what happened to the arab spring dream does egypt's first freely elected president bring any change fear poverty economic failure and filings remain to egypt attempts to escape chaos leave us wallowing even deeper. egypt year in chaos. more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations to rule

today. hello and welcome to all the parts of northern virginia cities around the globe like the land of the green but what we should be in. philly main town just got that i'm now joined by we hope we can be found there maybe. they can we i'm sorry now first of all i would like to ask a question about shame i know that one of the reasons you and named your party the pirate party was because some of your critics really tried to put you to shame and i guess to undermine what you were doing at the time and i think in the coverage of

the snow than a fair shaming and ad hominem attacks are very very prominent we've already heard all sorts of supposedly compromising details about his personal life that he hasn't finished high school that his former girlfriend was a stripper and so on rather than focusing on the substance of his revelations why is that anything. that is very typical when a scandal like this surfaces rather than trying to also the questions. of very much raised by snowden's revelations about what the united states is actually up to the. surveillance hawks in the united states security. is doing everything it can to divert the attention from what's really important here and talk about personal details of edward snowden what is at issue is that the united states has been betraying the trust of pretty much the

entire world now what do you think what do you think is so significant about his revelations because in the words of one commentator we have a. really learned anything that we didn't suspect before right well you're so no you could assume that the united states was eavesdropping at some level what is new here though is the extent of the fact that this is happening and perhaps most importantly we're getting confirmation of what we expected and the fact that. somebody inside the national security agency states that this is not right and the science to more or less give up a very comfortable life in the united states for its conscience that is huge now you mentioned that mr snowden has a lot of critics in his home country but he has his supporters too but i find some

of the argumentation that his supporters are using pretty questionable because what they usually say is that the american government is so bad because it's spying not only on the foreign there is but also on american citizens as if their american government is somehow entitled to spy on the entire world if you are sponsoring for any country you will join us to spy on other countries isn't it. but what's. upsetting here is that the n.s.a. has been spying at a scale betraying a trust at a level never seen before i can understand that american people are very upset about their spy agencies being directed not toward but in ward we saw we saw him ups it would snowden had leaked saying that they were spying as much on iraq as joe on germany on the united states and that is

a shocking piece of data i find is this the think of that in foreign there is an american a big artificial because if we are entitled to civil liberties we're entitled to them no matter where we find ourselves and let me actually quote something that the director of years national intelligence james clapper said just a couple of weeks ago he actually confirmed for nearly six years the u.s. government has been. using the large internet service providers to collect data on foreign there is outside the united states again under these. pretext of national security so you know the problem here is of course that if you are a foreigner and the u.s. government is spying on you you have absolutely no recourse to justice you cannot sue them you cannot go to your the math of course you cannot go to american courts for the same reason so often with you you have absolutely no more recourse to justice then i find this very hard to process i have to salute you agree what i was

saying about the job of a spy is to spy on other countries usually would go for spying on other governments but when you come to listening to the civilian population there's something called like you say civil liberties and what's important in this entire affair is that your civil liberties are human rights and your value as a human being does not depend on the color. all of your passport those are inviolable rights you have a right to privacy of communications you have a right to your family you have a right to freedom of expression they do not whatsoever depend on citizenship passport or something else now one of the reasons why the united states can't afford you spy on people around are all done such a scale is of course have to do with the infrastructure much of the. global internet infrastructure implicated in the united states and much of the electronic

traffic passes through the united states even something that could be solved on a structural level by simply reading or acting internet flows this is very interesting because it is in the interest of today's player to keep it this way it is in the interest of the large surveillance industry if you like to keep the internet in the hands of a very few select players because it's much easier to go to five or six internet service providers and bully them into giving everything than it would be to go to five thousand or six thousand so that we need to break this structure where there's only a few big play is that essentially. all the traffic in the world like you say the united states has about half of the world's top transit points transit players and that is a problem i agree with you absolutely that is

