coming up on our t.v. u.s. supreme court today ruled that a civil rights group does not have the standing to challenge the government's warrantless wiretapping program an update on the face of fight ahead. and it's a government agency charged with keeping the u.s. so what are the biggest threats the secretary of homeland security outlined some of the issues today we'll fill you in. and say you have a g. mail account like many people around the world we depend on google to keep us connected but a consumer group alleges google is invading your privacy details coming up. it's tuesday february twenty sixth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching our t.v. well the supreme court today made a decision that could have a big impact on your right to privacy and a five to four vote the supreme court ruled that people do not have the legal

standing to challenge the foreign intelligence surveillance act of the law allows the government to incept intercept foreign communications the lawsuit is from a group of civil rights advocates and journalists that challenge the foreign intelligence surveillance act some things you should know about the law allows the n.s.a. to wiretap conversations of u.s. citizens phones without a warrant it was first signed into law in one nine hundred seventy eight and the supreme court ruling today means lawyers cannot challenge the law in federal court . what the court did not consider is whether or not the law is constitutional for more on this ruling what it means for your privacy i'm joined now by ginger mccall director of the open government program at atic great to have you here thank you so some say that this ruling today has created this catch twenty two situation how so it is very problematic because standing is a preliminary question that has to be answered before the supreme court can ever

get to the merits that is the constitutionality of itself and what the court set out here basically is a scheme understanding that makes it very difficult. because the law and the activity surrounding it are so secret it's very difficult for any plaintive to obtain the facts necessary under this ruling to actually be able to get standing and to allow the supreme court to then consider the merits of. now the supreme court. can be a challenge in these cases or it's very hard for it to be challenged what's interesting though is that the ruling did not weigh in on the constitutionality of this law can you explain this it did not what we've seen recently is that the supreme court has been rolling very narrowly if there's a way that they cannot reach an issue of constitutionality they will select that path so here they used standing as a way to avoid that question of constitutionality it doesn't necessarily rule out

the possibility that the constitutionality could later be a challenge but the factual scenarios under this ruling that would allow for that kind of challenge are exceptionally narrow it would be very difficult for plaintiffs to be able to meet that standard under this ruling so if no one has any legal standing because they can't prove that they're being watched. is there any way or what how would it be possible that for the court to ever look into the law's constitutionality it would be very difficult that's exactly the problem here is that the activity surrounding pfizer these intercepts these wiretaps are so secret that it's difficult for anyone to get the facts necessary to be able to make the showing to to get standing under this ruling because basically said it's and have no idea whether or not they're being spied on is there any way for somebody to know well the supreme court did contemplate a factual scenario under which. some fison intercept is for instance used in the

case against a foreign national then that foreign nationals lawyer may be able to challenge under the fourth amendment but the reality of the intercepts is that they're very rarely used in any real criminal proceedings they're used to build the backbone of national security information collection and information sharing. but what does this mean for citizens privacy their ruling today it just makes it it's one more layer of secrecy it makes it more difficult to get any sort of judicial oversight of these very secretive programs that the n.s.a. and the other national security agencies are engaging in. it destroys accountability. now for those that are concerned who is more susceptible to government spying to being monitored under this program well five that sets it up so that if you are a citizen of the united states and you are communicating with someone who is outside of the united states that communication could potentially be intercepted so

people most at risk would be people who are communicating with those outside of the united states in this instance it was journalists attorneys human rights activists those sorts of people would be very much at risk especially since they may be talking with potential plaintiffs or people who could be caught up in investigations by the federal government so i mean one of the wider implications of this do you think that journalists now might feel that they need to watch out the way they're who they're communicating with than you know the manner in which they're communicating for fear of being wiretapped well we have these very important privileges set up within our system for attorney client privilege we have standards of confidentiality built into our journalism and the integrity standard surrounding journalism and this undermines that makes it very difficult for there to be attorney client privilege it makes it very difficult for a journalist to guarantee to an informant or someone who's talking to them that

there's actual confidentiality in those conversations do you think that this could potentially change the way that people communicate this ruling today it could it could chill legitimate speech it certainly makes it very difficult. to expect any sort of candidness in conversations with attorneys with you. and rights activists with journalists with the very sort of people that we want to be able to talk freely very important ruling today a very interesting case. unfortunately we're not hearing too much about it but we're glad that you could fill us in that was ginger mccall director of open government program at vic thank you. paula time now today delivered a state of the homeland security address and while the media hoopla is all about seaquest ration the homeland security secretary covered a lot of ground we know reach our next do you three point zero if you will and as you'll see the software metaphor is really accidental at all. on

