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tv   Breaking the Set  RT  June 12, 2013 8:29am-9:00am EDT

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examples of investigations that were tampered with one involved allegations that a state department official engaged in sexual assaults on guards at the u.s. embassy in beirut another detailed a possible underground underground drug ring taking place in iraq thought to have been supplying drugs in the state department security contractors but perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the memo was the fact that even a u.s. and bassett are who remains anonymous routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both cost prostitutes and minor children while prostitutes and children you know if anyone else did that they'd be behind bars but apparently working for the government affords them the protection of other and munity clean them above the law so if they're above the law it's pretty clear where you and i stand. a little more if you are seeing anything like that.
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so guys let's take a trip down memory lane to most exactly one year ago that's about the time that senators ron wyden and mark udall two members of the intelligence oversight committee asked the n.s.a. a simple question just how many people in the u.s. are being spied on pretty straightforward question marion a straightforward answer right o. not to the n.s.a. which replied by saying that revealing that information would quote violate the privacy of u.s. persons yup apparently it be a violation of your privacy to know that you're being spied on is that not the most orwellian thing you've ever heard well in the news came out i remember joking that the n.s.a. probably didn't want to release that information because the real answer would have been everybody fast forward to today but you know what the joke's on me because the n.s.a. is in fact spying on every person by phone and internet according to whistleblower edward snow. and. originally we saw that. focus very narrowly
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tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they the n.s.a. specifically targets the communications of everyone ingests them by default it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them in and measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve he said indeed this release is unprecedented and reveals how the government has direct access to the private servers of corporations and taps into them conducting constant surveillance the information has brought to light many questions about how the u.s. government's practicing counter terror operations not only abroad right here at home furthermore the self revealed identity of edward snowden raises questions over the his future particular they considering this administration's harsh crackdown on
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whistleblowers so to talk about all of that i was joined earlier by brad friedman writer and editor of the brad blog i first asked him about the intent of the program and who it really targeted. well you know the problem is we still don't know that and so whether this should or shouldn't be kept secret is kind of one of the most important points because we can't debate these programs you can't discuss these programs unless we know at least some idea what these programs are and you know you'll recall back going through the bush era the reason that laws were changed war was because of whistleblowers like edward snowden who is who came forth back then and said hey this is going on this began a national conversation the laws were changed for better or worse back then in two thousand and eight for example but only because we had some inkling that these things were going on you. people now who are critical of. snowden glenn greenwald
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for bringing out these points people like ari fleischer and then in the very same sentence they'll say but we need to have a national conversation about these things i'm not sure how or when we would have this national conversation if we didn't know about these things to some extent in the first place which we do now thanks to those guys but brad obama says that the n.s.a. program has struck the right balance if you look at the details of course those are classified if spying on everyone the right balance i'd hate to see is deafening overreach but interestingly enough i mean you point out ari fleischer i mean obama loyalists are using the same rhetoric to defend the president that bush supporters used to defend his illegal wiretapping program how come he wanted a partner see here. yeah it's kind of remarkable you would think it would make some of these defenders of obama sort of take pause when they see ari fleischer the guy who was willing to lie and make up any excuse possible for george w.
