that n r t r your first amendment rights under attack in boston it looks like exercising free speech puts a target on your back for police spying i had a disturbing report about boston law enforcement surveilling activists. plus there's yet another dark spot on america's image abroad this time u.s. contractors caught on camera drinking and doing drugs while on duty well look at this case and talk about the bigger picture when it comes to contracting health. and do you know who is watching you officials said they were worried that china was spying on the u.s. but it appears that the real peeping toms american should be concerned about come

from within us borders the details ahead. it's thursday october eighteenth five pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching our t.v. . but we talk a lot here at r.t. about the growing surveillance state so maybe what's happening now in boston shouldn't come as a surprise the american civil liberties union has gotten a hold of documents and tapes showing the boston police department has been spying on activists this after the a.c.l.u. sued for access to the information on the behalf of five activist groups and what they found is that officers have been monitoring and collecting information on political protesters many of the groups they have been keeping close tabs on are well known like veterans for peace and code pink now the story hasn't made national headlines but it's stirring controversy in boston here's

a look at some of the local headlines you can see there police boston police accused of spying on antiwar groups and another one group's fault boston police for surveillance. now here's a quote from a.c.l.u. study entitled police policing dissent states quote when law enforcement officers started investigating protected ideas rather than crimes they threaten our rights of free expression and assembly protected by the first amendment to the constitution and article sixteen of the massachusetts declaration of rights the unchecked political surveillance our lawsuit uncovered undermines our core values by chilling the speech of people who wish to participate in our democracy democracy which is a lot of bull exercise that our government should encourage and promotes to discuss this and more i was joined by kate crawford privacy rights cord nater for the american civil liberties union i first asked her if the boston police department has taken it too far. what's happening in the city is really disturbing and you

know if you talk to activists who have been out on the streets protesting war for ten years protesting on behalf of immigrant rights or workers rise they'll tell you that this is not a surprise. the boston police department has clearly been monitoring political speech for some time in the city what we didn't know was that the city was filing so-called intelligence reports with headlines such as criminal acts home sec domestic whaling these groups as extremists in these intelligence reports so called we didn't know that and we also didn't know the extent to which this so-called intelligence division of the boston police department is monitoring not simply the protest but also the internal dynamics of these of these organizations so for example commenting on two thousand and eight discussions in the anti-war

movement on the left in this country remarking about internal debate over whether the anti-war movement should come out really strongly against obama or wait until after the election this information has absolutely no bearing to any crime to any threat against anyone in the city this is purely first amendment expression and not only just that but the boston police department retained of these documents in violation even of its own guidelines and you'll find in those news reports that the boston police department says as we did so a computer glitch and that they discovered this in two thousand and eleven they discovered it because we asked for the documents it might never have been discovered that these documents were being retained in violation of the p.d.f. own guidelines had we not sued for these records and you know finally i'll just say that when one one of our clients was interrogated by the boston police department after a civil disobedience arrest she says she was. interrogated by the f.b.i.

d h s n a member of the boston police department asked all sorts of questions about her political associations that had nothing to do with the arrests. after that the algae her lawyers asked the boston police department of public records requests for a record of this interrogation they said they didn't have it they said that no such record existed well the records that we reveal that we got back as a result of this lawsuit show that demonstrably false they actually do have a record of that interrogation and you can read it on our web site at a.c.l.u. m. for massachusetts dot org and you know what i just want to say that this country is really in tough straits as far as the economy is concerned so what the boston police department is doing is both wasting our money vital public resources and they're doing it to spy on plec to. protect political speech which chills fundamental democratic values this country and really undermines everything that we're supposed to be about now you said that through this information that was

obtained through this lawsuit these protesters have been labeled extremists was there any information in these documents that led that showed any criminal activity at all. there were references to civil disobedience arrests. and there were reference there was some reference to a name and our kids black block participants. engaging in some sort of you know a totally unexpected five acts of violence not connected to any individuals but about our clients in particular the five piece groups and for individuals about whom we requested records the arrow there was zero in those files derogatory information about any kind of violence or future plans to commit criminal activity a couple of our clients were arrested for civil disobedience those are trespassing charges and according to the boston police the only rules they are allowed to ask

