request the gold and silver investors. call today eight hundred two five seven go. thank you. one day after being granted political asylum with the leaks co-founder julian assad remains trapped in the ecuadorian embassy in london the latest details on this developing story straight ahead and. the space x. falcon nine rocket as nasa turns to the private sector to resupply the space to. get ready for the next great space race this fight for the final frontier isn't between countries but companies it's one small step for space exploration one giant leap forward tried as a ship. and as a possible to hack the mars rover from the website from websites to spacecraft there's a buzz over a possible out of this world cyber attack and here on earth they hacktivist group

battles to take down a massive global surveillance system. it's friday august seventeenth six pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching r.t. we begin today with the latest in the case of wiki leaks whistleblower julian assad's assad remains inside the ecuadorian embassy in london where he's been seeking refuge for two months this a day after ecuador announced it would grant asylum to assad but getting from the embassy to the airport is proving to be a challenge if not impossible for a songe the u.k. vows to arrest him the moment he steps foot outside of the embassy but this has outraged a songes supporters think you are wrong. these

are just some of the sights and sounds unfolding today outside of the british embassy more protests and more arrests while ecuador and the u.k. remain in a diplomatic impasse where does the united states stand and all this party is white house correspondent christine for is out has the details. liz once again no word from the white house regarding giuliana songe or the decision by the president of ecuador to grant him political asylum we did however here yesterday from the state department officials there insisting the u.s. government is in no way involved this is an issue between the ecuadorian the brits swedes going to don't have anything particularly with regard to the charge that the u.s. was intent on persecuting him i reject that completely but it's not just a lack of information about julian assange reporters both covering the white house in washington and both the president and governor romney on the campaign trail have been extremely frustrated in trying to get serious questions answered really in

terms of getting any access at all now you may remember the incident just a few weeks ago when governor romney was in israel and reporters were asking him questions you know doing their job really and they were scolded by romney's aides. over the assaults on your troops governor romney just a bit for the house did it yes. do you feel you were shot if you're traveling right now as far as president obama he's been seen in recent days on entertainment tonight he's spoken to people magazine but it has been quite a while since he's taken questions from the white house press corps and as someone who attends these briefings on a regular basis i can tell you firsthand a lot of reporters here are getting very frustrated with the president terms of. the scope of their words and one of. the topics of access and transparency lives are certain to become bigger issues as we move ahead here just recently aides for vice president biden tried it what were in paul reports poor boards of course

written by reporters for reporters to sort of help share the duties so again a lot of frustration here when it comes to reporters trying to do their jobs i think jonathan martin with politico said it best when he said that this twenty twelve campaign is starting to be embodied by the consuming effort by operatives to stamp the spontaneity and life out of modern politics. in washington i'm christine for r.t. r t under attack our international web site r t v dot com went down today after a massive didio west attack a hacker group calling itself anti leaks is taking responsibility on twitter the attack disrupted our coverage of the pussy riot trial the now notorious punk rock band that staged a protest of russia's christ the savior cathedral those of i love say wiki leaks tweeted quote wiki leaks condemns the attempt to censor r t r t is an important alternative voice in the west artie's tom barton has

a story if you tried to go to auntie's website today you may well see this message instead of the actual website that's the result of a didio a cyber attack which struck many hours ago and has made our t. dot com on available around the world on twitter the group calling itself until leaks is claiming responsibility for the attack they linked in their tweets to the topics june songe and wiki leaks they also made a joke about the show hosted on r.t. saying that they wanted to see him smoking cigars and drinking whiskey but that they weren't able to because of this attack those and other tweets indicate that they wanted to stop artie's coverage of the granting of diplomatic asylum to the wiki leaks founder equites ors embassy in london a d.d. o. s. o. distributed denial of service attack is where attackers use remotely controlled computers around the world to flood a website with too much traffic for it to handle until leaks has previously

attacked wiki leaks his site itself would didio us as well but they say that their primary target is julian assange himself describing him as a new breed of terrorist the group says they're based in the usa as much speculation as to who anti leaks actually are those artes tom barr and update r.t. dot com is up and running after that hack attack. well looks like the space race is taking on a whole new meaning once a symbolic of a country's political prowess the space race seems to be becoming a commercial race since nasa retired its space shuttle program last year about a dozen companies have stepped up to develop space shuttles to explore the front final frontier most notably space x. which launched its spacecraft into the international space station last spring so what are the pros and cons of opening up space to private companies to discuss this joining me now is jonathan card executive director for the space friends here