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bush when when they see the that now fleischer and obama are you know in agreement on this and the fact that obama comes out and says we've struck the right balance on this well i guess that seals it nothing to worry about one guy has said we've struck the right balance you know it's absolutely absurd because what we're dealing with is a non adversarial court the foreign intelligence surveillance act defies a court it operates in complete secret its decisions are in complete secret there are no adversaries who come in and challenge the government's case last year alone they came in and put forward about eighteen hundred requests the pfizer court approved every single one of them and even the supposin public officials who are supposed to oversee this program the people in the senate intelligence committee the house intelligence committee even they don't get to see a lot of these do. and if they have
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a problem with them there's very little they can do about it they can't tell us they can't really complain about it they can't make these things public there is so much going on here and when you see. barack obama come out and say we've struck the right balance why democrats partisan democrats simply accept that when they didn't accept it surely when george bush came out and said well we're doing the right thing is absolutely remarkable the vote is in the party loyalty place it's astounding brad it is and it really is and let's talk about the whistleblower edward snowden who said i mean he said repeatedly that he didn't want to make the leak about han but rather about what the u.s. government is doing however he knew that the media would have a field day over him everything about him over the fact that he came out and i'm president a way to reveal his identity why do you think they decided to do that well look
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i've done a lot of reporting on whistleblowers over the years and i've seen firsthand what happens when these when these men and women these brave and patriotic men and women frankly you know come out and make these claims present these documents they are smeared they are assailed they are called crazy and i think snowden was kind of smart here trying to get ahead of the issue you know showing the world that you know he's kind of a normal guy he's an average guy he's not insane that's something that you know bradley manning has never been able to do for example he's never been able to bring his case to the public so i think it was smart for snowden to get ahead of this thing and show the world who he was rather than have the national security apparatus you know tar him as a crazy. terror loving america hater so i think is really going to brad that's a really good point because he could have just been a. sealed up for years that we never would have known what happened who it really
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is excellent point and as we know you of course he's in hong kong currently but knowing the stigma around china why do you think you chose to go there why don't somewhere like iceland which has a good reputation for protecting free speech. well be careful what you think we know. we don't know he's in hong kong right now we know that he was in we know that he was in hong kong on june sixth when he made that video with the journalist glenn greenwald for the for the guardian but he has checked out of that hotel right now he is whereabouts unknown so you know i'm not going to guess why he went to why he went to hong kong a lot of people are using that again sort of underscoring my point using that to smear him but you know the fact of the matter is if we didn't hear from him if we didn't see those documents by and large all we would have to go on is the word of the government and the government has blatantly lied about this james clapper the
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director of the national intelligence has lied about whether americans were being spied on and mass he lied to congress about this he appears to have lied about the prism program which they say. they're doing under the authority of the pfizer act section seven o two problem is that section didn't exist until july of two thousand and eight yet the prism program started in two thousand and seven according to these documents released by snowden so i you know i'm glad to have these conversations to try to figure out what is going on and it's very difficult but i think that the american people need to know we need to decide at least if we want to have something that appears to be a democratic state or representative democratic state in any fashion snowden's very smart i think that he knows exactly what's facing and he said himself he could be persecuted in the s.b. . charge extra to the u.s.
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so i think that he has a good head on his shoulders and he's making the right moves brad let's talk about glenn greenwald the journalist who broke this story i do you think there's a chance that the government will come down hard on him potentially charging him as a coconspirator in light of the trend of rosen wiki leaks and what to your personal experience in this story. yeah well what the government will do if they follow that lead of what happened with james rosen and a.p. yeah they're going to go after glenn greenwald hard it's kind of difficult because you know he's a civil liberties champion he has said bring it on he is not afraid he is not cowed he's very independent very outspoken so he says if this is a fight the government wants to bring bring it on so i'm kind of looking forward to that fight frankly my personal experience and i do have some here and i sort of share it with my colleague glenn greenwald a couple of years ago thanks to documents once again secret documents that were
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released by anonymous onto the web we discovered that there were three defense contractors who were working together putting using tools that were created for the war on terror by taxpayer dollars that were being turned around and used against glenn greenwald by the bank of america those same companies those same three defense contractors were also planning to use those tools against me on behalf of the u.s. chamber of commerce one of the largest lobbying organizations in the world is certainly in the country so here we have an example of private. the privatization of our national security surveillance state developing tools with government money supposedly for the war on terror for public use and then they are turned against private individuals journalists. like greenwald and myself so i've seen this
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firsthand really calls into question whether or not this is war on terror the government's fighting or war on democracy and truth telling brad friedman from the brad blog everyone check it out thank you so much coming on and breaking this all down. still to come tonight or visit this year's build a bird find out why this year's event was different and in the past. nobody chooses to be homeless no one chooses to me and our sorrow. is that it was for the show to. get in the six pm get out six b. six. they were. training school day. to day me the class people in the. days that were against the war.