questions about the trespassing charge those questions might be for example how long did you sit on the floor you know. why didn't you get up when the police told you to get up those questions do not include questions such as who do you organize with when is your next political meeting and so on and those are the kinds of questions that they were asked now if we do have some interviews conducted by the a.c.l.u. let's take a listen to them and we'll talk about it after. everything we do was being seen as being monitored suddenly. and that's scary they can be very scary he says officers asked me. oh you must recognize us we come to your protests i think that people are scared to steer that kind of that bully is fear of being called a terrorist or being scared of being seeing over the place it takes risks to be a democracy you go have to take those risks if the police are law during those who

are shooting the wrist. so kind of going along with the with what these activists have sad how does this police surveillance how has this instilled fear in the people in boston and do you think it's scaring people away from exercising their first amendment right and practicing their freedom of speach. yes i do unfortunately i do think that that's the case and it's not just our clients who would say something like that i was very it's very clear to me that when the boston police department which is charged with keeping the public safe with our money is using its resources to intimidate and harass political activists based purely on their political views and their first memon expression of course that creates fear and distrust of authority in this city and in the state. you know as a great example of how that how what we found can translate into real world problems for people is the intelligence sharing that occurred between the boston

police department intelligence unit and the f.b.i. the f.b.i. maintains a number of terrorism watch lists the system around who gets added to the list very a paik you cannot find out if you're online affirmatively they won't tell you the only way to get off it realized after trial and error is to sue and then magically you just are suddenly able to fly again they never confirm or deny whether whether you're on the left this is happened to a number of people in this country who were purely they were purely expressing their political views these people are not criminals at all and they were labeled as terrorists and put on no fly list it happened to a famous actor mark ruffalo who was involved with and i fracking work and help promote the film deathlands he found himself on a no fly list as a result of his first memory expression so absolutely i mean there are a number of concrete ways in which this can actually really hurt someone i don't have too much time left but i do want to ask you do you expect the book the boston

police department to be held accountable. you know we really hope so and if this is the zeal you guys are druthers yes because we're not going to give up here i mean you know this is a big there's a lot of press in the cities today and a lot of people are talking about what's going on but we do not intend to rest here . is very important just to shine some light on surveillance but that is only the first step the second address the problems that we've uncovered and i would encourage anybody in the city or the state or even nationwide to join your local a.c.l.u. because the more people we have on our side pushing good stuff the more likely it is that will resolve these problems all right thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us all about this lawsuit and what the a.c.l.u. is doing about what's happening over there in boston that was kate crawford privacy rights coordinator for the american civil liberties union thanks very much we turn now to a couple of troubling stories about criminal waste of government defense funds this

week in san diego seven men were arrested after reportedly admitting to a fraud and corruption scheme before navy officials and three defense contractors pleaded guilty in march to a conspiracy where the contractors gave the navy men over a million dollars worth of gifts these gifts include everything from cash the flat screen t.v.'s to home improvements in addition to their prison sentences each defendant is required to pay restitution to the department of the navy among other financial penalties meanwhile a video recently released by a.b.c. show security contractors in afghanistan partying themselves to oblivion getting drunk and stoned even shooting up on prescription drugs and these are the same guys that are part of a twenty forty seven million dollar government contract to train the afghan police force. for more on this i'm joined now by j.d. to chile managing editor of reason twenty four seven j.d.

