coming up on r t a new poll shows what americans really think about the n.s.a. it turns out most support the government surveillance program but they also don't want to consider edward snowden's leak to be criminal extended coverage of the n.s.a.'s leak case just ahead and a new report looks at the number of f.b.i. shootings and how they are almost always considered justified uses of force what is not really the case a deeper look at the numbers coming up. and it is your taxpayer money being spent wisely the pentagon wants millions of dollars back from boeing for excessive charges on numerous parts we'll dive into the nuts and bolts of this story in tonight's show.

it's thursday june twentieth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm megan lopez and you are watching r.t. well more information is coming out from the guardian today detailing the types of information the n.s.a. has and can collect when it comes to american citizens here's what we found out while the prism nucleon in mainway programs are mostly used to collect information on foreign entities and not on american citizens u.s. communications can still be collected retained and they can even be used for up to five years if they follow this criteria if they contain usable intelligence information on criminal activities threats of harm or ha of harm to people or property if they're encrypted or if they are believed to contain any information relevant to cyber security but as for a matter of transparency both present and past n.s.a. officials argue about the process is in fact transparent and as much so as possible . we wanted to keep the operation itself secret we felt it was sufficient to brief

five hundred thirty members of the american congress in both the senate and in the house of representatives when it comes to transparency you know look i would love to tell three hundred twenty million americans exactly what it is we're doing to keep them safe because i frankly think almost all of them would be really happy about it but i haven't figured out a way to tell three hundred twenty million of my countrymen without letting the people we're trying to catch find out about what it is we're doing too and that becomes a serious tradeoff here but even without that information it looks like the majority of americans are in fact happy about the surveillance program take a look at this new washington post a.b.c. news poll now when it comes to the intelligence gathering programs it turns out fifty eight percent of americans are supportive of the government's overall democrats are more accepting of the snooping than republicans and independents are but if one thing is most obvious while most americans might be ok with their

surveillance they do want to know more about it sixty five percent support a public hearing to find out exactly what these programs do now one thing that we have learned from the house hearing on the n.s.a. surveillance methods is that only twenty two people are authorized to approve which phone numbers will be surveilled and that's according to the director general keith alexander however it's also true that millions of other employees have access to confidential and secret files in fact it's four point nine million people that currently have that clarence now because of the amount of information going into and out of that agency is increasing. amounts the number of people who needed to go through all of this information needs to mirror that expansion and that could open the door to even more secret spellers like edward snowden in the future political commentator sam sachs explains. when daniel ellsberg blew the whistle in one thousand nine hundred you want to exposing the secrets of the vietnam war our

government was put on notice they didn't just have to keep their secrets safe from spies within but also from whistleblowers within men and women trying to bring the truth to the american people it would take another thirty years until after nine eleven for the government to learn the lesson again when a new batch of truth tellers stood up to blow the whistle thomas drake john kiriakou bradley manning edward snowden those are just a few of the high profile whistleblowers who in just the last few years have exposed some of the american government's darkest secrets from warrantless domestic surveillance to cia's torture programs to war crimes. and it's left those agencies in our government that depend on keeping secrets scrambling to find a way to better keep their secrets but that task is very difficult today mainly because the national security state has grown too large to control now since nine eleven the size of the national security complex and all of its secrets have grown considerably there are now nearly five million people in the united states with

security clearance that's almost two percent of the entire population of those five million roughly twenty eight percent of them have top secret clearance and about ten percent have top secret clearance and don't work for the government but instead work for a private contractor like booz allen and most frightening to the government agencies in charge of keeping these secrets any one of those five million people with security clearance could be the next edward snowden or the next bradley manning former n.s.a. and cia director michael hayden believes one way to stop the whistle blowing is continuous monitoring of those who have the secrets i actually think what we need is a different kind of security structure perhaps not fewer security clearances but a better way to go about clearing people for sensitive information right now we load up an awful lot on the front end lots of in. a geisha means polygraph examinations and so on perhaps that's not the best place to put all of our energy

