good good. for. another day ends with more unrest in the middle east al qaeda is calling for the deaths of diplomats and the u.s. has shut down its consulate in indonesia and that is just the beginning we'll have the latest for you straight. plus it's time to rage against the machine of secrets that is a new book takes an in-depth look and whistle blowing in the internet age with a particular emphasis on the case of wiki leaks coming up r.t. sits down with author indeed. and then later be careful not to run red lights in

some parts of the u.s. local governments are sending out tickets thanks to red light cameras all in the name of public safety but wait a minute some city employees caught on those cameras don't have to pay so is this just a way for local agencies to make some easy money. good afternoon it is wednesday september nineteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine frizz out and you're watching our t.v. . well let's begin today as we have for the last several days with a look at the latest in what's happening in the middle east and north africa and for the last eight days protests on the streets of cities in several of these countries have become wide widespread and in some cases violent most have come out

to protest say they're protesting against an eighteen muslim film made in the united states that insults the prophet muhammad and well one of the major events today a rally in lebanon planned by hezbollah here's our correspondent paula slayer with more. tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the southern lebanese city of tire this is in line with a call that went out earlier five he's been a leader on the swallow where he called for his supporters to show their anger in me in a shouts and in their faces he says that this film is the worst attack ever on islam not so far the demonstration is peaceful if one is a demonstration on monday in which more than one hundred thousand his biggest supporters took to the southern suburbs of beirut now unless one has called for staggered protests throughout this week we understand that the next protests will be on friday in an eastern lebanese city of baalbeck but at the same time we are hearing reports of an american to be changed kate if seen that for the second time

has been attacked in lebanon now this comes on the waynes day as clashes erupt between palestinian protesters and israeli security forces at least twenty people were injured when the catch was iraq to a global crossing in east jerusalem the protesters threw firebombs as well as stones at the security forces they responded with tear gas and rubber bullets we're also seeing again protests in the pakistani city of collection hero hundreds of protesters have stormed a barricade around the u.s. consulate building we're seeing the same kind of ban is the same kind of american rhetoric most of of focusing on calls for the american ambassador to pakistan to be expelled now hundreds of protesters also took to the indonesian city of medan here they are calling for the united states to be punished for allowing such a movie to be made also on wednesday there's

a lot of attention focused on paris where a weekly newspaper by the name of charlie hebdo has published a crude caricature of prophet mohammed we understand that some of them are showing him naked now this has sparked a fierce debate over the whole issue of sweden a speech with the french foreign minister say. that there will be consequences with god in this publication and he has condemned these caricature as being published in the first place but we are hearing from the french prime minister that sweden of speech is something that is protected although something that needs to be used responsibly nonetheless muslims that in this country have been organizing themselves for protest so far that protest has been banned that it is likely to go ahead we know also that they believe this is a cloak to move and that it has nothing to do with freedom of speech french police a position themselves outside the headquarters of this magazine it's a magazine that was firebombed last good when it published an edition that mocked radical islam at the same time at least twenty strange embassies are on lockdown

around the world for fear that they will be reprisal and revenge attacks and that was our correspondent paula slayer. we're going to switch gears a little bit now and talk about some pesky cameras that can really ruin your day if you've got one of these in the mail you're going to know what i'm talking about the super annoying red light cameras installed on our streets to make them safer to catch those drivers who put other people's lives in danger right well it turns out the major motivation for them might be something else entirely money and well they have brought lots and lots of money to cities and municipalities across this country and they come at a cost the cost of people's privacy here to talk more about this is mike riggs associate editor for reason. hey there mike ok so the common justification that local governments use when purchasing red light cameras is safety however what we're seeing is a huge upswing in traffic tickets and therefore revenue for these cities is that

