the turmoil in gaza intensifies fighting in the region has left dozens dead and growing calls to end the violence from the international community so long role will u.s. policy in the middle east play in ending the conflict a report from the region is coming up. keeping the us safe from a cyber attack congress can't seem to pass cyber legislation so president obama is taking matters into his own hands but what he wants to do is shrouded in secrecy and that has quite a few people concerned we'll look into that issue coming up. and blowing the whistle on congress passes a new law that gives added protection to those who report wrongdoing but the bill

leaves out members of the intelligence community why would the u.s. leave such an important part of national security efforts exposed. good afternoon it's monday november nineteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you watching our team once again in the middle east where the violence between israel and hamas has intensified with bombs exploding inside of gaza. now the latest reports how more than one hundred palestinians and three israelis killed over the last six days and much of the world is watching to see if the air war escalates to a ground war president obama was asked about the situation and made clear that he stands with israel. there is no come through under the would tolerate missiles

raining down on its citizens from outside its borders so we are fully supportive of israel's right to defend itself from missiles landing on people's homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians one of you people have been watching what's going on and making some connections pointing out the vast similarities with what's happening today in the region with what's happened four years ago the similar scenes of the tanks and the bulldozers oftentimes in very same regions they were four years ago not to mention of course the timing of this which is just after the u.s. presidential election and just before the one in israel but despite these similarities there have been some major differences first and foremost this time the arab spring has happened and policies made by the u.s. have changed the region in a significant way i'm joined now by our team correspondent hala slayer paul let's

first talk about the similarities and in many ways this intensification of air war between israel and gaza feels a little like deja vu are people in tel aviv noticing this. seventy people here are noticing this i mean you have a throwback to operation coslet which was the name of these radio operations back in december two thousand and eight at that time the stated goal of these radio army and the israeli government was to completely delete the supplies of weaponry that hamas and other militants in the gaza strip have been hearing the same kind of warmongering the same kind of statements coming out of the israeli leadership i think those one significant difference is that for the first time ever rockets have been aimed at tel aviv they have been successfully intercepted but this certainly has sent a chill down the backs of many israelis it was also

a rocket that landed not saw from the city of jerusalem this happened over the past weekend it's the first time since nine hundred seventy that i must that a missile has reached so far into the country now the analysis essentially is that since that last war must have been able to suck itself up on long range rainy and made missiles and if anything this is only going to be more of an incentive for these really government to move ahead with a ground offensive but again in terms of what all the similarities we saw the same four years ago that the operation from the israeli side started with a strikes we've witnessed these airstrikes now for six days and then it ultimately ended in a ground operation in the indication on the ground as we see the tanks and armored personnel vehicles move along the israel gaza border as we see some seventy five thousand reserve soldiers called up some forty thousand soldiers stationed in the south of israel or the indications at this stage of that a ground offensive could be imminent and let's talk now about the differences here of course mentioned some of these weapons that have been used by hamas that are i

guess for about lack of a better word better more enhanced improved but of course another difference here is the changing of the guards in egypt i know former president hosni mubarak had closed off the rafael crossing in two thousand and eight between gaza and egypt but the new president president mohamed morsi has not done so talk about what kind of effect this is having paula. well christine i think that's a significant point to make i mean we're looking now at the new egyptian leadership with the muslim brotherhood in power in cairo you do essentially have politicians there who have a much closer alliance to the hamas leadership in gaza but having said that though they do have a very delicate line to follow it's a balancing act that on the one hand they want to be true to their support base they want to respond to what people on the egyptian street are saying and that is to give support to hamas but on the other hand morsi and his government will not

one to a made the united states they receive millions of dollars every year in funding from washington and so they'll want to be seen not to be too much in the hands of a must but certainly something more like a middle of middle of the road mediator it's still questionable whether or not people see them as middle of the road but certainly they are seen as the most likely mediator in this situation they have been holding talks throughout the day sunday and monday with various players banking moon the u.n. secretary general is in cairo where he has been holding talks and what we're hearing from both the israelis and hamas is that they put forward their demands they're expecting that egypt will address those demands but you have a situation with both sides are waiting for the other side so as to lay down weapons before they say they'll come to the party and of course this is something that doesn't bode particularly well for the creation of peace what we're also hearing from these ladies one of their conditions is that the each option gaza border with russia remains open while they say they'll close down their border

between israel and egypt israel and gaza and in fact this border has consistently been closed that is not something that the former egyptian president hosni mubarak would have done for instance he did not keep that border open on his on his side he in fact kept it down in alliance and in coordination with the israelis so certainly the game playing has changed on the ground the use of egypt i think you're just taking a look at the global chessboard here another example of the tide. changing you take a country like a car an ally of the united states used to have ties with israel now leaders there are saying they're supporting hamas in this conflict talk all about the bigger picture here well not just dealing with egypt israel and gaza but there are several other countries that are sort of giving clues that this is in fact a very different battle this time around.

