trying to corporations room today. these fire casualty israeli troops fire on citizens in gaza one person is killed and several others injured so can the fragile today old cease fire between hamas and israel hold an update straight ahead. sometimes i walk in the ac in my house i'm greg. yeah so. the federal government reached a twenty six billion dollars settlement over the foreclosure crisis and the money was supposed to help struggling homeowners but our team finds that's not happening and some people are in fact still being carried to the curb. celebrities of this used much more than regular people like you would be twitter fail a lot of people can get into some serious trouble in one hundred forty characters

or less so tonight r.t. asks how the social media site made society dumber. good evening it's friday november twenty third five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching r.t. . let's begin with an update from the middle east where at this hour a cease fire between israel and hamas continues to hold according to israel's journalism outlet deb much of that ceasefire is owed to a phone call by president obama to israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu in which president obama promised to send u.s. troops to the sinai peninsula that egyptian territory in north africa surrounded by the suez canal canal in the west and israel on the right now this follows eight days of violence between gaza and israel that left more than one hundred sixty palestinians in gaza dead more than half of whom are civilians including thirty

seven children four civilians and two soldiers have also been killed in israel just a little while ago a spokesman for israeli's prime minister spoke to our t.v. alex jones keep blames hamas for the deaths of so many civilians in gaza. these rule doesn't target civilians and if we heard civilians we see failure in it but you have to understand that you must militants from us terrorists the hide behind civilians the fire rockets on our civilians from schools from hospitals they hide the rockets in hospitals in schools we see that the fire rockets from apartments of buildings so if we do not want seaview and soon girls are to be hurt we call upon civilians and we do it before every stroke we call upon civilians that they will not be around the reason that they will not let the terrorists to use

them to use their houses to use their schools the international community of course still watching to see what will happen next that this fire was largely brokered by egypt egyptian officials have said the rafah crossing will remain open both sides will have made clear that they're ready to strike should the other show signs of breaking the truce and you can see more of that interview with alex else scared six pm eastern on breaking the set with abby martin. plus shift our focus now to the economy and to a problem that continues to be widespread across the country despite major efforts to overhaul the system and the issue is that people continue to be forced out of their homes now earlier this year a twenty six billion dollars settlement took place and it was supposed to hold big banks accountable for the mortgage crisis and also help struggling homeowners but a new report shows that's not exactly what's happening especially in one of the hardest hit states states in this country california our jails are among the window shows us why this is happening and also the heartbreak that it's causing for some

families something i walk in this you see my house for a year so it rick. but there what my own immigrant weeps when she remembers the memories of her former home in los angeles she and her husband owed hundreds of thousands more dollars in loans and the value of their home and were forced to give up their piece of the american dream the bank that held the twenty six billion dollar national mortgage settlement was supposed to help struggling homeowners and make the financial industry clean up its act we have reached a landmark settlement with the nation's largest banks that will speed relief to the hardest hit homeowners but while banks say they've given billions of dollars to distressed homeowners the money is mostly being used to get people out of their home rather than help them stay this is the house but they're not last in a short sale she still love to work in her garden or her grandchildren played out here in the front yard now this house is just another example of how the mortgage

crisis continues to force people from their homes banks say they provided homeowners with twenty six billion dollars in relief since march half of that went to short sales a short sale means the house goes on the market with the profit of the sale going back to the bank to pay out the loan the homeowners kick down and really gets any of the profit from the sale the point of the settlement was we're going to keep people in their homes we're going to help people who are struggling with their payments we're going to keep them in their homes for sure until the opposite happens financial institutions were already doing short sales before the settlement banks can actually save money when homes go through a short sale process instead of going to foreclosure bank of america j.p. morgan chase and wells fargo relied most heavily on short sales for chase short sales amounted to two thirds of its relief this is a good deal for the bank first of all because they would make they make more money on a sword sale than they would on you know if the home was foreclosed upon when they had to resell it the new short sale numbers have angered homeowner advocates who