a politician i discussed everything from cyber security to immigration and our producer rachel currency this was at the brookings institute to keep us informed on what happened hi rachel so you know we've heard from president obama in his state of the union speech and other times he said that cybersecurity will be a priority to nepal a time no reiterate that today she certainly did secretary and a politician no made cybersecurity a huge portion of her speech so we've edited together some of the more interesting and important moments of that if we'd like to take a listen to it. the cyber around wasn't even a major priority of the early department and now it is one of our five core mission areas over the past four years we have built and deployed systems to detect intrusions and defend federal slighter networks we've expanded our twenty four seven watch center the engine we have comprehensive plans in place to manage cyber

incidents and to stand head of rapidly evolving threats and technology we are moving aggressively to recruit educate and train our cyber workforce for the future we need greater information sharing so that the government can learn from the private sector where people fight this threat every day and we need to ensure that the government can use information at various levels of classification to help the private sector protect itself. well we've seen in proposed pieces of legislation before example and even and in her speech we just heard this focus on the public and the private sector is working together to share information how did secretary napolitano. reiterate that today sure so first she brought up the idea that there might be some sort of civil liberties issues with this that it might affect privacy in the way that she kind of got rid of those concerns was by saying listen public

public sector and business information sharing is something we already do and she brought up the example of aviation she said listen essentially what happens already is that the t.s.a. and different airlines share information to ensure airline safety and she also talked about who should be in charge of cyber security in the first place she says listen i understand that the department of defense has a much larger budget for dealing with this they have their own cyber command but what's important is that while the do you can deal with cyber threats that occur internationally the department of homeland security is better suited to deal with domestic threats the one issue there is that once something is in the virtual realm these distinctions between national and international become a bit of relevant interesting want to shift gears a little bit now because i know that she did cover a lot of ground immigration of course of a very hot topic today what did she say on that front sure so she had a lot to say and most of it was very positive in regards to the work of the department of homeland security under her tenure if we'd like to take a listen to that. we now enforce our immigration laws according to common sense

priorities focused on the greatest threats to our communities previously this was not the case meeting the college student who came here with her parents when she was a child was considered the same priority as a drug smuggler this is changed last year alone we removed more than two hundred fifty thousand criminals from the united states so can you go into more about what state what stance she was taking what direction does it seem she wants to take the whole immigration debate today in the u.s. yeah absolutely well she would talk a lot about congress needing to take some sort of action in this regard but i wanted to do a little bit of fact checking on what she just said right there essentially she said we removed a ton of people who were criminals who would have provided a safety threat to people in the united states but as the immigration and customs enforcement said to themselves and some data they release forty five thousand

parents parents who arrived in the country illegally without documentation but whose children are legally american were taken from their children in the first six months of two thousand and twelve alone so figure of those two hundred fifty thousand people that she just mentioned forty five thousand of them in the first six months alone are parents and the thing is that deported immigrants who try and enter which often parents who have children still in the united states do are considered felons and they're considered top priority for immediate removal so when we hear that word criminal we really need to think a little bit about what it means in the d.h.s.s. eyes and in regards to these deportations there's some really interesting facts about this a lot of conservatives are saying that obama hasn't been very strong that he's kind of left a soft open border but under president obama and secretary napolitano we're set to reach two million deportations by the end of this year by the end of two thousand and thirteen which is more than all of the deportations from eight hundred from eighteen ninety seven eight hundred ninety two to one thousand nine hundred ninety

seven. combined so that definitely puts puts it all into perspective there it certainly changes the way you're thinking about how the d.h.s.s. dealing with deportations you know the d.h.s.s. this organization it is just ten years old or relatively new or part of the cat obama's cabinet is she set on making any big changes to get that feeling yes so when she was talking about department of homeland security three point zero as you brought up in your introduction she's the idea is that it's supposed to be more flexible more proactive as opposed to reactive in the huge way that they're planning on doing that is as we mentioned before this information sharing the idea is if you get information in real time and you're able to get it to local law enforcement people you know in federal government all of these things we can do a better job of dealing with these threats but one thing that she never talked about was how getting all of this data might have a very negative effect on on the privacy and liberty of people in the united states and very interesting rachel thanks for staying on top of this that was our producer

rachel. well we know that drones have become critical to u.s. military strategy and the technology has taken pilots off the battlefield and allows them to fly drones from remote locations far away from any combat zone but while these pilots are physically out of harm's way a new study shows that drone pilots are not spared the psychological trauma the study by the armed forces health surveillance center found that pilots that operate drones experience the same rate of post-traumatic stress disorder depression and anxiety as soldiers deployed in iraq and afghanistan to discuss what's behind us i'm joined now by dr sooty bose he's an emergency medicine physician an iraq war veteran he's also the founder of the battle continued or welcome doctor great to have you here it is great to be here think you know this study suggests that even though drone pilots they are in that imminent danger they still face health hazards what are behind these findings i'm not surprised to hear this it comes down to