the purpose for these cameras. it actually is the purpose for cameras studies of show studies that have been to your studies through your studies from florida from your facts ago from california have all shown that there is no discernible decrease in traffic fatalities where it's p.d.s. when red light cameras are in school. in fact one study of new mexico found if you compare it for intersections that had traffic cameras to six that did not and three of the four sections that traffic cameras actions actually increased so what cities are keeping them on anyway i mean you know they get approximately twenty percent of the amounts of a speeding ticket the other eighty percent goes towards the cup and use the supply these because these cameras are incredibly expensive so it really is just revenue generating projects or sometimes an hour something interesting and the city of rochester just adopted a new procedure that exempts city employees from paying for these tickets now according to the rochester democrat and car chronicle city of rochester employees

have committed at least a hundred and nineteen red line violations while driving say vehicles now in some cases we're talking about ambulances or police cars but often those police didn't have their sirens on and there were also violations by you know solid waste building services cemetery and library vehicles do you think this gives further evidence that the priority is not money is money rather than not safety. to a certain extent i mean you know if you find somebody a city employee who are running this red light camera you know i mean that becomes i think part of it is just the first ration of the paperwork it may also be really that they you know they don't feel like they feel like the police sort of it since these lawsuits i think really exceptional about. city employees and there's certainly nothing exceptional about laws that savors of employees of the rest of us police fire they've got all kinds of incredible exceptions and not just when

they're driving their their work vehicles but also when they you know interested are they. what their jobs are like i think so i mean i'm not actually sure the public employees being exempt from do you care for tickets as anything to do with the fact that speeding cameras are intended to generate revenue more than their safety i think that's a substitute with a totally separate but equally problematic trim the public sector employees in general get to play by difference and. i want to go back to something you talked about a moment ago and that is that if you know what kind of cameras these actually are these are not cellphone style cameras these are very expensive pieces of equipment as we know and you know i held this up earlier this isn't mine but you can actually see you know the license plate a pretty good make out a pretty good picture of the person driving the car. so these are really really good cameras talk a little bit about i mean i don't know if you know how much they cost i certainly don't and talk one of the role of these private companies in sort of selling these

cameras to different places. while thanks to the handles and maryland of the state of maryland read we do kind of know what she's cameras cost because marilyn just recently has been installed everywhere that in certain parts of maryland that have experience vandalism on their red light cameras they've installed another camera next to that one too to document vandalism so according to the state of maryland these cameras cost anywhere from thirty thousand dollars apiece to one hundred thousand dollars apiece which is part of the reason why news how these only get about twenty percent of the revenue from these cameras because the other eighty percent goes to paying for the equipment and then also paying for the companies that that operate them and that issue tickets because many cities are basically you know they've outsourced a big process a lot of writing tickets for speeding in general i mean you know they did they started out at intersections to discourage speeding in discouraged by running now

they've got remember i mean there's on i ninety five interstate on the east coast us they have these in the medians on the interstate that sort of just capture speeders but they're incredibly expensive and if you think about a camera cost one hundred thousand dollars issues let's say a two hundred dollars ticket. you have to issue a lot of those tickets to make your money back. but a lot even more if you consider the fact that you know states and cities don't get all the money that comes from these cameras but the same time what is i save you that saves you you know the pension of a police officer that saves you gas for a cruise or save you over time ok you know so i mean cities see this is a cheaper way basically. i i had to be crude but of ripping people off it's a cheaper way of ripping people off and having cops out there sort of sitting around waiting to catch somebody going six miles or a speed mike i want to talk with you about that the privacy aspect of this from

what i understand these cameras are not just taking pictures of the license plate on the person driving the car it also stores the date time and location data talk about some of the privacy aspects of this i'm mean to a certain extent that you know there's. anything that any cameras going to catch you doing in your car there's a good chance the police officer could also catch you doing because you're on a public roadway. and so there is you know there may be an argument the sort of violate privacy to a certain extent by feith inc even more troubling is that they these cameras don't have discretion and they can't you know nobody want to see it pulled over by a police officer who exaggerates that they were speeding but it it would be nice if you're pulled over by a police officer who explains that you had to go to the bathroom or that you know your wife was having a baby or something and and you know they suffer but you're off the hook and there's no discretion on several cameras and they also present the other problem that a lot of times you know because your option is generally inefficient let's say you