a problem or one of the media the fact of the prison gates candle is the. increasing public interest in encryption especially the applications that offer a genuine and to and encryption without back doors do you think will feed. any attempts on the part of the government to limit the public's access to and question because that would be one of the ways of protecting ourselves from being spied on by our own government or foreign governments for that matter unfortunately this is already happening i mean it started like governments thinking they had an ability to wyatt earp everybody in books so they did that and the next thing was the sort of mistaking the ability to wyatt earp everybody all the time for a right to wyatt earp everybody all the time you had to burn encryption in france for instance in the united kingdom. there's even a penalty of jail for not giving up your encryption keys on request so it's not

a. scenario the encryption would become illegal to make it possible to white up everybody that is already happening and we're seeing that net liberty activists are striking back with like you say end to end encryption what that means is that you cannot why is it somewhere in the middle encrypted in the end now let's go back to add a word snowden who is still believed to be in the transit area of the moscow sheremetyevo airport not far from a place where i say that the moment what's interesting about the coverage of this whole affair is that some of the american media. decided against calling him a whistleblower and insist on calling him a leaker and the crucial difference is of course. is that the by calling him a whistleblower you recognize that he released information about the government's

wrongdoing and american corporate media are reluctant to you make that judgment call and some would even argue that the media i know of in the best position of doing that my question to you is who do you thing is responsible for deciding whether the government has done anything wrong or not is it the judiciary is it the government itself is it the public well this is a p.r. war for certain this is not a murderer. first and foremost where the laws have been violated because laws can be changed in my mind this is about a huge violation of trust nationally and internationally to give you one tangible example it turned out that microsoft has been spoon feeding every security hole to the n.s.a. before it was patched before they fed these the repairs for these security holes to their own customers essentially giving the nurse all security agency the master key

to all its customers operations and that is a huge betrayal of trust a comedian in the united states perhaps said it best that they didn't necessarily claim that the president or the n.s.a. was breaking the law or they were saying it's a bit strange that they didn't have to break the law for what has been going on and i think that perhaps is the most accurate assessment now not surprising president obama was also i asked to comment on the recent revelations by mr snowden and here's exactly what he had to say let's. have one hundred percent security. and also then have one hundred percent privacy and zero inconvenience. you know do we're going to have to make some choices as a society now what's interesting here is here he hit my admitting that it is a society that has to make some choices but of course we all know that several

attempts to challenge the considerate constitutionality of the n.s.a. surveillance program in court were blocked by obama himself so ultimately it is the government not to dish or a not society deciding on whether the government is doing right or wrong exactly and i think they have created a ridiculous situation for themselves where they have a secret interpretation of a secret law so nobody is allowed to know neither what the law says nor how it is interpreted nor what they are really doing so if they don't know what actions are being taken to know what is allowed then how can anybody possibly know if they're breaking the law or not what we do know is that people are being feeling betrayed and rightly so those were the words of the forty fourth president of the united states of america one of the first presidents had different words to say he said

a nation that surrenders freedom for security. well disserve neither and lose both i think it was benjamin franklin but allowed to come back to this discussion right after a short break. wealthy british. market. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into

cars a report. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. welcome back to worlds apart we are discussing freedom in the digital world with ric. the founder of the swedish pirate party mr following let me turn the

tables a little bit i understand that it's extremely easy for you and for me to fill in big known to the actions of the american government but the prism program. be possible without some cooperation from beak attack companies you mentioned microsoft before there are also some other companies mentioned by snowden including facebook yaho drawl blogs and many others so i assume that many of those companies were started by people like yourself eighteen turpin ers who possibly feel just as strongly about civil liberties and open access to information yet that own companies provide these private information upon the government for every request do you think it is fair to blame the intelligence community for doing something like that when people who know how the internet could be used and misused are. accommodating them and their requests are cooperating with them well i think part