foundation jonathan welcome so what are the benefits of bringing the private sector into the space race one of the major pieces that the private sector can bring to this is a specialty in systematizing and streamlining the way that we. conduct operations. one of the problems that nasa is facing is that in developing their new s.l.s. launcher they're taking the budget away from all of the science and engineering research that nasa does that moves the. the technology front your forward now i know that your foundation the space frontier foundation the goal is to transform space from this government owned bureaucratic program and to you know one that is more inclusive and open up this fronts here to more people what is out there for humans what is space friends here would help in

a bind. what's out there there are asteroids near earth that have more platinum and platinum group metals than have ever been mined on earth. many of the most valuable metals that we have here are only accessible because of asteroids that have crashed into earth we're going to where those valuable resources live so a lot of our problems in energy and mineral resources can be solved by going out into space and bringing them back. we can also we've also already benefited from things like. you know telecommunications and things like x x m and sirius radio that allow information to get around the earth much better all right so it seems like there is a lot of possibilities out there what are the values and commercializing space exploration and making space travel available for regular people do you think it

will make this mission more feasible i think a lot of the question needs to be i think part of your question needs to be turned on its head. if we're not doing this for the people what is the point. if we're not going into space so that most people can go so that this becomes a place that humanity can expand to. what is the purpose. of any of this. stephen hawking has made the point that if we're in so much danger of hurting ourselves here on earth we need more than just the earth in order to live on something serious happens to the earth from global warming to nuclear war we need to we need humanity to be more than in just one basket. but all in one basket so certainly setting your sights high there what kind of a timeframe are we looking at when people can start making flight our bets.

my thought on that is these things always happen later than you think and when they happen they happen faster than you expect. we have a there's a company called planetary resources that expects to start. traveling to near earth asteroids to mind. and start collecting these resources within a few years. there have been planned for space stations and prototype space stations there's actually a prototype private space station already up in space now. when things start to come together they're going to come together very quickly and i expect it to be soon i get how did and how soon are we talking. there are some companies that expect to be on the moon by two thousand and twelve moon express does planetary resources expects to be up there in the next three to five.

i'm personally going to be surprised bigelow aerospace is space stations don't have regular customers if not permanent settlers in the next ten years speaking of customers jonathan how bad would you say the market is for commercial space exploration. the company space adventures which sells access to the space station through. the russian space program has sold just about every seat they've been able to get ahold of from the space from the russian space program. there are a lot of people with a lot of money who want to go now and the more people that go now. the more people without a lot of money can go through and i think there is a large market from biotech research. tourists and settlers that. want to go because they just want to go well when we say that we're opening it up

to more people i mean what do we do need by that exactly how much would it cost how accessible are you seeing space becoming. right now we are dropping the cost of space access by about it to about a tenth of what it's been on the space shuttle space x. is advertising rates of two to three thousand dollars a pound when on the shuttle it was about ten thousand dollars a pound. so it's dropping very quickly there are. life to go suborbital e for two to three minutes of weightlessness. that are going for about one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dollars a ticket. when previously that wasn't even on the market it wasn't available to people so getting to space in various ways getting to space for longer and longer duration the prices are coming down dramatically and opening up to more and more

people now to have a thousand dollars sounds like a lot but that really opens it up to a lot more people compared to infinity it's much slower compared to infinity. paradox so what types of tech innovations are we seeing from existing private companies for example like space x. or virgin galactic. we're seeing some really great advances in the technology new kinds of engines new kinds of guidance. there's a company called master narrows the math and space systems for instance that has a completely ai control vertical takeoff vertical landing rocket that. had a very successful flight earlier this week part of what's exciting about space x. inversion is not their. techno the rocket advances but bringing in new manufacturing techniques that the rest of the commercial sector has already adopted

but the space sector hasn't. and bringing virgin's ability to communicate with the public has a very excited but right leslie donovan just want to ask you because you know typically the space race when you think of the space race you think of you know some of the world leaders aiming to make their mark in space you know we saw the pride associated with landing on the moon you know with space becoming our space travel becoming privatized how does that change that dynamic. i'm sorry changes the dynamics i mean in terms of like what the space race what it means to be part of this space race. i think we have every right. to continue to be proud of what we've done with the apollo program. but what's important here is not to try to inspire people the point here is to do great things that are