sold your car on monday and the person who bought it from you doesn't get a new license plate until friday and in between the day you sell it and the day that license plate is changed that person runs a red light and they're speeding to mcafee's a license plate i mean i've read lots of stories now people who fly who they post their ticket online and if you've ever gotten one of these you know that the ticket often comes with an image of your car running the red light or speeding and somebody comically posted this picture saying you know i got a ticket for speeding in my toyota corolla but the picture attached to our ticket was of a man on a boat that you know there's all these like kind of crazy inefficiencies and who do you review this with you know i mean now i think a lot of people are finding that you can't reveal with because. you're fighting against a machine and not a person it's an important discussion to be had and certainly when we talked about it this morning in our editorial meeting everyone sort of groaned just at the mention of it so it's a topic that hits close to home for

a lot of people mike riggs associate editor at reason magazine thanks so much. well the internet has given rise to unprecedented new ways of communicating as we've seen with social media like facebook and twitter and connecting as we saw with the arab spring it's made it much easier for the government to spy on its citizens and also in some cases for citizens to spy on their government here at r t we have spoken extensively and in-depth about the whistle blowing web site wiki leaks how it's impacted both journalism and geopolitics how leaking overall has been made it much more simple when daniel ellsberg leaked the pentagon papers back in one nine hundred seventy one he literally hunted go through every page and photocopy it and then cross out certain information and he also had to expose his identity when he gave that information to certain organizations well today we're going to talk about how far we've come and what that means for us as a society a country and even on a grander scale use the right cryptographic tools keep your mouth shut and you too can anonymously friction will flee if this rate and entire institutions information

says one man who understands the issue inside out there may not be many daniel ellsberg in the world ready to push through the twentieth century's stubborn barriers to leaking but the twenty first century would be wise to expect more bradley manning's. well the man who wrote that is andy greenberg staff writer at forbes magazine he's also the author of a new book this machine kills secrets how we can leakers cypherpunks and hacktivists and to free the world's information and he joins us now thanks so much for speaking to us and i know your book really covers a wide range of topics but let's start with this comparison that you draw between bradley manning and daniel ellsberg we've interviewed ellsberg a number of times he's unfeeling in his support for private manning but why do you think so many people today and he draw this distinction which you know put very simplified i. put very simple you know classifies ellsberg as a hero and manning as you know a treasonous villain well i think you know what i was trying to do was draw

a contrast partly in their motivations but i believe fundamentally they both saw themselves as whistleblowers the contrasts between the two that i was trying to draw out really was more of a of a a matter of the ease that they lived in the technology that they used and what i think we can see is that is that ellsberg actually expected to go to prison for the leak that he was perpetrating the seven thousand top secret pages that were the pentagon papers whereas many although he said he was willing to go to prison you know to his credit as a whistleblower he never expected to and i think that that shows that in the forty years between anonymity technologies had developed and the new technologies had developed to this degree where he felt that he was protected there was only because of his own human error of of describing his his leak to a hacker that he was cause. yeah and writing this book i know andy you traveled literally around the world just to really get a better understanding of how we got to this point in terms of leaks i just want to

get your take i mean what are some of the most important things that you learned well you know i i met with julia songe in two thousand and ten just before the release of the state department cables and he struck me and he seemed to make it so easy to release trolls of classified secrets so i wanted to figure out where did this i you know where this idea of this cryptographic anonymous inbox come from is really just a kind of one off brilliance kind of singularity from this brilliant guy julian assange or did it come from some larger tradition and and so i ended up tracking down the the this movement called the cypherpunks who in the mid ninety's had already sort of dreaming of using encryption and the many tools to disempower the government then. take that power and give it to individuals and so and so i sort of traveled around the us tracking down these cypherpunks and cryptographers and inventors and philosophers who i believe inspired a songe of songs was one of these cypherpunks so when when i saw that the wiki