well it certainly is a very different battle this time around if you look at qatar for instance earlier this month the emir of qatar was in gaza where he played some four hundred million dollars to social projects there he has also been in egypt where he's been meeting with the egyptian president and he too is trying to play a role in these mediation efforts what i think is happening as far as qatar is concerned and certainly this is an analysis that's backed up by me talking to political analysts who deal with the situation is that it's trying to present itself as the big brother of the arab world you have to talk trying now to play it leading role in the israeli palestinian conflict as well as in the conflict in syria and certainly from the sense on the ground i get is that khatami did lose a lot of face particularly with the ball costing of the arab spring who's a channel like older zero i mean many people say that the revolution in egypt would not have happened if it wasn't for al jazeera and so you have a country like qatar needing to be

a study should solve in the arab world and so i think that is what it's trying to do now at least in this example these are the the israeli gaza conflict but this is a region that has changed and changed significantly in the last four years it's not going to be a region that is immune to changes it's a region that israel is having to adapt to it has its neighboring countries with new leadership with potentially new leadership and the israelis to a very concerned about this. yes certainly some major concerns on both sides everyone keeping their eye on that region thanks for your reporting r.t. international correspondent paula slayer. i want to talk now about the latest efforts by the government to deal with the threat of cyber security now as we've been telling you recent efforts by congress to pass cyber security legislation have failed so now president obama has taken the matter into his own hands were portably signing a presidential policy directive twenty according to the washington post this is a classified document which lays out what federal agencies can and can't do to

respond to cyber threats and attacks so because this document is classified i mean son of us can see it we don't know what's in it even those in congress will not have oversight though it may very well impact many americans so two attorneys with the electronic privacy information center or epic have filed a freedom of information request demanding that the president release this secret directive put simply they want to make sure there's accountability in the foyer request it says transparency in cybersecurity is crucial to the public's ability to monitor the government's national security efforts and ensure that federal agencies respect privacy rights and complying with their privacy obligations under the privacy act well joining me now is one of those attorneys working on the case a mystic and a rich hey amy thanks for being here i want to talk. first about what we know i know this is a classified document what do we know about presidential policy directive twenty

mostly what we know is what has been contained in the washington post summary of the document which is that it's given more in power to the n.s.a. to conduct cyber security operations and that underneath the directive that there will be what they call rules of engagement put into place where n.s.a. is able to reach outside of government networks and possibly into civilian that works in the united states we're not entirely sure what that means because we don't know what the document says so we kind of took that summary and we realized that there are a great amount of concerns here and previously we had filed a request for a different presidential secure. he directed it was on national security presidential directive fifty four which is a very long way of saying this is the n.s.a. cybersecurity authority that was issued under president bush we have a lawsuit going right now to pursue that document and we thought the logical extension was now if the n.s.a.'s authority is even creasing even more to try to get the public to see their increased in authority as well let's go to backtrack

a little bit and talk about why cybersecurity legislation has not been able to pass in congress i mean if you look at the senate bill the recent senate bill that failed this had the backing not only of most of the democrats and have the backing also a senator joe lieberman an independent and republican senator susan collins so i guess what are the political arguments here against this well there are two camps in the cyber security legislation world there is the camp that would like to see the department of homeland security had cyber security operations in the united states on this is a civilian agency they have very specific obligations they have much more transparency the military agencies and this is the route that epic support says this very public friendly outlet however there's another camp that would like to see the cyber street operations house entirely at the n.s.a. the national security agency which has a long history of just being a total black hole for public information not only the last two boy requests that

i've discussed at because gone to the n.s.a. up to ten times in the last few years asking them for information asking them for them to make anything that they're doing public to be held to some sort of transparency standard and they just won't comply and we believe that given the choice of these two alternatives that we would much we would much greatly prefer the civilian agency than the military yet you know i think a lot of critics would argue that by doing this by having so much unknown and always keeping it secret in the name of national security it sort of cheapens what you know the things that do need to be kept secret in the name of national security when there's such a sweeping. you know this is used and overused i think it could be argued as you mentioned the only place really that we know anything anything about this is in this washington post article. but in that article it says that you know it effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyber attacks so let's talk bigger picture here i mean does this you know make cyberspace the