welcome. so i mean we are at a time now where we hear constant rhetoric from political leaders about cutting the nation's budget deficit and with billions of dollars pumped into the so-called military industrial complex why isn't there more oversight over these defense contracts you said yourself there's billions of dollars flowing through here there's so much money flowing if you're here but overseeing it all is absolutely impossible hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on wars in afghanistan iraq . operations elsewhere and in africa you know north africa so and so forth along the way people can start skimming money all the money is going to be substantial because so much money is flowing through the works now we just looked at a few examples there some of them are particularly humiliating but how much do you how widespread do you think this this problem is in terms of the money i think that the corruption is extremely widespread in terms of drug and alcohol use i think is

also enormously widespread that's always been the case in military settings the difference now is that we have little video cameras of people who are offended by this rightfully offended but to record it and we can see it they went on and it just started went on in vietnam went on to world war two soldiers have always gotten drunk and they've gotten high whatever's available because they're alternating between boredom and terror and it's just a case of some strong rich environments relatively few women to modulate that worst behavior that if you get money like that where your might not and then don't indulge themselves because they can. now what. is there any indication of just how much money go down the drain from these bad defense contracts. well in this case i think there were several million dollars worth of contracts at stake and i bet a million dollars in bribes in return that would seem to be a relatively i mean so there's no return millions of dollars and the return for a million dollars this is one case where there are costs we don't know exactly what

was going on obviously the catch with the catcher that we heard about it when they do but assume a lot of this happening there's a lot of money at stake and if people can get a piece of that and that's a huge we're going to argue that corruption is a long long time game dating back to world you know the civil war when they sold rotten pork and beef to the union army you know nothing really has changed since then now it's prepackaged meals and replacement parts but it's the same thing all right so if the long running and widespread problem and we're seeing that we're birthing these specific examples of government waste to be due to these government contracts. is this a place for gov and government officials to lock when they're talking about making cuts well i would hope so and you know the problem is when you have so much money at stake a million dollars in bribes is a tiny percentage of what's actually being expended by the u.s. government there's going to be corruption at any time is money being spent at least

a little bit of it yes we should look at this we don't need people being bribed to return for useless contracts the reason these bribes are being offered is because the contracts would otherwise be properties and companies these companies are buying business that they wouldn't otherwise so yes meaning the taxpayers are going refill which and we shouldn't accept this but it's going to happen because there's so much money involved the so much money available somebody's going to try to take a piece of it so yes the government should be looking at this ok and exact i mean is there a sign that the government needs to do something about the way not just making the cuts to begin with but the way that they do business with these defense contractors . the way that they they give them out. well you know i think we should see more transparency he said seeming people policing themselves if they were to post these contracts more publicly so the public at large knows who this business is going to . and who's buying me who go with the contracts so that the public at large has

a chance to lisa's and protect bribery and corruption where it's curry in an open source way but there was a better chance of it was minimizing it certainly not eliminated but minimizing the corruption. now i want to ask you j.d. because we hear we see this widespread this waste in these government contracts and at the same time you also hear reports within the military of soldiers with in the air force or in other branches not having the equipment that they need soldiers flying aircraft that are unsafe because of a shortage of funding how does that happen how is that money directed into a place where where it's wasted when in other areas that money is much needed and can be put to better use. well it's virtually anything so all these expenditures are politicized and it is partially now because of the corruption too. when you

know when it contracts to being awarded to companies that buy them that bribe officials obviously there's a resource of the being diverted from elsewhere and elsewhere might be something where they're very well they're very much needed but somebody didn't offer that for us so the money isn't spent on a needed expenditure it's spent instead on the politicized or corrupt expenditures and of course there are just explodes with little sense expenditures favorite companies districts that have powerful senators and congressmen representing them and money gets spent there instead of where it might still be needed so that if corruption necessarily but no to satisfy political opposites well above very important topic and timely now with an election coming up j.d. i really appreciate you coming on the show that was j.d. to chile managing editor of reason a twenty four seven news. seven pm. and now a topic where the united states is the number was but this time not the prize or the prize is not sought after presidents and the prisoners in them are to america