inspirational. and the more we get used to doing something the farther out the more spectacular things we can accomplish so you're saying it's not a competition this is for the goodness for the good of mankind exactly and the easier it is to get to lower earth orbit the easier it is to put a man on the mars or on titan or some other great remarkable achievement that's going to be the new apollo program. hopefully that's that's where it goes jonathan vega so much for coming on the show that was jonathan cardia executive director for the space frontier foundation. also ahead on our team would have to be a well funded state sponsored genius to pull it off but could hacking into and taking control of the mars rover be possible the question more next.

a client of american power continues.

revolution. and it turns out that a starbucks has a surprising him. is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us.

to the capital account. from hacking at web sites to hacking spacecraft the hacker group anonymous has reportedly threatened to hack nasa mars rover curiosity curiosity now on the red planet trying to find out of conditions there ever allowed for life but many groups believe the hacking threat is fake this after anonymous vows to shut down trap wire a massive global surveillance network. to talk more about the latest in the hacktivist world our producer andrew blake joins us now hi andrea liz could hack this really hack into a spacecraft on mars i mean anyone can do anything i mean if you reverse engineer

anything you don't like if you have the technology to put it there you have the technology to take it down it's that simple we can essential we do anything i don't see why not but the way in the reason this all started developing was back around a week or two ago someone at p.c. mag. in addition they wrote that oh if you really wanted to have curiosity out of curiosity this is how you would do it and they kind of pinpointed step by step well if you know you can get three hundred if you can send a signal at four hundred thousand kilowatts to three hundred fifty miles away and you know how to do essentially rocket science because that's really what it is so they publish this saying that well if you really have all the means to take down this billion dollar craft you probably already know how to do it but they leave it out for everyone and allegedly someone with this security consulting firm called flash point caught on a regular anonymous person in

a chat room talking about it and kind of sent out an a.p.b. saying oh hackers are going to do it they're going to do it it's out there and it's going to happen and which is pretty much just unfounded they're just reported on you know a paragraph that someone typed in a chat room about like go here let's let's let's let's say ok well it is rumors of anonymous actually doing the hacking you're not buying into that no no not at all i mean we know that there is a possibility that someone would be able to do of this possibility that you know saw me do anything i could easily just flip over the small maybe not easily but i could flip over the i don't want to do that but so yeah did this say that someone could do it absolutely why not and someone explained how it just takes that kind of resources and money and no. so how that you would really have to have a city like anybody can just hack into the mars rover you know not just your run of the mill no this was if you ask me this is kind of like another attempt to label anyone that's being considered a hacker or not even just activists for just anyone is you know just another

terrorist of the country who is has this crazy ability to do anything that they want in they're going to use it to take down the space program so that you know traditionally. anonymous usually has some kind of a motive in terms of which who they plan to attack a government agency or somebody basically it pisses them off and i really know what he's an idiot and there are no or anonymous to hack there over the there isn't if you ask me i mean i don't speak on behalf of anyone other than myself but when you go out there and look at the facts why would this loose knit international collective of hacktivists go all men and we hate science lots of room in science so it doesn't make any sense so like i said the technology is there or the know how is it there but to say that this endeavor is actually likely i think is absolutely ridiculous and kind of just fear mongering on the part of the mainstream media who wants the world to be weary of hackers and activists and i mean might very well

be just another ploy in this whole step to trying to introduce cybersecurity legislation because they're worried that people are going to get insider information and actually actually take this into their own hands. want to move on because there's something else i want to talk about speaking of hacking and cyber security something you have been keeping a close eye on trap wire what is the latest on that front. that's a good question a lot of people still don't know about trump lawyer and that's kind of almost as terrifying as trip wire itself for those watching at home who don't know about it it's been seven or eight days now since we discovered by going through e-mails allegedly obtained by anonymous has. that there is a global surveillance system that was licensed to the white house to canadian authorities to scotland yard to to local law enforcement law enforcement agencies

across the country and this trap wire surveillance system uses technology and egrets it with publicly available data and kind of track anyone anywhere at any time for any reason so that exists according to these e-mails and according to publicly available information and it's been eight days now and no one really seems too scared but it sounds scary it does sound scary but luckily i shouldn't say no one sounds too scared because there is a campaign right now to revolt against this whole thing a lot of have to this have taken to the web and kind of put out a call for our missis say that this trip wire thing this thing that no one is reporting on it seems kind of scary we should do something about it so for instance right here in washington d.c. documents that we found through these are e-mails that were hacked from the strategic forecasting or stratfor they were then distributed to wiki leaks who published them recently and if you go through there we can see that the metropolitan police department in washington d.c.