leaks sort of came out of this. tradition of of of anonymity technology is slowly developing over time i saw that you know this is something that can be systematized and replicated so then i went looking for the next with you exe and that it was a kind of tour of the activist world it took me from bulgaria iceland to paris and finally to berlin where i met this the the engineer known as the architects who rebuilt wiki leaks emissions and then led a mutiny within weeks and went off to form his own group called openly i want to talk to you about some of these other groups that i know that in your book you talk about not just wiki leaks they have these other organizations that are sort of sprung out of it why do you think though that they haven't had the same impact as waking leaks at. that we can we've had initially well you know one thing that i try to highlight in the book is that they have very small cases i spent some time with

the bulgarian group called balkan leaks successfully did obtain classified or releases of secret documents about the bulgarian governments and leaked them and eventually parted with a book with wiki leaks to release we could be very explosive documents bubble garia but before that they were already using the same technologies and methods as wiki leaks to and successfully showing that this can be replicated with but i believe what's been missing from other situations is are two things and one is a technical understanding of anonymity tools which often leaks had in the same way that wiki leaks did essentially using tor this very you know. this very secure and well tested piece of anonymity software as the as the fundaments of of their anonymity promise but then also i think the other states don't have the kind of journalistic or free expression figurehead that wiki leaks had in julian a son and a son you know with his kind of colorful personalities like amazing media. persona

he he was a kind of beacon for whistleblowers i'm not sure if he still is but he was at one point you know i want to ask you something i mean as far as julian assange i mean to this day and major newspapers and major networks use wiki leaks as a source they do entire stories about information that they got of wiki leaks and yet so many of them have distanced themselves from julian a songe from wiki leaks why is that. well i think the wiki leaks in a way has it has betrayed the principle that it used to tell out of being simply a tool for whistleblowers you know wiki leaks no longer has anonymous submissions portal so the information that it seems have gone over the last year is you know has either been explicitly or you know revealed to be mostly come from mostly source to the hacker group anonymous which makes wiki leaks less of a kind of whistle blowing a little more of the just a

a kind of publishing site for hackers which i absolutely do think reduces its not only its credibility but its but its role as a kind of moral outpost for free expression yeah there seems to not be sort of that time taken to go through and give these documents for people who are concerned about what's going on instead it's just you know troves of things coming in and then being published it actually is a difference and i was at the end veiling here in washington of that collateral murder video. and it's really interesting. how much that changed how it sort of put julian assange on the national. stage and i want to play a little bit about what assad said recently from the patio there from that ecuadorian embassy where he's been saying the united states must know that it will not seek to prosecute. oil supporters.

the united states must wage before the war that it will look as you journalists are starting shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful so it appears and you know one man's witch hunt is another's legal investigation i guess how did we get to this point where songes in hiding holed up at the ecuadorian embassy. well i mean it's a complicated scenario with his legal limbo has so many moving parts i mean he's actually he's he's not actually facing any charges of related to his publication yet but he's right the obama administration is absolutely a war on on leakers you could call them whistleblowers i mean i would i would call some of the middle east whistleblowers but. the obama's justice department has in fact and they did six leakers under the espionage act and that's more than any other president in history combines which is an amazing reversal of obama's

transparency promises from two thousand and eight yeah absolutely i want to switch gears now to the future of internet freedom i know that you covered this extensively for forbes and we've watched over the last several months the failure by congress to pass cybersecurity legislation and now it's come out that president obama is planning to issue an executive order on this very topic so far what's been leaked out is pretty vague but give me your thoughts on this you know strengthening battle between internet security and internet freedom i mean who is in the lead well what we saw in the in the legislation that they have told essentially in with was of of sharing between the private sector in the government that i did think was of major concern i mean one of the things that i try to highlight in this book is that there's a sort of porous membrane between the private sector and the government allows the government to swoop in and take documents or private information from the cloud in