has been covering this multifaceted story looking at mistreatment of people behind bars and some of the faulty science that can lead people to wrongful imprisonment but there is also big money to be made from presidents from lucrative contracts for utilities to the growing private prison business here is marc mauer the executive director for the sentencing project explaining the shift toward more prison funding . from space for the results of the so-called get tough moving of the last thirty years the idea about the way to promote public safety is to get tough on criminals as it's phrased send more people to prison and keep them there for longer periods of time so policies like mandatory sentencing three strikes you're out the war on drugs and on one hand they've been very successful they've been a result of the enormous rise in the prison population but as you point out enormous trade offs in terms of public services and support that we see that nothing paints

a picture like numbers in the case of the united states these are some big numbers . here's a look at some of them two point two million people are behind bars there are four thousand five hundred seventy five prisons in operation in the u.s. and seven hundred thirty and every ten one hundred thousand people are in prison two point two million people by the way is the approximate population of the state of new mexico so there are as many people living in prison in the united states as there are people living in the state of new mexico and that's the to stick of course does not take into account the family and friends of prisoners and the toll it takes on them and the community is now interestingly interestingly enough this is one topic that hasn't been discussed in the twenty tell two thousand and twelve presidential debate perhaps it has something to do with the fact that most states don't allow felons to vote but you can count on r.t. continuing to report on it. well it turns out china is not spying

on the u.s. despite warnings from congress that they are the chinese telecommunications company huawei was accused by u.s. officials for spying on for china the company is the world's second largest maker of networking gear and last week a report out of the house intelligence committee ward against the danger of allowing wall ways technology into the united states but according to reuters an eighteen month white house review found that the company doesn't pose a danger to the u.s. didn't found no evidence the company is conspiring with the chinese government to spy on americans so worth the cyber fear is ever justified to discuss i was joined earlier by tim carr senior director of strategy for free press i asked him after a thorough investigation finding no evidence that the company is spying on americans why there was so much hype from members of congress that the opposite was happening. that is a very good question and i think congress has been very involved in the issue of

cyber security they are they a bill. all system through the house earlier this year there is another bill in the senate that would address this issue as well but there are a lot of questions still out there about how real this threat is and there are very few answers i mean you can you can go to members of congress will tell you that the strike is huge senator joseph lieberman just wrote a column for the new york times in which he claims that we're incredibly vulnerable to this kind of threat but it's unclear that wall way is the real problem and the report from the white house found that there were there weren't any instances of spying as you as you mentioned but that the technology itself was very vulnerable to being hacked but that seems to be a different issue. intelligence officials say in the wake of this white house investigation and they say ok they haven't spotted on this yet but they're concerned about the capability for them to spy on us in the future is this concern

justified well i'm concerned about the capability of any company to spy on people it's not just chinese companies that have been implicated in this and we've seen that that eighteen t. for example has conspired with the nationals security administration to tap overseas phone calls of americans there is this larger problem out there of collusion between corporations and governments to spy on internet users now as to the issue of cyber security it's it's not clear where that threat exists and one thing that's interesting to note is that one of while ways biggest competitors is an american company called cisco systems that has spent more than fifteen million on lobbyists in washington eleven million dollars on campaign contributions in in washington and they're their sworn foot foes of wall way so there are some questions as to whether the house intelligence committee or other members of congress are responding to the needs of cisco that wants to eliminate

a competitor as opposed to the true concerns about our national security that is. an interesting question that you raise but as you had mentioned earlier there are some cyber experts that are skeptical of law way they're saying that the technology is flawed or at least they call in the backdoor that makes hacking and spying much easier i mean what do you think is this just poor planning or this big scheme to spy on people i think it's probably just the result of bad technology a lot of this stuff is just poorly created in and they haven't really vetted it to the extreme so yes i mean if if one way were to enter the u.s. market and they already have in many respects and sell this equipment widely it is vulnerable to that sort of hacking so i think that that those are concerns that are real in that if anybody is going to buy huawei equipment for these sorts of large communications networks that they should they should address those concerns because it does make your system vulnerable not so much to cyber terrorism but to the sort