feel banks should be doing more to keep people in their home those funds were supposed have been divvied up to help some of these people who were defrauded get back in weeks. some of what they lost they'll never regain everything we have delivered to california eighteen billion dollars in relief for california's homeowners however there is no relief for people like but they're still battling the bank over fees on her short sale my husband a. headache and me cry other homeowners are also crying and demanded help. but through the robo signing deal the government wage its right to go after the banks for their just sept of practices the banks were able to sort of get away from with this without too much harm to their bottom line without any harm in terms of having to go to jail while homeowners struggle to rebuild their credit and their lives the wrongful deeds of banks remain unpunished in los angeles

remember linda archie so this landmark settlement and relief to struggling homeowners from the settlements sadly it's not working for the major majority of people and barely scratches the surface to talk more in-depth about this we're joined earlier by r.t. correspondent ramon glinda just a little earlier today. the purpose of the settlement was to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and to help keep banks accountable so that they wouldn't repeat the practices that led to this mortgage crisis but what we're seeing here in the trans is that as you mentioned a majority of the credit that's being taken from the banks for doling out benefits is really just short sales which ends up putting people out on the street now the problem with this and it's actually beneficial to the homeowner somewhat because it's not as bad as a foreclosure you don't take that huge hit on your credit but at the end of day you lose your house and a lot of critics of the settlement and

a lot of critics of this report say that it really isn't any sort of punishment to the banks because when it comes to short sales the banks had already picked up their short sales even before the settlement was signed so there's a lot of fear that what the trends that we're seeing right now aren't really going to help to punish the banks in any sort of way from california certainly one of the hardest hit states when it comes really to the number of people who have lost their homes why is that. there are a variety of reasons you're absolutely right seven out of the ten top foreclosure markets in the entire country are here in the golden state i mean in riverside county one out of seventy three homes is in foreclosure now we're dealing with one of the biggest and most lucrative real estate markets here first of all so during the housing boom people got rich and it got really really broke once it fell but we can really look to settlement that happened just

a few weeks ago with countrywide where there they had to do hundreds of millions of dollars after settling in a lawsuit in which they were accused of really targeting minority borrowers and this is black and latino families who were unfairly targeted by the subprime mortgage lenders primarily countrywide here in california more than half of the foreclosures were black and latino families and just forty and forty eight percent were let the families alone so that's a big reason why the crisis hit especially hard here in california and according to this report from on three hundred thousand homeowners have benefited from this program overall so far getting an average it says of eighty four thousand three hundred dollars so for those who actually have benefited what's next for them. right christine well this is another number where we have to dig a little bit deeper out of those three hundred thousand it's really just about

seventy thousand who really who received first lien modifications or second lien modifications and about thirty thousand other people are really under just a trial modification right now so there are still thousands of people which are in limbo and many other people who fall into that category. of short sales so at the end of the day people who are on these straw modifications are still unsure whether they'll get that full lot of kit modification and even those people that did get a modification have to deal with the fact that. the foreclosures in many markets are still very high and that's affecting property values throughout california and in many other states that were hit hard by the mortgage crisis. like there is still a long way to go to be able to keep a whole lot of these people in their homes are to correspondent rym uncle lindau in los angeles thanks so much you bet. so i had on our tan cybersecurity it's

a hot topic here in washington d.c. what's the lawmakers do to protect us from our attacks the top ten reasons all of us should be concerned. here is mitt romney trying to figure. the name of that thing that we americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about my music are

a. little you know what kind of my terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want to give us a good feature is on the on the ball and the crystal ball. consecutively up out of the. clear the slope are going to distract us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industries that sell the sensationalistic garbage because of breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

well in the coming days and weeks there will be some things to keep your eyes out for regarding the future of your privacy rights in this country and also the increased ways the government has decided price protection on privacy might not be as big of a priority earlier this week we had an attorney aimee's to panavision on the show she was one of two lawyers with epic the electronic privacy information center who filed a freedom of information request to make president obama's directive on cyber security public all that foil request was promptly denied and yet there are still many americans who don't seem to pay much attention to what's going on in the world of cyber security correspondent liz wahl has more. well here at r.t. we pay close attention to what's happening on capitol hill regarding cyber security

legislation but the effects reach far beyond washington here are ten things into your daily life that are affected by cyber security first off your personal correspondence our e-mails are saved and can be accessed by the government and the private companies they contract and under current laws phone calls can already be listened to number nine your health the establishment of electronic medical records is a major part of health care reform but those records can be accessed by doctors and other health care providers some of whom aren't your personal doctor and also pinned up these private records to boehner abilities from hackers and at number eight your money using online banking apps makes banking information passwords and account numbers easily open to scanning via smart phone and bank servers can store identifying features of the devices used to access the information number seven your vote voting machines have long been called hackable and on election day we saw

some regularities stemming from both being allegedly altered add to the fact that many observers claim the current crop of technology is in need of serious oversight and should make many wonder but the possibility of throwing an election might not be too far from reality. and number six mass transit transportation systems work thanks to information and transit system networks that control navigation traffic signalling systems traction power systems traveler information and fare collection systems all of which are vulnerable to cyber attacks and number five infrastructure parts of our critical infrastructure from electric grids to water pumps and filtration systems to nuclear plants and cellular all depend on computers to function. a number for government communication governments and corporations use security e-mail or secure e-mail rather systems to stay in contact but with

techniques like spearfishing these e-mail service can be breached plus should whistleblowers like bradley manning face life and solitary confinement for passing along this information. and number three global finance high frequency trading uses computer algorithms and technological tools instead of runners on an exchange floor of course time the global finance system to computers means that it is just another part of our world affected by cyber security and number two news and information news organizations use web content systems to plug in and share their stories and governments large and small connect with constituents via official web sites which can easily be taken down and distributed denial of service attacks they can also be hacked and last but not least the surveillance state big data is here to stay the ability to store and compress huge amounts of information is getting easier databases are already finding patterns giving individuals

a digital footprint between security cameras hiding and more and more places and cell phone location information there won't be many blanks to fill in and the privacy the expectation of privacy we have or at least our parents had will be lost in washington liz wahl r.t. . well there are other reasons to be concerned about new decisions being made in the name of cyber security while they may be beneficial to the government and to private industries they often come at the expense of individuals rights and we do have a few specific examples to tell you about let's start with the case of andrew arnheim or he was convicted this week of stealing more than one hundred twenty thousand e-mail addresses of i pad users and illegally gaining access to eighteen two servers and he was charged with conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and fraud in connection with personal information but this case is a lot less simple than it sounds i was joined earlier by r t where producer angie blake he helps me fill in the holes. it's

a whole lot of holes that someone really needs to fill in because it seems like the justice department kind of screwed up when they were figuring out how to do this it goes back to two thousand and ten when you aren't home or in a group called security they discovered that there was pretty much just a huge security flaw with eight hundred two servers and the serial numbers belong to all new i pads were linked to profiles that were hosted openly on the internet not password protected not encrypted if you knew where to look you could find them and instead of calling up eighteen thousand telling him you know telling a.t.t. this is what's up our time i went to the press and revealed ok look there's a huge security breach and thousands of thousands of customers can easily be targeted because of this but he didn't break into any security and you know he didn't say he didn't do anything he just sort of exposed what he found and what he thought a lot of other people could find me to simplify it's more or less finding finding himself in the right place at the wrong time he discovered on the internet that you

can access all this information without having any sort of special credentials or history much just going into an address bar and typing a website it's a simple as that and finding something that's just sitting there on the internet now a lot of stuff gets put on the internet that people might not certainly want to find you might have a compromising pictures or or old high school poetry or something they don't want to end up in there but that's why you have to protect things in the case of eighteen t. they took thousands thousands of their customers and left their data sitting there on encrypted waiting for someone to come along and say hi there's a problem here now he never hacked anything he was just smart enough to find out what was going on but because these laws are quite defined yet when they took him to a court in new jersey last week and they tried to charge him for this the jury only took around an hour to convict him on a couple of charges and now he's looking at prison so he's his attorney does plan on appealing but shows us that you can pretty much do anything and if a prosecutor tells the court one thing and convince the other way that no one is