of the problem is that the government does look requests this i think that's the wrong word to use in this in this occasion the government is demanding this and they're not only demanding it they're demanding it and putting a gun to their head and they're also doing this in form of what's called national security letter meaning the they're also saying that you can't speak about this to anybody else but surely they could have they could have used some back channels to a lot of the public know about what is going on because obviously again to them the values so free speech the values of you know civil liberties would would be just as important as to you but it seems that when it comes to you know when the push comes to show they actually prefer that corporate interests rather than the interest of society or you know civil liberties for that matter. think it is a problem you could see there are some companies have tried to sort of lift the veil a little bit like google has published we received between zero and nine hundred

ninety nine national security letters this year and they're now arguing court that they should have free speech rights to to talk freely about. them and that is taking the fight a little bit and i think that's in their strategic long term interests just like you say i'm an entrepreneur from a first company sixteen i'm i've been fighting for net liberty freedom of speech freedom expression all my life my colleagues colleagues in the united states are treated like this if i were in their shoes i'd be i'd be furious this is not what the net is about this is not what technology is about it's not about control over people it's about empowering people now i think we've already heard from regrets being expressed by steve wozniak just a couple of weeks ago the co-founder of apple computers and when he gave an interview to your a spanish technology website he actually said that he felt guilt for inadvertently and neighboring masseur violence and to me it sounds very similar to regret that

albert einstein had a day closer to the out of his life when he said that he regretted that the research that he made out to meant a lot to the creation of nuclear bombs than the nuclear bombs being dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki is it almost inevitable that any great invention any great technology is ultimately used for nefarious reasons i think any technology will be used with people who have money to prove to promote their own interests and what those interests are will vary but what's interesting here is that we are at a very very important crossroads in history we are a point where the power over information. is at stake if that powar. in the hands of governments and corporations then we'll just walk into big brother dystopia worse than anything emergent in the

one nine hundred fifty s. or sixty's with those horrible big brother novels on the other hand if the people if the citizens take control over this power of power over information then we will be able to demand accountability of elected leaders to a level never seen before we will be able to communicate share ideas cold should tools developments. a space scale in efficiency never seen before and you've just made a reference to orwell's nineteen eighty-four novel and i think it's important to keep in mind that. back in the 1940's when he was planning that noble he was modeling it at least in part on the soviet union and what i find extremely interesting is that you know russia china aqua door cuba

all those countries they need to elevate all those countries that have been implicated in one shape or form in the snowden affair they're usually criticized by western governments as being you know totally limiting their freedom and civil liberties of their citizens and yet here we have to model democracy is the united states on one hand the united kingdom on the other hand that who have been proven to spy on our citizens and i think the problem here is ultimately the problem with democracy with people in those countries being brought up believing that they have democracy without actually checking whether or not their governments are respecting their civil liberties and their human rights people have been spoon fed image of reality that has no be. turned to be not true if you look at the united states posturing if you like towards the rest of the world for instance criticizing china of hacking the united states criticizing china of censoring the internet

of wiretapping the internet in terms of the united states has been doing all this and more to much larger extent it only managed to keep it secret absolutely so yes i'd agree that people have been living under the illusion if you like the. politics somehow did not apply in this part of the world i'm afraid there are for rough wake up now people have called here in the past a political evangelist but i really think that your a political or internet prophet because you so often talk about how the internet and information technology will change the world around us and you said once that the invention of the internet was a herald of the largest power shift since the creation of written language i wonder what you meant by it you can observe it. what's happening now is exactly what

happened when the printing press arrived you had somebody who had the power of the narrative in that time it was the catholic church meaning that if you are able to tell everybody else in the world what is true and what is false then you need never worry about something somebody taking a step that goes against your interest because they will confuse your interest with the public interest since you are controlling their world view this was the case before the printing press when the catholic church had the power of the narrative this is what's changing again with the internet you have had a small self selected elite typically the very rich who have been controlling the narrative who have been controlling what has been true and what has been false and all of a sudden the internet is breaking that again the internet is allowing people to observe and communicate with the out getting permission from those who use to