of hacking that we see going on nationwide and worldwide actually at a at a different level usually individuals who are hacking into systems and and causing all sorts of havoc ok now sixty minutes did look into these allegations want to take a look now at a clip in the telecommunications world once you get the camel's nose in the tent you can go anywhere and there overriding concern is this that the chinese government could exploit wild ways presence on u.s. networks to intercept high level communications gather intelligence wage cyber war then shut down or disrupt critical services in times of national emergency while away is the business. in the business of doing business thirty two point four billion in revenues last year across one hundred fifty different markets seventy percent of our business outside of china while we is not going to jeopardize its

commercial success for any government period. well there you have it a wall way as a business as he eloquently stated a very successful business so i mean doesn't it doesn't make sense and is that just logical that they they're not going to jeopardize that by you know even working for anybody or conspiring with the government. i'm not sure i buy his line i think that the chief executive of huawei is himself a former member of the chinese people's army has very high level connections to chinese government and through the chinese communist party. and you know i think that the decisions that are made at the executive level of that company or any company are merely about business and business but politics do come into play and if you do have those sorts of connections with chinese leadership it's the same for u.s. companies that have connections with u.s.

leadership you know there are conflicts of interests that may run against legitimate interests to do business as a business doing business and so i'm not sure i buy that law and i think that that while way is does there are some real concerns there's a lack of transparency there they chose not to be listed on markets in hong kong and overseas because they didn't want to comply with disclosure requirements in order to do that so so yes there are real concerns now whether they're spying on the u.s. or not it seems that the that the white house through this investigation found that that's not true ok with that in mind though you had mentioned the ties to the chinese government that it doesn't make sense i mean we have representative mike rogers saying cyber war or we are in a cyber war something along those lines does it then make sense for the u.s. to take preventative measures and block companies from expanding their infrastructure companies like weiwei within the u.s.

for well i think it's it is legitimate to be concerned about cyber terrorism there there are real threats out there in fact the united states itself is engaged in a form of cyber attack when we hacked into nuclear centrifuges in iran and so this is real it is happening however a lot of these threat assessments that happen here in the united states are really based and relive and. mission they haven't really disclosed the size of the threat and i think that in order for them to advance this kind of legislation they need to be much more transparent about how real the threat is because the risk there is that these increased efforts to clamp down on the internet will ultimately impinge upon our own freedoms as internet users the the legislation that passed the house earlier this year that that represented rogers was in support of indemnify companies like twitter and facebook from handing over user information to

government and we need to be very careful about that right you can really appreciate you weighing in that with ten cars senior director strategy affray prat . that's going to wrap it up for this hour but breaking the set is coming up in thirty minutes here on our let's check in with the host of the learn to see ledges on today's agenda abby hey listen it's gone down so you hear about the meningitis outbreak that's killing people and it's totally been played up by the mainstream media absolutely ok well one thing that they're not talking about is where this medication is being mixed from it's called compound centers and it's completely run by the pharmaceutical lobby with no oversight by the f.d.a. so that's what they were talking already breaking the set on that rose in me talking about a new supreme court case that's citing whether or not drug sniffing dogs can come to your home and search your personal property without really any sort of oversight or justification with that at all is that it's totally agree just violation of the police state when we talk about that russ baker going to come on to talk about the complete sham of the two party system and how elections are basically read from the

top down in the exclusion of third party candidates so we're going to break in the set of all these things and more coming up thirty minutes. looking forward to it break the set today have a that's coming up in a half hour but that is going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered you can head on over to our you tube channel that is youtube dot com slash r t america or you can check out our web site that is our. u.s. air producers are busy working on stories of the don't always have time to get to on the air or you can follow me on twitter liz wall breaking the set is coming up in a half hour we'll see you right back here at eight pm. this presidential election is not just about obama and romney there are also third party candidates on the ticket and they will influence its outcome see a debate among this nation's major third party candidates right here at our top twenty three.