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it's tough to think about all of that comes of it. and to know that many may not have only been lost due to ones should never be me but there are also do different closures that never should have. preparations for the first woman cause when it was strictly classified. even her own mother knew nothing of the imminent extraterrestrial voyage during her second door which there was a terrifying and unexpected emotions. one wrong move under siege and may never return to. she later i'm a regular sleaze survived an assassination attempt this and thirty five right at my side of the car nine bullets were found on the my seat valentino to discover
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seagull in space cannot see. when it comes to the issue of mega corporations and their shady dealings of the food products we consume the focus on one santow can make it easy to overlook other corporations that are just if not more dangerous to the public good which is why today i want to talk a little bit about nestle the largest food company in the world that's the group is based in switzerland and takes in an estimated one billion dollars in annual
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revenue and no not just from chocolate milk sales is the nestle serves as an umbrella corporation for over twenty nine different brands including several varieties of bottled water arrowhead deer park ice mountain ozarka poland spring and zephyrhills in fact nestle waters probably the company's most profitable commodity you see nestle rakes in an absurdly outrageous amount from bottling and reselling the water to extracts from the ground take for instance its processing plant in wellington counties southwestern ontario according to canada's largest citizens' organization canadians dot org nestle pays three dollars and seventy one cents for every million liters of water pumps from the local watershed which is then packages in a single use plastic bottles and sells back to the public for as much as two million dollars let me break this down for you real quick three dollars and seventy one cents for every million liters repackaged and sold back to the public for two
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million dollars that's a profit markup of fifty three million nine hundred eight thousand two hundred fifty five per cent yes i know it sounds crazy but nestle is making almost fifty four million dollars a share profit on water alone furthermore and it's really let's pursuit of revenue nestle which operates in eighty six different countries pursues ways to remove the restrictions that would prevent it from pumping water during droughts yes drought. you know when there is no water because heaven forbid mesley misses a penny of that fifty four million dollars percent profit just because a few villagers are dying of thirst at this point you're probably wondering how it's even possible for one corporation to make such a dagger in mind blowing profit margin on a natural resource that should be a right not a privilege well it could have something to do with the philosophy of a man named peter rabbit nestle's. east.
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since we had this on believe me so did does and then marketed towards a specific goal bases space that. deep and him leaves me plenty of debt so does the boost seemed just as it was close to. done the most recent. me s.p.t. th decent that this was going on decade in. doesn't and what it was because he said that i have time to get if you know the details now in case you didn't get all that let me paraphrase what brainiac just said to him water should be privatized and applied a price like every other resource on the planet even goes as far as suggesting that the idea that water is a right of all people is an extreme one whoa whoa better watch out for those extremist human beings who dare assume that they have a right to something they can't live without. guys this is the same corporation
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that donated over a million dollars to prevent g.m.o. labeling in california and furthermore nestle has been the target of an international boycott for some time see its aggressively marketed baby food an infant formula that has contributed to the deaths and suffering of children around the world so the next time you reach for that bottled water think about nestle the big corporation that's immensely profiting while sucking the world dry leaving millions of people without a drop to drink. this past weekend saw trans national banking elites foreign diplomats and public servants once again convene for the annual build a bird conference and with no surprise the meetings like in past years were cloaked in complete secrecy yet this year saw increased scrutiny and journalists and media
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outlets who are now demanding transparency so what we've learned from this year's summit and again from inside i was joined earlier by journalist and radio host jason berman's i first asked jason what kind of definitive policies have resulted from the secretive meetings check out. one we know that the european union and the euro has come on by admissions from their own members such as and you have in your own who actually attended this year and he is a belgian finance minister so we've already had pretty high level admissions that this is more than just a thing more than just a consortium of people that are getting together talking no they're actually setting policy in their abbey or you followed build a bridge for years in fact that we were both there covering it last year in chantilly virginia as we know the builder committee has taken a different approach the media this year providing a media contact intent what do you attribute this change in attitude to. well i believe the only reason. that they've changed their attitude slightly is because of
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the light that we have shined through the alternative media and programs like yours to make people aware that this group not only exists but it does wield great power once again when you have the heads of state the heads of banking industry is the dutch royal shell facebook google in attendance with prime ministers like carl cameron obviously they are shaping the world around us and you know i fear though jason that this is just the guise of transparency i mean it like we saw this here the protesters had this fenced off area far away from the conference hall it looked like for the first time let's talk about the most interesting attendees that we know where they're side from multiple banking c.e.o.'s at the world bank i.m.f. there are also members of british parliament along with high level c.e.o.'s of today's top tech companies google amazon jason the build of our web site listed two interesting discussion points from this year including very vaguely how big data is changing almost everything and cyber warfare what do you think this all means put
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put put this all together for us. well right now we have a huge scandal breaking out that's old news to people like you and me that the national security agency here in the united states is data mining all data whether it be phone calls e-mails or web activity and once again when you not only have the representative of the largest social network out there facebook and eric schmidt a man who goes way beyond google after all he had a diplomatic trip to north korea just this year you're obviously going to be in discussions on how not only to mine that data but how to store that data and how you can use it to profile not only individuals but communities states and even bigger i mean this really is about more than just data collection they are monitoring the activities of people on the whole so that's why it's so important again to talk about this because once again when you have no accountability and you