maybe we should put our energy in terms of continuous monitoring another approach the government is taking toward whistleblowers excessive punishment the obama administration has attempted to prosecute more whistleblowers under the espionage act than any presidential administration in history combined but as just one radek a whistleblower herself an attorney for notable whistleblowers argues this strategy hasn't worked the more they crack down a whistleblower is i mean they cracked down on tom drake but manning still blew the whistle and i mean manning has been treated horrible ways been incarcerated for three years including torture during part of that time yet snowden still blew the whistle so who will be the next whistleblower in the last few weeks we've learned of massive snooping programs like prism nucleon and main way to collect quantities of data on american citizens that are in comprehensible but there's still

a lot more to learn about the inner workings of the national security state and snowden himself is promising more revelations in the days and weeks to come the question is what effect will more truth telling have on the american people's view of these top secret programs i think historically yes we will look back on this period of time and i. think it's horrible and completely antithetical to a present open democratic society i have no doubt in a couple decades that will be true with five million people holding security clearances we know it takes a lot of manpower to maintain this level of surveillance and that ultimately is the main weakness of these programs if they're dismantled they won't be from without but instead from within thanks to what can be described today as a whistleblower revolution in washington same sex. now even though the newest polls show that the majority of americans have no problem with the n.s.a.

surveillance program there is still a vocal minority that is fighting against the government one of those groups is called the world can't wait and they say that enough is enough when it comes to government overreach so recall the rally in new york city in artie's own on a stasi a charkha attended she brings us a look at their demands. all right. america's privacy and freedom versus the u.s. government if you had government they claim to be for the people then secrets in the interest of national security are kind of like an oxymoron a group of new york activists come together in reaction to the n.s.a. spying scandal that shook america to the core can we tolerate letting these same people. who regard merely telling the truth as a capital offense to steal everything there is to steal about our lives our thoughts and our feelings they say now is the time to act out against the abuses of power carried out by america's government including the unmet promises to close

down the guantanamo bay detention facility and what they call the war against whistleblowers in america we're certainly seeing an escalation of the government's response in terms of social control as well as persecution of people who are speaking out against the system speaking truth to power these americans are demanding that u.s. officials keep their hands off edward snowden the twenty nine year old former cia contractor who revealed the n.s.a. surveillance program that collected phone call mehta data of a sweeping number of people and spied on searches e-mails and file transfers through its present program it's not only the citizens of the united states it's billions and billions of people who are having all their data vacuumed up by the national security administration and whatever other agencies and programs have not been revealed yet snowden is currently hiding in hong kong hoping to get asylum in iceland and while the spying revelation he exposed was shocking some still go about

business as usual you know woodward snowden now still enough people believe what snowden did should have been done by the media a long time ago he didn't reveal anything. as a spy or a prankster or anything if he's he's really press he's really newspaper a growing number of americans i am bradley manning i am bradley americans are also demanding fair treatment of twenty five year old army private bradley manning currently on trial for leaking classified documents to wiki leaks now facing up to life behind bars the obama administration has prosecuted more people for d.s.p. an espionage shall. in all the previous presidential administrations combined and that's horrifying many see it as no coincidence that the n.s.a. documents were leaked at the start of the bradley manning trial when you speak truth to power there's a very heavy price to be paid in this country activists say the so-called war against whistleblowers is on par with the abuses happening at guantanamo where

hunger strike over one hundred detainees has been going on for more than four months until they restore my dignity i've been detained at guantanamo for eleven years and three months i've never been charged with any crime while the u.s. government tries to convince americans that mass spying is done in the name of the good and should be considered new norm and that places like one ton of money to benefit national security it's people like manning and snowden as well as their supporters behind these walls and throughout the world who continue to defy the system and fight back the only way they believe is right and. new york a new report a setting light on some of the more formidable practices of the f.b.i. that being the hundreds of shootings that the agency has been involved in over the years however according to an f.b.i. spokesman since two thousand and eleven there have been no findings of improper or intentional shootings what's more internal f.b.i.