mental stress basically i mean even from my personal experience what i saw out there is it's not always the patients or the warriors who are injured who get p.t.s.d. it's the ones who are almost injured are the ones who face imminent danger so p.t.s.d. post-traumatic stress disorder is in exile the disorder and it's defined as an anxiety disorder that is from an out of the ordinary traumatic event that is perceived to be a threat on your life so this can be from combat it can be from assault it can be for many things and often drone operators there you know doing missions that involve life and death so i'm not surprised by these findings right so it seems whether you're whether or not you're actually in the situation or doing it from afar killing somebody is killing somebody and you're going to face that reality one way or another. it is i mean in the military were always taught to follow the

mission so you know whether the mission is driving tanks whether the mission is being a medical whether the mission is operating a drone you have to follow your mission and off and combat zones you're in danger or you're making critical decisions in that mission where life and death is involved in this can have psychological impact. you know we hear stories of soldiers that are deployed and you know as you said they witnessed the horrors of war and they come home feeling alienated from civilian life but drone operators even though they aren't actually deployed can they face that same kind of feeling that they engaged in in this remote warfare but they still have this experience of war and they come out come back come home to their families kind of facing the same kind of alienation definitely i mean these are defined you know out of the ordinary traumatic events and you know most of us aren't used to these events and you know

usually in the combat zone we see young soldiers who are eighteen nineteen years old and they're basically tossed from high school straight into the combat zone and you know i won't ever forget the story of some of these guys who just come up to me and you know hand me their weapon and they're like doc you know i can't take it anymore just an incredible amount of stress that the soldiers are going through is so similarly you know when operating a drone these are out of the ordinary you know mental mentally stressing events and this can cause the same seven. which is why are there even instances that drone operators can be subject to even more stress than traditional pilots i was reading you know just the nature of their work they're kind of staring at the same place for hours and days on end and they're kind of they see when they're doing it remotely they kind of keep a close eye on the area and they keep the after the traumatic. event has happened they still continue to monitor the area whereas if you're actually there you tend

to flee and not stick around so could that have these psychological impacts as well i'm not sure if there's like a study to show that is the reason it's happening and that's the whole enigma about p.t.s.d. i mean we don't really know i mean why is it that you know according to the rand studies that. out of every four. warriors that go to war that one of them comes back the tension with p.t.s.d. what is it in that one person is it how they're hardwired is it what they faced and you know as we learn more and more more about this over the years we'll figure out what the moment so certainly we're seeing that there are health health concerns with operating a drone this kind of new warfare. i wonder if drone operators are screened in the same way about traditional military. military soldiers whether they're you know when they're in the field if they're screened in the same way. the screening is

also very challenging because you know as an emergency room physician myself for instance if i have a patient with a heart attack i can find a heart attack i can do an e.k.g. and look for it i can do a blood test and look for the trip on in value and i can see that they have a heart attack but p.t.s.d. these are invisible wounds of mental alertness and i guess it's hard to hard to screen for it even because there's no test that can give the diagnosis it's a clinical diagnosis where you have to just look at the symptoms the patients are having and a lot of times you also have to rely on. the soldiers coming forward and telling you what they're experiencing emotionally and psychologically. which i think much of that here a lot of a lot of the soldiers we go undiagnosed right definitely a lot of them go on diagnosed and you know for the listeners out there what i would say is the onus is on off the society the family members that have to recognize

this because it isn't going to be a magical test that discovers this it's not going to be some sort of a government you know policy it's going to be a family member that loved one out there who's going to catch this and it's important to recognize the symptoms you know the symptoms i would say they divide into three categories two of which are very easily recognizable so there's arousal so hyper vigilance anxiety. getting easily startled there is flashback so you're reliving the bad having nightmares those are usually you know those two categories are usually identifiable but the family members out there what they should look out for is also avoidance where things that normally the soldier like to do or the drone operator like to do they're withdrawing from that they're withdrawing from family members kind of becoming secluded and i think the listeners out there can recognize that and hopefully seek help it's a very interesting study and i appreciate you telling us all about it that was dr city both as an emergency medicine physician iraq war veteran and founder of the

battle continues dot org. well internet giant google and hot water again for a possible privacy violations there's after application developers found out that google is sharing information about users without their permission the group consumer watchdog alerted the federal trade commission and has asked them to intervene so will google face any consequences ryan radio associate director of technology studies at the competitive enterprise institute joins us now to discuss welcome brian so what kind of information are we talking here what kind of information is being shared by google what we've learned is that google is sharing some info about its users these are people who got an android phone androids actually right now the leading smartphone in the world hundreds of millions of users the idea of the i phone yes android phones together there many models actually outsold the i phone overall that's been the case for for some time now what we've learned in recent weeks is that the app developers small companies and