a way that is troubling i mean the we don't know what is in the cyber security legislation yet but but i think that absolutely the the internet moving data to remote servers has empowered kind of government surveillance that is troubling around the world in the u.s. and abroad even more so finally i want to talk about something that's just sort of starting to come. and that is news that a new i phone application could be coming out and that would allow the apple just got the patent for this and basically it would allow people who get this app you know large companies to shut down the usage by other people their cell phones or of their cameras what do you think this would mean on a larger scale one of the full story about the but but i have covered another of cold open watch which was actually full suite of apps for android and i phones that allow you to turn your cell phone into a kind of invisibly recording surveillance or you could say valence device you're

instead of the government surveilling you you're supervillian the government from below but. i'm not sure what the this other app is that would sort of. the economy to that but i do see a lot of promise in terms of individual liberty in the in the sense that smartphones and other democratizing technologies are going to allow us to you know to watch authority the same with authority you watch is this yeah certainly interesting this one's a little different very very interesting the work that you have done i think so much for coming on the show and agreeing greenberg the author of the new book this machine kills secrets how we keep leakers cypherpunks and have to visit him to free the world's information so i do want to talk more about this this i phone application now that would allow companies to shut down cell phone usage remotely by individuals who aren't following the rules now we could be talking about gym

locker rooms classrooms movie theaters or on airplanes i don't lease one person who would have loved to have this function during a fundraiser a few months ago when he was caught on camera saying this. were. or was. there there were those. they were trying to coerce. this. governor romney's comments have gotten him into a little bit of hot water both with opponents and supporters alike so the fact that a speech given by a presidential nominee is recorded shouldn't really come up that much of a surprise even at a private event and we live in a time where we videotape just about everything whether our dog is doing something adorable or police officers are beating someone up in the back alley it's the digital age after all and a freedom that we enjoy because technology allows us to capture was actually

happening was actually being said but it might not always be this way i want to tell you a little bit more about this patent awarded to apple this week it's titled apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device now in it there are details about why this policy enforcement capability is useful it gives examples of the need to disable noise or light emanating from wireless devices like at a movie theater for preventing wireless devices from communicating with each other such as in academic settings and also for forcing certain electronic devices to enter into sleep mode when entering a sensitive area also in this patent a reference to the use in quote government buildings so whereas now you might be able to record what your elected officials are saying well that might change soon we're going to be keeping our eyes on the story but we did want to let you know you know enjoy these freedoms to record and have control over your cell phone usage while you still have them. coming up next on our t.v.

capital account let's check in with laura lister to see what's on today's agenda hi there lauren hi christine daae as simpson bowles ring a bell do you remember that absolutely absolutely see it was a couple of years ago almost but it feels just like yesterday because lo and behold the debt is still increasing for the u.s. government at a quick pace meanwhile we have heard politicians keep uttering this word simpson bowles simpson bowles or i really should say they've been hurling it around like a political football but nonetheless this was a proposal put forward by a fiscal commission that president obama appointed it put sacred cows on the table on both sides to cut the deficit so needless to say it didn't get very far in washington but we will speak with one part of simpson bowles in just a few minutes we have former senator alan simpson to tell us why this plan is still so important today and why it's not getting anywhere now more and i mean it might have been a few years ago but this is something that seems to be referred to time and time

again by lawmakers battling it out talking about financial regulation and you know all those decisions that they like to fight over thanks so much lauren. that's going to do it for us for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r c dot com slash usa. culture is that so much a given to give each visit a share of the final touch the defense has the time to leave should the protests then even violence in the arab middle east against the usa make washington completely rethink. plumber mission and free accreditation free zones for judges free. range lunch free. three stooges free. download free broadcast quality

video for your media projects a free media old dog a hearty dog tom you. get are sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.