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basically are living in a national security state which we are and people are meeting behind closed doors with these executives we deserve to know what's going on especially when there has been pretty much denial across the boards that they were giving this information but for one we know that schmidt a few years back said hey if you're doing something on the internet you shouldn't be doing maybe you shouldn't be doing it not we shouldn't be watching you we're listening to you and taking that data but don't do it all right it's also just disturbing to know that these top tech leaders are kind of providing this blueprint for the rest of the world i mean all these foreign diplomats leaders it is disturbing to say the least raise then one of those interesting attendees that i found was lawrence lessig co-founder of creative commons net neutrality advocate a proponent of aaron sorkin's work why do you think a transparency advocate was invited to one of the most secretive policy summit of the year. well i think it has to do with his base knowledge in technology the fact
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that he is a pretty big head over it ted talks and like you said it is very interesting you know he has written books railing against the united states and its policies within congress and basically how money runs our government and that is the truth so i think on one hand they want to get an inside inside look into somebody's mind that basically profiteers up dissent and i like that personally but also to possibly compromise this person to say look we like what you do maybe we can work on some of these issues but these issues are a little bit too taboo we're not going to be able to help with those we'd like you to help by you know basically promoting the idea that the older brother isn't a consortium of the global elite isn't eating to plan out the world and unfortunately all we're left is back you lation days and because of how secretive it is because of the lack of transparency but you know luckily we've seen the amount of protesters exponentially increase this year i mean it looks like
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thousands of people were out there you had british member of parliament michael meacher was there you know with this increase in pressure from activists journalists even politicians do you though finally start seeing some answers from people who are attending a technique well i think you're already starting to see that you've seen some members actually come out and complain that there isn't a lot of transparency within the builder bear group and when somebody like me ciar gets up before like you said thousands of protesters that are outside of this hotel and demands transparency and is writing to parliament and wants accountability from somebody like david cameron i would say that in a way you know us activists are winning once again we went from a conference that didn't exist that only crazy people talked about to now it being established as something that does matter that does have the upper echelons of power meeting and is being challenged by men. parliamentary government i would say that's a huge step for us and i think lastly jason now that a lot of build
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a bridge attendees are also on the board of think tanks and the council on foreign relations trilateral commissions why do you think that there's not more kind of light shined on these other think tanks and i mean really what's the difference. well when you look at something like the council on foreign relations for instance you're talking about three thousand plus members when you're looking at the trilateral commission you know you have spokespeople you have meetings in the open you have a press center where press is actually allowed to go and not just contacted media contact you know for basically no information as charlie skelton tried to do for the on the guardian during this conference so i think the major difference is the fact that you have twenty or so people that attend every year and then there are scouting out other big players in the world of finance intelligence and beyond people like timothy geithner people like david petraeus people like robert zoellick so they may not be there next year but obviously they're integral into some type of a geo political plan this year some type of positioning so the big difference to me
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is the size of the organization and the lack of transparency thank you so much jayson burm as always if you like what you see so far go to our facebook page at facebook dot com slash breaking the set mission or do it thousands of done already and give us a like we have taken our status daily there with links to past segments as well as reaching out to you for ideas and what you want to see covered on breaking this is that you know also check out behind the scenes photos were taken our studios like when rebel in came to break the stage with us last friday to our facebook page and check out all of that and more and that's it for tonight's show make sure you join us again tomorrow when we talk to a student activist who's been at the protest underway in turkey to take a closer look at the latest clashes between protesters and police in taksim square the president urged long thoughts on the violence you see right back here tomorrow .
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live. live. live live.
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live . wealthy british. margetts why not scandals. find out what's really happening to the global economy in these kinds of reports. but i will only react to situations i have read the reports. for years and know i will leave them to the state department to comment on your place in the monthly so it's
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secure because i'm going to. say no more weasel words when you have a direct question be prepared for a chase when you throw a punch be ready for a. pretty tough speech and down to freedom to cost. a little bit. of. live. good speed.
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limits good. luck and just see. a little.
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but empathize having dreams of a very similar situation myself prepared trying to actively support through this interview and otherwise so snowden's editor of wiki leaks julian a spawn to our son speaks with r.t. about the challenges that edward snowden faces after blowing the whistle on a massive u.s. secrets or balan's program. activists say the brutality of authorities in turkey is ramping up as the prime minister gets set to meet protesters who are inert almost two weeks of heavy policing. data we're hearing is shuts down its main t.v. and radio broadcasters as part of a cost cutting drive thousands who are sacked call it a blow to democracy. london riot police on alert after anticapitalist rallies lead to intense scuffle.

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