records obtained by the new york times through a freedom of information act request discovered that out of the two hundred eighty nine deliberate shootings only five were described as quote bad shootings and the agents were deemed faultless and one hundred fifty others for more on these numbers i was joined earlier by j.d. to chile has a managing editor at reason twenty four seven and i began by asking him whether all of this shooting was really justified. but even theoretically i suppose in a perfect world of the greats of every shooting the if the engagement was justified i doubt that's the case we do know that. in a few cases that involve nobody actually getting injured. as many items have been disciplined i believe it's total of five over the last twenty years or so whenever anytime somebody has been actually been shot or killed. into it's going to squeeze the trigger has been given a pass on it and the magic phrase here seems to be to tell me the circumstances of the f.b.o. which invokes it look at the totality of circumstances and decide that the matter

what anybody else might think the issue did was justified now are there any reason instances that we know where the shooting was not justified. oh absolutely it was a cave first of all it's very rare for anybody else to look at it and yet shooting except for the f.b.i. itself so i very often it's difficult for us to see you even to have a second opinion of what went on a kid on a very were occasions somebody else does look at it we know there was an instance where the f.b.i. was looking for a seeking out bank robber and somebody who matched the description that they were looking for showed up was an innocent man who just was dressed the same way in a similar vehicle as a person they were expecting they ended up shooting him but not fatal unfortunately ultimately he was awarded one point three million dollars in damages and the case was ruled the shooting was ruled justified now your civil court awarded one point three million dollars in damages to an innocent man was that was very explicitly not the target of the f.b.i.

stakeout you think there would not be a righteous shooting if you had decided otherwise so if we take this case where somebody outside of the f.b.i. a very rare circumstance looked at the f.b.i. and came to a different conclusion to what the f.b.i. and so it imploded and spread across the other cases it's highly likely going to find that some of this other one hundred fifty incidents probably were not justified either now and it is some of the possible explanations that the f.b.i. gave for why all these shootings were justified or that agents tend to be older and more sperry and stand better trained also they are generally involved in and they only on the operations where x. sense of planning has happened and they tend to go in with quote overwhelming presence and or in some minimize the chaos the shootings and things that could possibly go wrong now in your opinion to these arguments hold weights. some of these are valid and you should be trained at a higher level agents are better educated are better trained are older than your average city city police officer but that doesn't mean that there's absolutely no

flaws and how the human beings who staff the f.b.i. go about their actions that some really unbelievable and we know from the justice works case that there have at least been some incidents were outsiders have come into office you conclusions from the f.b.i. and it's really hard to believe that human beings with all of their full is. no mistakes whatsoever so no i mean overall are the f.b.i. agents are working at a higher level than a city police officer probably at least most cities but at a perfect level you know nobody operates at a perfect level that's not believable so finally j.d. what's been happening here for some day watching over the f.b.i. . what is happening is that is really what happened. but the m. basically agencies should not be investigating the cells and the i often agent is engaged in the shooting the f.b.i. should not be a law agent so that if the agent should not be the ones to investigate and determine whether that agent was engaged in an erection shooting this thing of

course goes for police officers police departments the f.b.i. tend to set the tone for city police departments around the country and it's become notorious for police forces to sign off on the shootings of their own police officers even when local journalists and many residents who live in the area in the same jurisdiction know for certain that this that the circumstances were bizarre and really didn't matter the efficient story the f.b.i. is setting a tone for police officers this is a larger matter than just the f.b.i. itself because the f.b.i. creates the you know the the protocols by which other police departments operate so some but it is outside of the f.b.i. should investigate their shootings just as outside agencies should investigate police department should say to intentionally meant as an editor as a twenty four seven thank you so much for writing and. thank you for having me on well it's official the u.s. is turning a corner in the afghanistan war according to government officials that you want us has agreed to engage in its first formal negotiations with the taliban about how to achieve peace and to end the over a decade long war this is

a quite an about face from the bush years take a quick look at how quickly the u.s. has evolved on the taliban the united states of america makes the following demands on the down close immediately incrementally every turn. down the bond regime is coming to any. respects the people of afghanistan. and we are only its largest source of humanitarian aid but we can turn to. our nations to reconciliation process between government and the time then we agreed this process should be advanced by the opening of. something. now the first meeting will take place in the office that president obama was just talking about in doha qatar after washington dropped its longstanding demand for the group to actually were announced al qaeda as a precondition for talks is now that talks are taking place it's all part of the