control it and therefore the greatest power that has ever been held and. the power to tell true from false is being challenged and that i'd say is what this power struggle is really about now i think one of the first casualties of these new world order that you alluded to will be the concept of a national interest which i find to be a big cue from is because what we call national interest is actually defined not by a nation by but by a small group of decision makers and when you refer to national interest you can actually justify any course of action and i think one of the reasons why snowden and bradley manning to some extent have been. cracked down upon so harshly was because they are also try to take part in this discussion of what was in the u.s. national interest and what was not but the american government of course doesn't

want any public participation on this particular question along absolutely that is a very astute observation i'd say you can observe the united states in particular in this affair has been sort of saying that there are certain human rights but obviously they don't apply when national interest or the security interest is at stake because then we launch permission to do whatever we like and that attitude that rather out again to attitude i'd have to say has backlashed backlash severely so you can observe the. just like you say nation national interests starting to take a back seat to two large movements you have corporate movements i mean if you look at big corporations their budgets eclipse a lot of national budgets day a lot of national book girls productions and also ideologies new ideologies that

spring out net the net liberty movement is huge it's more. people in the millions look at how sopa was defeated in the united states last year if you look at the pirate party which i founded that has now spread to seventy countries so yes i think we're starting to see ideas clash rather than nations now let me challenge here a little bit i know that you've been a very vocal supporter of internet freedom civil liberties but. in one particular case he also created quite a controversy by suggesting that freedom of press freedom of expression should take precedence to for example the existing ban on the possession of child pornography and i think this is just an anecdotal example my question is far more general. we have some social controls in every sphere and airy every area of live why

should the internet be that one area that one round where everything goes where nor controls should be applied so how do you see this line between. securing civil liberties when it comes to freedom of expression but on the other hand also securing our there rides that are granted to people but that is my point exactly your practically making my point for me what i'm demanding is the the same laws that apply offline should also apply online and that is not rocket science when i hope parents and grandparents sent a letter in the mail for specific things applied to the letter it was anonymous they decided if they would sign the letter or not it was tracked nobody could see who was communicating with whom it was secret in transit the mailman never heard it would never open every letter some some nations did but most didn't the mailmen was

no response before the contents of the message. what we are demanding is the rights that our parents and grandparents fought bled and died for. online as well it isn't rocket science and that's what this leads to just because people choosing to use a modern communications medium that does not mean they give up their civil liberties today we are we are exercising our freedom of speech freedom of expression freedom of assembly freedom of the press through the internet and therefore the internet has itself become just as fundamental a liberty as those we exercised through it your little bit earlier to you the internet in ip informational technology is dismantling those borders if not between nations that please between people but at the same time while the world is becoming increasingly more interconnected and in telling these so-called

international law those rules that govern our coexistence on this planet it is being increasingly flaunted especially by the united states and i find it extremely productive on one hand the world is more open and transparent than ever before but on the other hand you have these use of all three tavia i would even say authoritarian methods like spying and persecution and restrictions and indefinite detentions being on the rise how do you explain these paradox my gut feeling is that they are happening in parallel and may not be at least not directly connected when it's to comes to the united states becoming authoritative as you imply or thought a tarion and that is certainly the direction it's heading in even if i i'm not prepared to state it's there yet. the one thing we do know about empires is that they all collapse without exception history is brutally clear on that

fact. and if you look at the state of the united states today i would put a big question mark into its long term survivability in that aspect. it might be fighting for its survival at this point and that would explain a lot of what's happening and ok that's a very interesting question but unfortunately we have to end it there thank you very much quiet time please join us again thank you i'm here along. the interview.

a little.

more revelations from x. cia contractor edward snowden revealed the u.s. has been bugging and saw the monitoring you institutions in brussels watching to me . york. riots rage in egypt these three people were killed by supporters and opponents of president morsi and fears growing of more volunteers to come. south african riot police crackdown protesting crowds furious with u.s. policies as president obama is the continent to boost trade ties. coming up it's time to crunch the numbers from interest is up next. good afternoon a welcome to prime interest i'm perry i'm boring and washington d c.