really safe right now i think. you make a really really good point when it comes to laws and the internet there are a whole lot of things that just aren't defined they don't refer to the the legal you know or the case that took place a few years ago to try to solve this one talk a little bit about the precedent that this case could set for years to incredibly incredibly damaging one actually if if this case is an appeal properly and it stays as it is right now means that anyone who has anything on the internet ever on any sort of accessible network can can take someone else to court just for finding it if if you don't take your own for cautions to ensure things are pretty protected securely they are open there for everyone that's why people don't give out passwords but with a ninety nothing was password protected it was just sitting there waiting for it in your own home or made a really good point when he was on trial he said that you know any computer in this instance is a protected computer the internet itself is a publishing platform and you don't have to call up google every time you want to

use google you just go onto google and you type something so hopefully i mean for the sake sake of ourselves who use computers daily this will be reanalyzed in another court retry and hopefully the person that was set this week in newark will not stand yeah absolutely i do want to talk about someone else now jeremy hammett he's been behind bars for nearly a month he's accused of being a member of and part of the group that hacked into that private intelligence firm strat for a whole lot going on here he was denied bail. talk a little bit about some of the other things we're learning about this case ok we'll play it like you said you important thing yeah it's really going to have an himself was it was in court in new york this week and there was no conviction there was like you said he still spent eight months there hasn't been a trial yet he's is hopefully going to be released on house arrest so that he can kind of you know get himself together before he goes into court for this and the judge went and said no you can't get bail because you're

a dangerous person if we let you out you're going to see. out of your apartment you're going to go to a coffee shop you're going to go onto a computer in you're going to steal credit card numbers again and you are pretty much a domestic terrorist so they had to stop him and say look sorry not only can't you get dealt but we're also thinking about putting you in prison for life and one really interesting thing here was that hammond he did he could be the very first american citizen charged with a crime relating to wiki leaks because we know that when those files provide him to julian assange and then from there are things going to steam rolled so it's really interesting case here because not only are we seeing that you know alleged computer criminals can be put away for a really long time but the government can easily be using this case to set an example for anyone else who dare do something that the government might not like protected network well the other thing too that i think you didn't mention is that the judge in this case is related to someone who actually was a client of stratfor yes yes yes i think. it's kind of funny actually yeah that the

judge was writing over this case in a new york district court her husband was one of the couple thousand clients of stratfor who subscribe to the email updates you pay some like twenty five dollars a month and you can get intelligence from this so-called global intelligence company sent to your inbox well the judge's husband was one of the few thousand people whose identities were compromised in this attack step stretford already filed they already came to a settlement with a class action lawsuit and we believe now that the judge's husband actually received that settlement because he was impacted by the heck so there's calls now from members of anonymous and members of the jeremy hammond solidarity network to try to bring this up into the media is something we're doing right now so that you know we realize oh maybe a judge someone with an arsenal interest in the case perhaps be sitting on the bench the judge is telling a twenty eight year old guy high by the way you can't be released on bail and then we could put you away for life and didn't you tell me earlier andrew that this judge actually said he was as dangerous as a sexual predator when you have

a. if he can use programs like tor the onion router which allows people to cover up their footprints when they do things online a lot of people use tor so that they can protect their identity when they're talking to sources or perhaps you know sharing information online in his case they believe that he used it when he was helping out tax transferred and distribute those files among members of all suck but because sexual predators can also use tor he's just as dangerous as them and so now he's going to be denied bail just last question and i mean bigger picture you know we sort of started off this statement talking about why this wasn't necessarily a great week for tech week yeah and not so much for type of but for people who use technology for example who have made it a part of their lives and for privacy rights i mean is there light at the end of the tunnel where we can hope like what really we've been seeing for the last couple of months there's so many efforts on a congressional level to try to pass cyber security legislation and we already know that congress is having a hell of a hard time on their part trying to do that so ideally we can we can rely on the