they bought into this trap where program which means that the d.c. surveillance cameras can use this face recognition software and can use these data mines to find anyone deemed suspicious and you know profile them and they're saying you know there's these cameras everywhere in places like d.c. new york l.a. chicago london all across canada across texas. what are we going to do about all these cameras if we don't know that much about the system is there something that we can do so right now there is an active campaign on the internet to go out there and find these cameras and to render them useless i'm not encouraging anyone to do that pretty sure that's illegal i don't think i can see that but but there is a active campaign people an anonymous call. for this crack well let's let's see let's say a member of anonymous because keep in mind we're talking about this huge international global entity made up of anonymous persons so people who say that they are involved

in the act of this collective anonymous are calling for a campaign and actually they're saying starting this saturday tomorrow actually they want people to go out there and they're calling it a splash cam saturday because a lot of these surveillance cameras you know if this technology is correct they can use it to find out exactly who you are just by picking up a glance of you you know walking by however they also have a very substantial weakness and that's if you put any sort of lubricant or viscous liquid on the lens it's you're essentially ruining it so if you want to go out there and spray silly string at these cameras were there a water balloon at them or minutes put a box over them you're shutting down one node of a system at least temporarily that is connected to this huge international global if you're going to have cameras are connected to the whole trap wire. yes i don't and a lot of people are still trying to figure that out what we know based off of the e-mails that were allegedly taken from the stratfor servers is that places like

washington d.c. and new york police department and the new jersey transit all at least one time or another according to these e-mails had contracts with trip wire and we know that like right here in d.c. the d.c. police department their cameras are linked to hundreds if not thousands of private businesses are also linked to the department of transportation they're also linked to thousands of cameras in the public schools so all of those cameras you know this isn't a technology on the camera and this is this huge global system it's all being sent into one place that is being sent to others and so people are saying just be suspicious and if you feel like taking out a camera or two this week why the hell not right sounds scary it'll be interesting to. see how this plays out this weekend. pleasure to have in the studio that was on our t. web producer andrew blake thanks so sitting with our space the mars curiosity rover drew worldwide headlines last week when it reached the red planet but after

a few days has carefully austudy peaked about our trip to mars we sent our tease laurie harshness to the streets of new york to find out. human technology is on mars so what this week let's talk about that are people really into it some people are some americans maybe. they don't think it has an impact for humanity all together. so what does matter is just something cool gets the american people hyped up about the rest of the world cup a matter. i hope will find some hole the kind of life there and i think it can help to understand that we are not alone in the universe do you think that we will shift our perception of how to be if we learn man. i hope so i hope so maybe you will become a bit more. but i hope so and it's funny to say that because i'm french and we're

not a boy at all but i think we need to understand that we're not alone yes i don't think as many people are into it that should be i posted something on my face we're going to haven't had one comment or one like it at all and that was a couple days ago so that's kind of a little bit of a little bit of a disappointment why is that you would think reaching another planet feller i feel like maybe the olympics shadowed it you know and kind of eclipse the moment but i tend to think there's more pressing issues here on earth and i'd rather see the money invested in. environment and. global food issues and that kind of thing but could we possibly find other solutions if we look outward. possibly i think it's great too i feel like we've lost that spirit of exploration largely and it's underfunded a lot of people have it but we don't we don't commit enough to education either at

school in our government or in our living room or in our solar system. maybe they'll find some oh worm holes or something of carbon you know carbon based or some of that but no martians no martians what if they did find martian there i don't think they'll want to come to earth if they're getting our television they won't be want to be coming though they'll be seeing our lives are dashing something like you know whether or not you think it's a big deal that humans have technology on mars the bottom line is it kind of is the big deal or at least it's a massive accomplishment no matter what we learn from it. that's going to wrap it up for this hour but for more on the stories we covered you can check out our youtube channel youtube dot com slash r t america and also had on over to our website our team dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter.