one last hurrah for cia whistle blower john kiriakou soon to be in prison for leaking government information kiriakou friends and supporters on or his commitment to telling the truth and speak about the future of whistleblowers in the u.s. coming up we'll share what happened at this song celebration. for you to the street you hold your money. she may be homeless but she's taking her fight straight to the bank and she is not alone four years after too big to fail banks bail out these protesters want you to know what the bank of america is up to. and in an ironic twist the white house is of welcoming tech savvy americans at its first ever hackathon this is political activists and hacker jeremy hamm in the fight against fights his case against the government behind bars.

it's friday february twenty second eight pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r t as regular our t.v. viewers know cia whistle blower john kiriakou was sentenced to thirty months in prison for leaking information about waterboarding and systematic cia torture to the media however last night he couldn't have been further from the jail cell as supporters held at a sendoff banquet just one week before he is expected to head to prison human rights activist journalists family and friends attended the event but it wasn't all dancing and dining as his prison sentence loomed our t.v. producer rachel cursing us was at last night's event and joined us earlier to talk about it i asked her the one question that's on everyone's minds what happened last night. it was a very brutal the fair in many ways because well it was in probably one of the

ritziest places in d.c. that's called the hay adams hotel and it overlooks the white house we were in kind of the penthouse suite in in a sense it was it was very clear that it was called an orange ball so that meant a lot of people were say wearing jumpsuits with bow ties underneath so kind of the tension of of the fanciness as well as the prison sentence that loomed was very much in the air and the reason why they chose this this place to hold the event was because you had a great view of the white house and of the washington monument in the idea was to look down on the tortures to have a moment when they were kind of on top when these activists had an opportunity to look down instead of say look behind bars john kerry for many years works for the cia and beyond that he he also was the one to leak the cia torture tactics what are his a thought study talk about some of the agency now and where it's headed yes he absolutely did in some remarks he said that in some ways he still loved the cia and the promise that it could potentially hold for you know american for making america

better and more free place as well as the rest of the world but he also said was he was incredibly concerned with the way the cia was being managed in particular he brought up cia nominee for director john brennan who has been a part of the security apparatus for quite a long time and i was hoping we could take a listen to what he said about john brennan. i've known john brennan for a long time i've known him for twenty two years i worked directly for him. i think he's a terrible choice to be cia director. yes so essentially he's saying that this is a man who has overseen a lot of killing a lot of essentially throwing out of the constitution and then he thought of the cia it was going to be. an organization that he could envision being better it wouldn't be that way if john brennan were at the head of it now he is about to head to prison for quite a amount of time two years is definitely not a small sentence leaving his five children behind does he have any regrets about

this whole matter sure i think that it's it was very clear in speaking with him that he's going to miss his family certainly he's hoping that once he leaves prison he'll be able to provide for them in a way that he won't be when he's behind bars but he also seemed very steadfast in his actions in terms of having a regret about whistleblowing itself he he didn't really and he spoke about that as well with us if we'd like to take a listen. and i see parallels with the one nine hundred fifty s. with the mccarthy era i really do. you know with fifty years of hindsight or fifty plus years i'd say we realize how utterly wrong those people were i know in my heart that years from now people are going to look back and they're going to know that we were on the right side of history we were the ones who were right the government was wrong. yes so he's hoping that in the end history will come to vindicate him and his actions despite spending these next thirty months behind bars now there is a lot of people at last night's event can you talk about the future of whistleblowers

i know thomas drake was there is it is it a bleak future for whistle blowers at this point yes certainly so as a bit of background john kiriakou was the sixth person in the obama administration who's been prosecuted under the espionage act which was created during world war one and its ties to current whistleblower bits p.c.'s especially. according to a lot of lawyers who were at last night's event and thomas drake was was the first of these people prosecuted under the under the espionage act and he talked to us a little bit about what that was like and just as background he was part of the national security agency and he broke essentially the story or leak the press leak to the press all of the warrantless wiretapping going on and he had something to say about what he thought the future was going to be like for whistleblowers no indication that they're letting up i mean it's pretty clear that right now they're going to wiki leaks look at all possible legal you see there. you're still others i

mean there's major investigation you realize major investigations going on the f.b.i. and other government agencies need to chill leaks. so the lesson there and the lesson both from mr drake mr and other guests at the event last night was listen he's going to be in jail for thirty months don't forget about him and don't forget about the larger issues he stood for both sent him letters but also trying to keep that fight for government transparency and accountability alive and well very interesting thank you so much for attending that event bringing us this report back our to producer rachel kirsten yes thanks for having me. well it's a promise we've heard president obama reiterate time and again since two thousand and nine from campaign speeches to state of the union addresses white house weekly addresses to town halls no more taxpayer bailouts never again will taxpayers be on the hook because a financial company is deemed too big to fail. never say never it appears that bank

bailouts can and do still happen just in a form of covert backdoor deals that is here's what we found out last week turns out the new york fed said in a court filing that in july it had released in bank of america from all legal claims arising from losses in some mortgage backed securities the fed received when the government bailed out the american international group back in two thousand and eight so essentially mortgage lender a.i.g. was attempting to sue bank of america for billions upon billions of dollars for selling them toxic assets but the fed is getting in the way and not only is the fed getting in the way they're telling a.j. it can't sue and they are also refusing to sue the mega bank itself so if an institution as big as a i.g. isn't powerful enough to take on the bank of america what hope is there for average americans and getting restitution that they desire archie correspondent ramona lindo takes us to

a tragic story of kent california of one woman who lost everything except for her will to fight. foreclosed home owners in los angeles are calling a wall street giant bank of america this is ridiculous i mean how greedy can people be among them is single mom sold at corona i've spent over forty thousand dollars trying to get that and that's all we want it's just simply our mortgage after negotiating in terms of beauty krone says the bank held her payment sending her into default occupy activists tried to keep her in her home a crony owner daughter were eventually evicted in and that's what they do they create blight in communities it's sad it's it's tragic actually. then i haven't lived and honestly.

both of you are pretty lonely so they throw you into the street they hold your money they like two years after the mortgage meltdown mainstream america still feeling the brunt of the crisis wall street executives have been able to avoid prosecution through a series of fraud settlements be they and other big banks have agreed to pay billions of dollars for their financial schemes but deals with the feds have bailed out bank of america from having to pay billions more in legal claims and back america has paid lots and lots of money out but it's it's really a pittance of what they gained throughout the financial bubble that was that was built up in the housing market regulators have been criticized for putting more priority on keeping banks afloat than on the rule of law he is can you identify when you last took the wall street banks to trial. i will have to get back to you with the specific information but we do litigate they have not been held to account and they continue many of the same practices and are just as big if not bigger than

they were before the foreclosure rate has decreased since the peak of the crisis but there were still more than a million homes that bill into foreclosure in two thousand and twelve. well bonuses on wall street continue to grow so does a heart ache over america's foreclosed families we don't want anything free we just want our homes and to continue paying our mortgage broker. in los angeles remember lindo r t. all right everyone we are team minus six days until the dreaded sequester that is automatic government spending cuts that everyone from economists to politicians have said could cripple the u.s. economy and yet nothing's being done about it for months now we've heard of how cuts like this could be a death blow to the u.s. military but it goes beyond that so let's take

a look at how these cuts will affect your life it will slash some sorry billion dollars in health care services to military families also affected will be the health and human services department they will have to reduce hiv test by four hundred thousand due to funding cuts the t.s.a. will face for a low days so that means security lines could be longer for travelers the food and drug administration will experience two hundred six million dollars in cuts so that could affect regulations on food quality and the list goes on it also affects schools new york schools alone will have to lose one hundred and two point two million dollars in federal aid now to tell me how congress can let us happen i was joined earlier by our total scada he's an advocate advocacy coordinator for the school of americas watch and i first asked him what these cuts do to education and what they mean for our children's future. some of the cuts that are discussed as you as you just mentioned were for federal schooling and then some of the head

start program four hundred million as well suppose is going to be cut but it pretty much appears almost all of these cuts but it's not going to be so automatically it seems more of a percentage decrease over the next several months for the fiscal year between now between march and and september so. for example on some of the head start programs that it's more likely that there will be more of maybe an increase in the amount of families would have to pay not necessarily the tens of thousands of children will be cut off of the program. i mean in reality if you like it's just. a lot of fear mongering to to be able to point to these these types of programs that are obviously yes important and needed and there shouldn't because to them. it's more of a hostage situation and to really avoid the defense cuts and i think that that's where we should be the focus should be on that that the fence has defense budget is

bloated and it shouldn't. avoiding cuts there shouldn't. be so damaging to to other people but i think a lot of the damage can still be avoided either way so potentially avoiding defense cuts at the cost of prosody our future and in our children but i do have to ask you because it seems a little bit hypocritical considering the fact that president obama in this most recent state of the union address talked about early childhood education funding preschool so how can any do that how can we fought to fund these preschools and have more children entering interning and to early childhood education but also to cutting schools. doesn't make much sense for them to use these to specifically the point to these cuts it's completely unnecessary in the sense that. you don't. need to cut these programs it's there

a drop in the bucket compared to to the defense budget and. you can look elsewhere or the other major obstacle of course is that the republicans refuse to consider any spend any tax increases so here we're just talking about cuts and. it doesn't make any sense it just shows the power of the sense in the street where you're going to have to. weaken the so the social safety net which we was already weakened and which actually needs to be strengthened in these types of programs instead of being cut and which is kind of now congress has painted the entire country into a corner. and we. still need to be looking for four types of alternatives to these automatic cuts and again it really goes back to looking at the defense budget and yet we have both a drawdown going on in afghanistan i know the technology is becoming cheaper because of drones and whatnot and cyber cyber security but also congress is on

recess right now they're on vacation so the thing that we had something crazy like this happen it was the fiscal cliff and we heard all the rhetoric all the craziness come up with the fiscal cliff i think congress went and said we went off that fiscal cliff but then they said retroactively we did not go off the fiscal cliff is it possible that we could go to the sequester and then congress decides that we've retroactively didn't go to sequester or is what the damage already done i mean that's exactly what's going to happen. it appears they're going to they're going to let this happen on march first action appears very likely that action will be taken by congress before then so that the sequester will all supposed to kick in but it appears to just be the that will be the jolt to get the congress members to actually work towards something and it's pretty much expected that in march that they will still do exactly what you've just said that they will. go back and retroactively say that the sequester didn't occur and the beach is very. you know

since since the cuts are also budget afford to september. it will just take as long as the teach that there actually be any type of. spending decreases it may not even be felt now as archer over scott are advocates and advocacy coordinator for the school of americas watch. well hack your heart out that's the message coming out of the white house today as the obama administration continues to appeal to tech savvy americans with the ever a first ever hackathon the idea behind a hackathon is to create a new petition page for the public to contact the government online the obama administration is looking for a major revamp for it's really the people web site which in and of itself is a first now the white house is inviting hackers to come in and redesign the website actually ceding control of the website to the people who will most often be using it this hackathon happens to coincide with the open data day and the obama

administration says it hopes to attract data visualizations specialists technology and host of elders and many others to participate in creating a more user friendly site that will not only allow people to create petitions but will also allow them to track the real time progress of any responses or legislations that come as a result now as of right now more than six million people have left some ten million signatures on the current we the people web site everything from gun control to creating a new deathstar has come up since the website's conception so we're going to have to see the new developments. on one hand the government is encouraging the so-called good hacking with this hackathon but on the other it's attacking the cyber community the likes of which no administration has ever done in the history of the u.s. during the same week that this white house. houses supported the hackathon and the

attorney general eric holder released a new report that outlines the administration's strategy to deal with cyber hacks and that results in the theft of u.s. trade secrets meanwhile accused hacker germy hammond is approaching the one year mark in his trial he has been sitting in jail since last march with no possibility of bail and no trial the twenty seven year old is accused of helping half the global intelligence firm known as strive for and still private correspondences credit card information donor names and much much more from the company's database but new information about the judge that is actually presiding over this trial of jeremy hammond has made the case all the more unusual so to break down the latest developments i was joined earlier by our team web producer and your blech. development is a very very minor one in the grand scheme of things that it's only going to mean that we're going to be stuck around waiting for a little bit more future mayhem was arrested march fifth of last year and has yet to be tried for. accusations with lol second and most off shoot he was hacking

stratfor hacking law enforcement agencies there's a whole laundry list of counts that he's facing and in fact the judge so that he could be sentenced for thirty five years to life for this thing but yesterday the judge who he is we just talked about her husband is somewhat connected this thing she said you know what i'm not going to step down right now even though there is this huge grassroots campaign to have me you know removed from the case with actually a press release outside the courtroom yesterday despite all these things she said nope stick around so we don't have to wait till april which when the next round of hearings will start so let's back up just a little bit judge will read our prescott as the judge is dave she actually went into the ruling in the whole case is saying that her husband potentially was affected by the strap for hacks let's put up a. graphic to kind of visualize what she said in this ruling that was in fact tonight she said in doing so defendant hopes to draw a link between the stress for hacking the interests of cash gordon clients which

purportedly would then impose a financial interest upon cal gordon and in turn mr cavalier that's her husband and in turn this court defendant's attempt to draw such a link is a few tiles absolutely futile that sounds a little. unfriendly and your own you know i read the whole the whole motion came out yesterday and a couple of different times she said a couple of different things that make the oh really you're trying to put this motion where you're saying that you don't have any bias whatsoever but you're unleashing this verbal not just the defendant but his attorneys and his supporters and pretty much so the people who are rallying for jeremy him and they were trying to draw these connections they were even speculative they were just just crap and even. we know we see that her husband this this cavalier fella is his name and email address were leaked through the stratford dump now it wasn't his credit card information and it wasn't any monetary loss but he was still involved and he was

still targeted and he has a reason to not want his name and email address circulate as part of this huge criminal vent that is been going on for over a year now we still haven't seen any developments so right now we have had him locked up for over a year almost see where we've got bradley manning who's been without trial for over a thousand days eric schwartz committed suicide and it was. supposedly as a result of the department of justice justice going after him the department of justice is also going after wiki leaks are we starting to see a trend as far as how cyber hackers are prosecuted i wouldn't say we're starting to see a trend it's been happening for months if not years just the last couple of weeks especially with aaron's passing there's been this whole kind of renewed interest in paying attention to these people who are locked up who are fighting these charges because people are starting to realize that these charges might be a little bit silly people are start to look at these counts are being filed and go

that could be anyone that could be me in fact we haven't released a letter from prison today we're sorry for this week where he attacks computer fraud and abuse act which is the legislation that they used to go after erin that they used to go after jeremy to go use to go after pretty much most hackers is that the c.f.a. . you know he was he also said the same thing that he thinks the justice department is responsible for error and stuff but maybe c.f.a. reform isn't the solution maybe we just need to abolish it we need to start all over because here is an antiquated computer law from the eighty's that they're using it it's way to a lot of people say it's way too overly broad you can pretty much stress the case if you're the government to prosecute pretty much anyone for anything involving a mouse or a keyboard and they're doing. to silence people who are sharing information that's critical the u.s. government as we see with him and as we saw with manning as we saw with with countless others being keep going in going and going to go through all the different members who've been in prison and we only have about

a minute left i have to ask you because we have all these cases of prosecutions of hackers and yet we have stuxnet we have flame we have cyber attack at the white house right so can you explain this i mean apparently what's good for the goose is not good for the gander right i mean i really think that the white house report this week was perhaps the most hypocritical thing that the obama administration has done yet and that's saying a lot because here they are actually trying to recruit hackers to come in and make their website and even their website pretty the petition part they want to make sure that people have more more more easily petition for a death star which is fantastic but they're going to use their resources and they're going to use america's brains and minds and their ability to do that kind of stuff but at the same time going to prosecute people who are trying to expand that knowledge to others outside of the beltway while we're going to try to recruit those same people to wage our cyber wars in iran and china and all that it's very hypocritical and i think people need to step back and realize that the government can't be picking and choosing what they want to do with these geniuses

a very interesting dichotomy r.t. where producer as you're black make sure you check out our website for the very latest on all of these cases a brand new website r t dakar let us say thank you andrea. well if you asked someone in the one nine hundred sixty s. what they thought the twenty first century would look like you might have painted a picture that was similar to the jetsons cartoon episode was flying cars and robot maids well we certainly aren't there yet as far as technology goes with take a look at this this is a medical advance that is that thing that you see the doctor holding is an ear or it's a biomedical ear that engineers have successfully created and by three d. printing made of living cells doctors say could be viable in less than five years well are you amazed yet turns out this technology opened up a whole new realm for what the future could hold so for jet flying cars we want to know what person from history you have three d. print if you could and our own laurie harshness of the resident dot net took that

question to the streets of the big apple. who would you three d. print from history this week let's talk about that when jake says that's good he would be amazing at twitter just a bob marley laugh i guess first and who is second and so i come from his sort of churches i mean reported bring so in the life of a character oh yeah like super mario or there were elmo you had that oh my god it's already working my project good one i like my best friends someone you know that's a good idea do you think that people would do that if the technology were available

they'd start bringing back people making copies from this frederick douglass. once a king. and malcolm x. do you think that they would appreciate where society is today to be honest with you they would be a little disappointed abraham lincoln chaffee the classic president right that louis everybody says no i know and said that yeah well i guess link it is very popular right now. to do lincoln i mean lincoln's pretty hard right now you know people like lincoln be him walking around his beard be good yeah top hat yeah and he'd be like what the hell did you do with this country while i've been dead or describable the thomas jefferson i love to know what he was thinking when he you know put together the founding of this country and you know i know yeah well what do you make of the second amendment argument today i did think i hope it would be very sane and that you guys are totally to get out of god and i had to guess i

think he would go this is really dangerous it's really crazy. we were talking about something else entirely and there should be gun control and all of the background checks and everything else yeah i guess the purpose of these questions is to see you know how the past would deal with the president yes definitely what do you how do you think they would deal with that i mean how would most or deal with music sampling you know reproductions of like that that would be amazing to see what he would do he would probably lay off the auto tune you don't know maybe he would love it i mean he's you know one of the towering geniuses of her like material or something you know like computer technology but he said go crazy with photoshop the bottom line is three d. printing technology is developing extremely fast so let's just hope the people in control of it use it for the good of humanity.