sometimes individuals who sell apps to users on the android store are in some cases getting from google information about the users that could be the full name of the user the e-mail address the suburb possibly even the street address in some cases that's raised privacy concerns in some circles and as you see. some are calling on the f.c.c. to intervene all right so yes some personal information there what kind of problems can this pose for consumers so far we haven't heard of any problems the theory is that perhaps if an app developer figures out where you live your e-mail address if you leave a bad review there could be retribution there have been no reports of that happening yet but there are theories out there about things that might happen that are harmful in future on the other hand the google has provided a reasonable explanation for why this is happening when you buy an app on the app store using your google wallet where you probably put in your credit card or pay

pal you're actually buying from the app developer it could be the company that makes angry birds it could be a smaller company that transaction legally is between you and the developer google just in the middle so for things like sales tax compliance the developer is going to need to know where you're located to the extent that it has to tax that or provide information to the authorities if they come and audit it similarly let's say you download an app and there's a bug there's a problem dressed can let the developer let you know so there are some reasons why the information could be used to help users and in theory why it could be used against users although we haven't seen that yet. you know this isn't the first time that google has been in trouble of our privacy issues. now this is raising a lot of concern do you think that. will google be held accountable will certainly it's already being held accountable the marketplace with all of this media people who are wary about google are free to leave to get an i phone next time their

contract is up or windows phone for that matter the f.t.c. has been working to police internet privacy in some cases imposing very large fines on companies including google but also apple microsoft and many others even for relatively trivial privacy violations and it's would not be surprising if the f.t.c. considers intervening here again however google has has. said that its policy that governs the sharing has been intact for for quite some time perhaps before the the consent decree the settlement between google and the f.t.c. was in place so whether google actually broke any laws here is unclear especially because google says in its policy that some but not all people read that it will share your information for transaction purposes it's kind of like when you buy something from amazon but when it's a company that amazon contracts with of course they have to know your shipping address to ship something to you that's the sort of arms and transaction that's occurring here whether all users know about it is certainly in doubt many people

apparently are surprised to learn that their e-mail addresses are going here to developers whether that's a legal issue will be raised or be seen of course so many people use google these days it's become a household name. i wonder what it will take for google to be more sensitive to feel to be held accountable to their customers to not share this information. it's really going to depend on how user privacy expectations evolve in time so we don't really know how much people care about privacy in aggregate because people different people will sometimes tweet where they eat everything they do whereas some people are aware reclusive mean we have a facebook account or a fake name so google really has a lot very big incentive here as do all these companies to try to strike that balance between giving users free services or low cost services to make use of information while also keeping it safe every company is struggling to drive belt we could have no information sharing and pay twenty bucks a month to use a search engine but the users have spoken that's not what they want they are

willing to share some information in exchange for some services but that calculus is going to evolve as people learn about the risks of information sharing and as these services grown proliferate a lot of times people are as long as it makes their life easier they're ok with giving out a little bit of information it kind of makes you wonder if this is just what it's come to now that where we just kind of have to accept that we don't have the same amount of privacy about our parents were afforded or you know the previous generations how to for a very interesting ryan thanks for thanks for weighing in on this that was ryan radia he is the associate director of technology studies at the competitive and surprise institute's. well update now on the case of army private bradley manning pretrial hearings resume today at fort meade where a military judge detained him denied a motion by the defense to dismiss charges against the alleged whistleblower the defense hope the charges could be dropped because they say manning did not get a speedy trial under current military guidelines the court has one hundred twenty

days to proceed with the trial despite numerous delays presiding judge colonel denise lind ruled that the defendant's right to a speedy trial was not violated. finding many of the delays caused by the government to be reasonable arrested in two thousand and ten for leaking sensitive documents to the website wiki leaks manning has now been in military custody for over a thousand days waiting trial. lawyer in the u.s. tasers are a popular weapon of choice for police agencies and sometimes there's questions over whether a taser should have been used at all and in some cases they have garnered a lot of attention like this one a few years ago. but there have been cases where suspects have died from tasers and now one of the makers has come up with a taser that's equipped with

a camera according to the maker every zap can be documented documented with full audio and camera video all the hope is that the device will hold police accountable so if any questions come up you can just look at the video but what about the person getting the electric shock and will police turn over the footage that might make the officer or that apartment looked bad. well we are going to leave it all there a budget for more of the stories we covered you can always had to wear you tube channel we post everything there in full our website r t dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter as well back here in a half hour. talking about the same story doesn't make it news know some part of you know puff pieces some tough question if you.

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