battlefield people are saying that that's a little bit of a contentious point if you can call something that happens on the internet a battlefield i think that's an interesting analogy whenever it gets brought up. when one of the reasons they're saying it is because you know basically congress or not congress but the white house and government in the military are acting without you know would be able to act without sort of vote taken or approval given that's how that's what kind of distinguishes that makes it a battlefield or a war exactly and i think it's the operation between congress acting in the president acting have been very interesting the president has said he cannot go as far as congress can go so all of the the different things that are included in one of these bills he has he has publicly said we cannot do all of this but some of it they can do they think by executive order a presidential directive that they can implement some of these measures without having to go through congress and we have to assume that some of that is what's included in the secret directive the stuff that's more geared toward the n.s.a.'s

actions another executive order is in the works supposedly a draft to spend really step would give more power to d h s to do cyber security operations and these two based on what we know may work in conjunction. complement each other but they would work outside of the guise of what congress is doing and congress could always come in and say this is the. procedures that we're going to put into place talk about some of the timing regarding this process i mean you mentioned that you are still involved in a lawsuit to get information released that was issued under president bush so that's more than four years ago and now you've filed this request i mean during those five six years however many years i mean a lot can happen that the american people don't know about. so talk a little about that that's i mean that's why we're filing this we filed our first question two thousand and nine that's been three years ago since we filed it

furthermore since the documents been released and in that time we believe that the public hasn't been able to involve themselves in the cybersecurity debate and the reason they can involve themselves is because they don't have the right amount of information and they don't know what side to be on and debate when you can't watch the debate actually and supposedly there have been unclassified summaries of some of these presidential directives not supposed there have been unclassified summaries released but they don't say exactly what's in it you can't look at the text you can analyse analyze it and in some cases when these secret directives have been put forward not in the cyber security context in other contexts and members of congress have later come in and seen what these authorities are given they have come out and said you know you'd be shocked to know what agencies think they're able to do under these powers and i think that that's one of the great concerns as we'd like to see what the language says and see what power is given certainly though some of the proponents of keeping a lot of this information classified and secret and not available to the public

they use examples like what we saw with the stuxnet virus that computer virus developed by the united states and israel jointly it caused quite a bit of damage at an iranian nuclear plant you know this we want to say something similar happened of virus that infected computer and software in programs here in the united states that you know the government needs to be able to act and to do so without being open about it what's your response to that well i don't think we doubt that the n.s.a. is. position they have expert computer security individuals working for them their expertise is unquestioned this well as the people at the h.s. working in cyber security they're at the top of their field these are incredibly intelligent individuals however i think that our government is based on public accountability and regardless of what actions they're taking maybe a different safeguards need to be built in notifying the public after the fact so that they're able to effectively counter maybe

a dangerous virus or something however that transparency needs to be built and we need to know what they're capable of doing as soon as possible in order to educate the public and have a real debate about what this means for your concerns on the concerns of epic really revolve around accountability and transparency exactly all right aim is to ban it was to ban of it with the electronic privacy information center thanks so much as always. also ahead on our team congress passes a new bill to protect the whistleblowers one key group of people are not included in the some growing find out who.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call i don't know. i'm sorry i mean the guy who cares an awful lot about you sir are a fool you know what kind of mind their terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want you to listen to defeat terrorism on the liberal democrats and republicans. can secure really good out of. the corporate media distract us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that's also from facials to garbage he calls it breaking news i'm not me martin and we're going to break that.

all right well let's move on to the war on whistle blowing a war that in the last few days has actually tilted in favor of those advocating for more protections it's certainly been a long time coming but last week congress approved legislation making it safer for federal employees who want to report wrongdoing at their jobs to do so without fear of retaliation i want to talk more about what the new law does and does not include with our t. web producer and your blake answer that's the first question i mean who is included in these new protections it will looking at a lot of federal employees of course not all of them that would be too convenient but one one big expansion that we're seeing here is that workers at the t.s.a. the transportation security ministration finally have whistleblower coverage which obviously makes sense but again we're looking at an agency that's still rather in its infancy it's only been around since a little after nine eleven so it makes sense and we can finally i'm very curious to

see what kind of things are going to come out of that because that's one of those agencies where you're getting not people from within the federal sector but people who are you know subjected to treatment by the by the t.s.a. every single day and it's kind of a kind of something that people aren't too crazy about and if you've been to an airport lately you're not going to be people who they're happy with what the t.s.a. is doing from the public facing side of it so it might be really interesting to see now is that that now that t.s.a. employees can actually come out and talk about abuse and misuse happening within the agency itself what actually is going to service are they going to go to congress and start complaining or are they going to go to their superiors and start putting in reports we can hope but there one there one major group that we're going to start seeing ideally a little bit of response from items that they think are going to need a little bit of media attention but said of course not everyone is covered i know the senate had tried to include provisions to protect people with national security

clearances yeah this is very interesting the house republicans not only didn't include it they flat out blocked the. two parts of the legislation and what you just said which is the national security intelligence workers. but so what's their reasoning here well i disagree question i'm not too sure but one thing that we do know is that president obama has supposedly saved the day and he's issued a little policy directive that will provide some sort of safeguard for these intelligence community workers who want to go and speak up but you know the congress themselves actually decided that that's not the best thing so we have you know the executive branch saying one thing legislative branch saying another is it's still a victory absolutely but there's still it's not coded in there yet it's still just a minor win in the fight to actually have public employees like actually working for the government be able to complain and in the intelligence community that's really where we're seeing the most people not actually just coming out and

complaining to the most people actually being prosecuted for that too i mean if i ask you who is probably the most harshly prosecuted whistleblower in the united states right now you might say julian sons of all will not and that is not a united states bradley manning of course and i think was a army intelligence officer who has been detained for over nine hundred days now for blowing the whistle of that in solitary confab salut lee in conditions considered torture especially united nations and for what he did allegedly was blowing the whistle on war crimes and actually saying ok i work for uncle sam i'm in the army the army is doing something i'm not too crazy about it i'm going to handle it with the law and scots law yes so i'm going to blow the whistle and webb says yeah that's so i mean how do you think that that is do you think that under this new law it could be argued. in a court of law that bradley manning should. you know the phrase i mean it could be argued should have been argued all along that when you have the state department saying that he hasn't done anything that actually caused massive damages like the

prosecutors want to say absolutely but isn't really going to happen it's a good question especially like i said when we have congress saying one thing the president saying another it's definitely a step in the right direction another group that i think is really interesting way to look at this is f.d.a. and if the employees are covered under this however private business is tied with the f.d.a. like independent food producers they don't necessarily have these protections and they can make their own rules regarding this alone or old i mean they can and some of them do some of them don't but whereas if before we saw the f.d.a. release now if you work for the f.d.a. and the you see problems within the food industry you can blow the whistle now in you will at least on his legislation be covered but if you work for like some mom and pop place with a contract the f.d.a. you're not necessarily going to get that protection if you step up and say ok there's a lot of stuff going wrong here they can still retaliate against you but on a bigger level on a federal level there will be some protections now once obama signs this into law.

but the fact that we still need a law in order to tell people that it's ok to go along with what are you up for wrongdoing i mean i think. that bradley manning's i think it would be good just really quickly to mention julian assange is because i think today has been five months that he's been holed up at the ecuadorian embassy in jail without charge in the u.k. no charges. afraid of going to sweden for questioning on sexual allegations because he thinks he would then be. brought to the united states to face charges. you know what's the bigger picture i mean does this new law you know would it protect someone like julian assange who hasn't even blown the whistle has just provided sort of a medium by which others can learn even the american citizen either what they are going to do to him is a question. and i think we're all eventually going to find out but like you said we have the presidential policy directive that's going to supposedly provide some sort

of safeguards for people within the intelligence community which is great but in the meantime we still have the congress and we have the president saying different things are these protections actually going to happen and if you look at the intelligence community that's where we're seeing the biggest prosecutions of these cases they know just last week i saw john kiriakou received a civic duty award for blowing the whistle on waterboarding in afghanistan and it was in a room maybe one hundred twenty people and they started saying well we passed around a petition right now do you think we'll get the president to pardon you because you talked about was still blowing it and talked about waterboarding actually acknowledge that and kind of like a flat out you know like no one thinks it's actually a reality you can go to tom strickland with the n.s.a. and couple there and say whistleblowers have been under fire by federal prosecutors lately so it's. going to set up a bit of a really interesting and i think to i mean you make a good point about you know the congress says this the president says this you know we have these three branches of government but what actually goes into effect

remains to be seen as if you can make it if you're still new and i think yeah i have yeah absolutely our senior producer and you're like thank you we're always here for breaking it down capital account is up next on our team so let's check in with lauren lister to see what's on the agenda today other war and happy monday hi christine happy monday to you you know if you factoids out some data points about what's going on with the economy in the u.s. we got a report from the wall street journal they didn't analysis of all of these corporate earnings and conference calls and found that about half of the major corporate investors are not investing they are delaying they are suspending their plans to invest in the economy meanwhile there is another report some some credit information that shows that the average credit card debt per consumer that has debt per borrower has increased so it's about five thousand dollars it's gone up four percent. are these the kind of statistics that you want to see ur these the opposite kind of things then you want to see so we're going to talk about that in a few minutes steve king is in studio he's always

a great guest and that will be in just a moment sounds like an in-depth conversation thanks lauren thank you that's going to do it for us here for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or our website r t dot com slash usa. well. it's technology innovations all the developments around russia we've got the future covered. download the official ati application to self choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorites from alzheimer's now t.v. is not required to watch arts here all you need is your mobile device to watch our team any time any part of the.

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