court system to take these little discrepancies but it looks like we really can't right now but hopefully these cases are getting the media attention slowly but surely that are necessary so that people will start voicing their opposition like remember what happened with sopa and pipa even the n.d.a. when there is use things that started to seem like like fringe topics to begin with but when people realized oh ok so put that passes i can't do this on the internet so when they started getting in touch with their lawmakers who then decided oh wait maybe i shouldn't vote for this piece of legislation hammond may have actually committed a crime that's on the books life imprisonment for victimised victimless crime seems a bit harsher with our home or for all intents and purposes i think a lot of people go ahead and say they can never actually committed a crime all right certainly very interesting stuff here are two weapons use or injured like thanks as always thank you. well in many ways social media has revolutionized and forever changed the way people communicate with one another thanks to facebook our friends another part of the world can see what we're doing

when we're doing it and thanks to twitter we know a place to post all of our deepest thoughts and insights as long as they're under one hundred forty characters are to correspond honest r.c.h. are going to take the fun look at how twitter has perhaps forever changed us. one hundred forty million users. and millions of posts in one hundred forty characters every day from ones of questionable substance there's this really annoying phenomenon where people tweet what they have for breakfast i hate that like i don't care what you had for breakfast i don't want to see a picture of it i don't want you to tell me the ingredients in it there is like a self obsession that that is the that is brought up by twitter to gaffes lending tweeters in big trouble like media mogul rupert murdoch tweeting about quote jewish owned media coverage of the israeli palestinian conflict only to later tweet an apology the culture of self obsession and political correctness has created a minefield the illusion of safety that people have when they're typing away on

their computer either from the safety of their office or from the safety of their home office sitting in their underwear in their parents' basement in the field people really feel invulnerable i popping tweets from the rich famous and powerful often get them an earful of criticism not to mention the loss of potential endorsements it doesn't help that their twitter audience is so large so lebanese have misused twitter much more than regular people like you and me john mayer. was answering all of his tweets and posting updates at the same time he had been telling jennifer aniston he was too busy to take her calls this a celebrity gossip journalist michael musto says ridiculous twitter behavior will exist as long as those in the public eye tweet before they think twitter is a treat for scandal lovers auto giant chrysler had to apologize for a post on people not knowing how to drive on the reality t.v. star kim carr nash and deleted tweets amid death threats after being pro israel then pro gaza then pro both sides driven well past the last exit to relevance

billionaire donald trump selection one twitter rage almost stole headlines as the media announced election results this election is a total sham and travesty we are not a democracy the world is laughing at us which is funny because the world laughs at donald trump a lot more than they laugh at obama trump became one of. republicans whose excessive critique what viral over elections and coulter said that. she called for rock obama a retard first of all it's just respecting the president and also which of course she does every day every week in her column anyway but also you know retard is obviously an offensive word. and you know it's a slur against the mentally disabled insulting to its aside outright wacky wants often get more attention and tougher consequences than they deserve a blog is a column without responsibility then a tweet is like a fart online it's a brain fart you can say anything you want and i think it's kind of crazy that

people are held responsible for what they tweet i mean i guess it's that the winner might be an exception a mix of point formats and misuse of the microblog made the congressman an infamous symbol of what not to do on twitter he's just a great example of the flip of the tongue right or slip of the finger or a slip of the twitter or slip of the tweet right get you in trouble i need to do is tweet something that you mean can direct method in your career is over politicians of course should be tweeting because everybody should be tweeting but they should really be very careful to also be sort of not post happen to get pictures of yourself looking a rousing to anybody because it only takes a few seconds to send a tweet many people forget about its longevity a tweet will remain online for ever even if deleted so why not think twice before clicking as abraham lincoln said it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt and. r.t. new york well that's going to do have harassed.