very. worst were to look a little light out of a. minute. well for about fifteen years you've never seen anything like this. what's good looking to break in the set i mean all ruffle oh you know between all that coverage of shark nato and the news of that nasty heat wave crawling up the east coast i'm glad the mainstream media did take some time to talk about this important news story. as american as baseball apple pie and celebrity gossip twinkies are returning new owners are heralding the sweetest comeback in the history of ever a major day in american history one of the great tragedies a very good streak average several months ago would twiggy one out of business but

they're back apparently they've got leaner operating costs so damned twinkies may also be a little you know the new box is hitting sales lists that takes it as having two hundred seventy calories and a weight of seventy seven grams of c that's right folks everyone's favorite preservative filled piece of americana is back some beef with the sugary piece of the sea while the hostess company has returned they'll have as much smaller payroll having downsized from twenty five hundred to just eight hundred workers the fewer employees are the result of the company choosing to outsource delivery and the automation of many of the old jobs the company also used to have about six hundred outlet stores that served hostess products directly to consumers but those stores will be won't be reopened either so it's not really great news for hundreds of former hostess employees that might have been hopeful and if that was in bad enough hostess union workers are also officially a thing of the past since the company basically declared bankruptcy last year in the midst of an aunt. in conflict between unions and c.e.o.'s and the company plans

on having zero unions this time around as you can imagine that affects salaries pensions and overall working conditions to me it sounds like hostess is following in the typical footsteps of american corporations outsource jobs replace employees with machines and kill worker unions but that's a side of the story you're not likely to hear in the corporate media which is exactly why we're breaking the set. i. so guys i'm sure you've heard by now that secretary of homeland security janet napolitano has decided to resign to that end of that would be appropriate to reflect on some of the legacies she leaves behind first on the list drones in the bulletin has been one of the biggest proponents of drones most notably she's been instrumental in the program's expansion by piloting a platform to use drones as a means of patrolling the american canadian border and under her direction the

d.h.s.s. actually considered mounting quote non-lethal weapons patrol drones but it's not just drones you can also think to pull a ton of streamlining data collecting through fusion centers for homeland security and the department of justice can share what they learned from the perpetual monitoring of our communications see back in two thousand and nine the d h s released reports detailing the criteria for surveillance targets as quote extremists and the only problem being that the new definition of extremist is any person or group that's anti-government that's right any activist or dissident in this country anyone who is the least bit critical of u.s. policies is an extremist this is exactly why the occupy wall street movement had that you know disproportionate scrutiny with protesters being investigated as terrorists yes folks under janet napolitano this is the new face of extremism now seriously though what's perhaps most important to point out about his legacy is actually the outright denial that all of this is even going on you see following

the revelations of the n.s.a. spying program bill a ton of defended the n.s.a. saying that quote i think people have gotten the idea that there's an orwellian state that's out there that somehow we're operating in that's far from the case no one should believe that we're simply going willy nilly and using any kind of data we can gather. well unfortunately that's exactly what the government is doing. seems to me that going willy nilly and spying on everyone is just standard operating procedure these days but even as we bid farewell to secretary napolitano the future still looks bleak considering that president obama president obama recently hinted that someone that the administration is considering as for replacement so that it's none other than mr ray kelly turn and white police commissioner and head of the largest counterterrorism force in the country kelly is also the guy behind the n.y.p.d. infamous stop and frisk program policy that allowed the police to stop and just about anyone they find suspicious keep in mind the hundreds of thousands that were

stopped each year the vast majority are black and latino but this trepidation toward minorities seems to be a hallmark of kelly's career case in point the n.y.p.d. massive surveillance of muslim communities in new york and other parts of the country for six years then after nine eleven the n.y.p.d. infiltrated muslim student groups put informants in mosques and catalog countless muslims without suspicion. here's the best part after all that spying and monitoring and invasion of privacy the program led to zero leads in terror cases and still mr kelley defends this program as a means to national security so there you have it a brief rundown of the man who may be our next secretary of homeland security because we have a lot to look forward to i still think drones will soon be king of the skies over america well news reports in