peace process president obama has alluded to as he looks ahead to two thousand and fourteen now it should be mentioned that we have seen these peace talks fizzle out in the past before they came into fruition and that could very well happen again what it should also be noted that this is the closest the u.s. has come to negotiations in quite some time the taliban has also offered to free u.s. army sergeant bowe bergdahl who has been held captive since two thousand and nine but they are asking in return for the release of taliban leaders from guantanamo bay in return we do not know how much of a role in the afghanistan president hamid karzai will actually have in any of these talks. now traditionally we have heard horror stories of average american citizens being wrongly charged by the government for money they didn't know government overreach some screamed i arrest corruption another said but when it comes to defense spending it looks like the shoe is on the other foot according to an audit

conducted by the office of the inspector general boeing has been overcharging the u.s. government millions of dollars for parts and production there are a few examples the aluminum bearing sleeves used on an aircraft main landing gear door usually cost about ten bucks boeing charge the pentagon two thousand two hundred eighty six part they control surface part kid that attaches to an aircraft's left elevator should cost about four thousand dollars boeing charge the pentagon more than twice that the challenge in structural support on the a c one thirty you gunship costs about thirteen hundred bucks back in the real world in boeing terms that means seventeen thousand six hundred twenty eight dollars per part and finally the metal tube assemblies that cover aircraft engine struts cost twelve thousand four hundred sixty seven dollars anywhere else but when you buy it from boeing it cost twenty two thousand six hundred dollars per part now in all boeing owes the government a whopping thirteen point seven million dollars that we know about so is this

standard operate operating procedure or is boeing ripping the pentagon and therefore american taxpayers off well earlier i was joined by mark shank he's the director of foreign policy at the friends committee on national legislation and he discussed how boeing has been getting away with this for so long. well boeing's been getting away with it because every other company prior ever the defense contractors been doing it whether it was a k.b.r. and him in iraq charging four thousand dollars for a circuit breaker that would cost on the market a normal market you buy it for two hundred bucks they're charging four thousand so it is standard protocol within the defense contractor industry to overbill sometimes we find out about it sometimes we don't even the pentagon itself hasn't done an audit on all financial expenditures they don't claim to do an auditor to be able to even do an audit until twenty seventeen so in terms of taxpayer dollars it puts me i.r.s. conference scandal star perspective because that's peanuts compared to the kind of

the millions that we're talking about here so you're saying this is an isolated incident someone question to you is why is it taking the pentagon so long to to notice these problems do they just simply not care about this these nickels and dimes it has as it could be described so a couple reasons one they haven't subscribed to an audit they need to they're only one of two departments in the administration that haven't done an audit the other is department of homeland security second in a war zone it's very easy to profiteer off a war just take several examples you cited the i.g. office of the inspector general even staff sergeants at the very very base level junior level military bringing back millions of dollars in d.v.d. recording facility tens of thousand dollars in teddy bears one hundred thousand dollars in backpacks the only reason we're finding out about it is either because of the special special inspector general for iraq reconstruction stuart bowen or a special inspector general it's a mouthful for afghanistan reconstruction on top of the problem with cigar insecure this acronym for both is that there mandates are short and the centrally even

before the war ends we don't have a permanent office for a special inspector general for overseas contingency operations that's what wars are called where we can monitor and do oversight over american taxpayer dollars otherwise we're only going to continue see more bones more even more k.b.r. more for the charging overbilling the government or staff sergeant. where they're putting a million dollars in d.v.d. recorders ten thousand dollars in you know a teddy bear or a hundred thousand dollars in back this is a serious problem it's a serious waste fraud abuse corruption problem and the american taxpayer. is there any indication of exactly how much money of the pentagon's budget we're wasting so if you look at joe stiglitz work or the bills work when they're talking about four to six trillion dollars spent on iraq and afghanistan pentagon would say we've spent one point four trillion it's actually forty six if you count in veterans' benefits and things like that i would say eighty cents on the dollar comes back to the u.s. or to foreign contractors we're leaving little infrastructure in place. stuart bowen special inspector general for iraq reconstruction essentially finished his