florida have confirmed that drone crash confirmed a drone crash along florida highway today the second such crash in a week's time now it's no secret that spy drones keep a constant eye over the u.s. southern border but their use here domestically is really starting to grow just last month f.b.i. director robert mueller acknowledged before a senate hearing that domestic drones are be. used for surveillance by local law enforcement once again raising concerns over the implications this has on the privacy of american citizens at the here in california senator dianne feinstein added that quote the greatest threat to the privacy of americans is the drone and the use of the drone and the very few regulations that are now opening their eyes i'm sorry it's a threat that many americans are now opening their eyes to creating their own defense to the expansion of such surveillance and now some people mainly my next guest has created something called the drone shield a device that alerts you when one of these unmanned flying robots is overhead so

joining me now to talk about this innovation and the effect of drones on your privacy is john franklin founder of the drone shield program john thank you so much for coming on the show a limited you're having i meant so i really want to get started here and ask you like what made you want to create this product like what me how did the drone shield idea come to be well. drove didn't start off trying to detect them in fact i first want to use this guy right here to take a look at my roof and in the process of unpacking it by the way it's cheaper than a ladder and in the process of trying it out in a depression in my neighbor's yard so this is something that people can just perch it's you told me earlier that these are very affordable just about anybody can do this this is less expensive than the latter would be and it comes with a high definition camera so you know i thought might be a lot more fun fun way to get to see my roof and a lot easier to store than a sixty foot ladder and what you brought you brought the actual device this is the

drone shield right here can you and you brought the how does it how does it all work well so sort of to wrap up the story i know crashing my neighbor's yard and you know it was a big incident and you know combine that with the kind of ambient you know discussion the media of drones and privacy concerns and it dawned on me that nobody was addressing drones from a technological perspective and we thought you know with cheap by. i'm processing power this is a raspberry pi right here for thirty five dollars you know linux computer basically as powerful as your i phone and you know other cheap components we can actually detect the audio signature of a drone so i actually have a demo set up here you can by the way this is the feed from the so that's watching me right there and seeing myself right here you see the camera go so if you're flying this in your neighbor's yard you're able to see this through yeah. right there is pretty good so how does the device work did it listens in to see what the we've got is a signature database we have to train it to work on different types of drones and

we have to also inform about false alarms generators and basically once everything's calibrated correctly it should be able to alert the user by sending a text message or an e-mail to their smartphone now got a quick question for you i want to play you this this sound bite that i found earlier from general dynamics at the rate the technology is going right now it looks like this is really the future of drones i wonder if we have that clip. and maybe these will be integrated into future force layered sensing systems these systems may be airdropped for hand launched depending on the mission requirements. the small size of a maybe allows them to be playing site once in place and then they can enjoy a low powered extended surveillance mode for missions lasting weeks all right

can your device watch out for the terminator pigeon perched outside my house. it's that is fantastic that seems to be that that's where technology is going right now so i guess my question for you is in the future as more technology continues to develop drones become more sophisticated will devices like what you created here that's monitoring four for. drones be as ubiquitous as like a radar detector is right now and you think well yes even those little miniaturize devices would have to communicate with their sensing to someone who's interested in seeing that and you might be able to get on that conceivably i can't say for sure i don't know how they work but you know that's the american thing going on so so that you had a campaign this is this is a start up company what kind of uses are our people fighting for right now what kind of for those of you know folks out there that are kind of interested in what you're doing what kind of calls are you getting well during the campaign i was amazed by the level of interest we got from just citizens all over the country and

citizens of other countries you know we have preorders from germany japan poland israel all over the place and in fact i got an e-mail from a woman who was concerned her ex-husband was you know using a drone to monitor her children you know so i think there's that was the interest we got during the campaign and there are starting to see people who are interested in. you know maybe the campaign got some legitimacy and maybe we can target anti paparazzi you know applications there are people commercial interests that want to know if they're being surveilled you can think of if you have a you know prototype brand new car you know you don't want someone to get a look at the brand new corvette or something you could but that's far down the road right now we're focused on the community aspect to make this a real success we're going to have to replicate the success of the academics have had in the machine learning realm that means hosting a database that anybody can contribute to anybody can try their hand in developing