report this year saying we've left nothing in the country no wonder they're engaged in violence because our infrastructure we left it pales in comparison to what they had pretty pretty invasion so we need permit capacities independent of the pentagon keep in mind the cigar and see here are within the pentagon walls so it's kind of like keeping your colleagues accountable is very difficult to do unless you have independent oversight so until we have a permanent office for overseas operations to provide real oversight we'll see more of these boeing examples well one of the offices that you mentioned that is part of this oversight is the cigar that's the afghanistan. faction of that now today cigar released a letter warning the state do you know day the usa idea of serious problems involving failures in prime contractors to pay subcontractors in afghanistan now the reason that they say that this is a problem is because it puts at risk the entire mission in afghanistan because it means that we could be losing support what the afghanistan people it could also

delay or end many of those projects those reconstruction projects that we have been spending millions and billions of dollars on so can you talk about this just a little bit two points first to john i met with him when i was a congressional staffer on the hill he's doing a better job than his predecessor the fields who several men. the congress called for the firing of because he just wasn't doing a good investigation so we're finally doing better investigation within cigar and stuart bowen at six years leading the way but in terms of what the afghan people are the iraqi people are seen they're seen development that's done primarily by foreign contractors whether it's come on experience or as you see your dear. who are doing it behind the wire under heavy security and so the afghan people aren't seen their schools reconstructed in a meaningful way or the roads rebuilt and even so if they are they're done under water under security so they're not using them because the taliban might hit them the real person developments local level and we have just a very short amount of time left but can you tell me very quickly what's the solution here you know so we need to make these oversight capabilities permanent so

merging the cigar and security into a permanent office where we do oversight but i think long term the way we reconstruct these countries has to be done in the local level with local oversight local leadership that's the only way we're going to provide stability in the construction these countries from so that the people involved in order to create the country that they want to live in michael shank director of foreign policy at the friends committee on national legislation thank you so much for coming and say well mind the doubt for decades now the wealth gap in the u.s. has widened while the rest of the rich have giving while the richest are scarce they are getting richer things have stagnated for the rest of us by comparison for more on this great divide of residence lori garver nest.

a lot of what i'm about to say is stuff that sounds a lot like death you've probably already heard so bear with me a little bit here a new world wealth report just came out indicating that the number of super wealthy is at an all time high the global population of high net worth individuals increased nine point two percent last year almost ten percent there are now twelve million millionaires on the planet and the american slice of that is the millionaire iest with twelve point seven trillion dollars in assets among high net worth individuals i know you've heard it all before the one percent blah blah blah but don't glaze over just yet because we need to go over the flip side of that a new report from the national center for children and poverty found that there are forty six point two million americans living in poverty just over fifteen percent

of the population lives on less than seventeen thousand dollars annually for a family of three twenty two percent of all children in america lives in poverty while the number of american millionaires grows about fifty percent of all jobs in the u.s. pay less than thirty four thousand dollars a year you probably already know that wealth inequality is rampant so you might already be no mean to these facts but i'm going to say them anyway because you know what they are important there are tons of studies and research that all indicate how horrible such drastic wealth inequality can. the for us the friday it leads to more health problems in the overall population it breeds more inequality and corruption it keeps away at social mobility crime goes up there are even many correlations between drastic wealth inequality and an increase in mental illness

the list goes on and on about how horrible it is for any society to have a small percentage of the population be extremely wealthy while a large percentage is struggling on a daily basis and that's what we have now in the us a massively skewed distribution of wealth and even though all these studies just came out we treat it as old news we've all heard it so many times that we're numb to it we're all sitting on the couch as they pass the remote yeah i know wealth inequality any more chips left but the bottom line is this wealth inequality is getting worse and worse every year like a cancer eating away at our society so there will be nothing left social immobility will settle in for the masses better wake up food or one day it's just going to dawn on them that while they were sleeping they somehow

became slaves tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the resident. that does it for me for tonight but for more on the stories we cover go to youtube dot com slash r t america check out our website or to dot com slash usa and don't forget to follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez stay tuned to larry king's politicking is coming up at nine pm on our two. today on politics the conflict in syria and more that means for the president of the united states and the world former ambassador to morocco marc ginsberg weighs in plus our politicking panel tackles the latest news you need to know that's next on politics with larry king.

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