algorithms for so you're hoping to build something larger something more community based where people can can jump in absolutely do you think that these will be more readily available in the future in the same way that drones are well this is going to be. imminently available anybody can buy the components for this and amazon and build themselves and the software that we're going to ship in september is going to be available as well now i do want to ask a little bit more about this thing. right here how much how much does does a drone one of these like personal commercially sold drones go for this is three hundred dollars at least last when i bought it it was the real that there is so the relatively inexpensive what i'm getting is that these you know you can go to sharper image or you can buy it on amazon or something like that do you see this type of drone technology being even more invasive than what the government's capable of the more commercial the private use of drones do you see that being a bigger problem in the future well just from a practical standpoint these one thing these can do that a predator reaper can do is get a horizontal perspective they're flying very low and then you very close your

windows and you know they can actually see inside your house if it's you know it's night. so potentially yeah i mean so john i want to ask you real quick for someone that's that's concerned about privacy right now someone that you know may have spotted a drone earlier today and wanted to know exactly what type of drone where can they go to find out a little bit more about about this product this is a drone shield or we're going to have all the database and the code on that web site and start over so all right john franklin founder of drone shield thank you so much for coming on the show thank you. still ahead on the show we'll look at the use of drones abroad to discuss how people in yemen have been protesting american drones with code pink spam bailey. 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 realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom are welcome to the big picture.

that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and they are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of the war i and a brave thing that had together in a court of law was frowned on lads here's a story made sort of movies playing out in real life. looking to do is have you ever seen anything like.

a court of the bureau investigative journalists as many as two hundred eighty five civilians have been killed by covert u.s. military actions and yemen this number includes the sixty nine civilians who've been killed this year alone. keep in mind these statistics speak to the civilian casualty count just in yemen and a country that's rarely if ever spoke. about in the corporate media yet the details that are given about the country paint a picture of a lawless landscape ruled by militants and terrorists be set on harming america a country so dangerous that the u.s. has to continuously conduct targeted assassinations using drones even if it means civilian casualties in the process now while some of you watching this program may object to the united states policy of extrajudicial assassinations recent polling shows that that a staggering sixty six percent of americans still support the use of unmanned drones to kill alleged terrorists. but when it comes to drones or america's other

controversial issue on top perhaps no one has felt the hardships more than the people of yemen recently a delegation of american activists with code pink travel to yemen as a good as goodwill ambassadors hoping to raise awareness of the here in the united states about the need to end the policies that perpetuate both civilian deaths in yemen and the indefinite detention of yemeni citizens at guantanamo many of whom were cleared for release years ago so joining me now to talk about what is being done to reverse these policies i'm joined by writer and code pink activists pam bailey how are you going on the show thank you for having me so you recently returned from yemen you were staying in the southern part of the country this is a this is an area of the country that's kind of. little is talked about in the mainstream media it's painted as this very hostile place as a hub for terrorist activity but this is not the case now i've actually stayed in both santa and then we also went to athens and it is very telling before i left

most americans do think that taking your life in your hands if you even step foot on it which of course is not the case it's got a deep culture very welcoming people which is surprising given the disastrous impact u.s. foreign policy has had in their country and while you were there you were interviewing several people. remember reading your article where you were you see that you interviewed people in a neighborhood that was routinely targeted for drone strikes how exactly do you know what's the criteria for you know who's going to get struck because. the civilian death toll is so high that i have to ask you know essentially how do you spot the terrorist you know no one knows when you when you said how do you know what areas would be targeted for them became very clear for all the stories no one had any idea you know they didn't know when to what to expect when who was behind it why they were targeted. i think it was sort of clear is that. very often.

the people who are harmed you know is what we call collateral damage one pattern that was sort of common to almost all the stories we heard is often called double tap strikes when basically but that involved is a first drone hit and then when all the community members will go out and try to rescue the people who are hurt is a second line and in that they're. the people were hurt or people were just trying to rescue their their neighbors and we heard we heard a number of stories like that it was very calm and you have to ask what's the what's the philosophy for that but let's look at the possible rationale right now i was just talking about this with the civilian death tolls this year so far is as many as sixty nine when the united states is touting the drone strikes are accurate and precise and that they have such a high success rate why do we still see such a high civilian death toll is it because of this doubles double tap strategy or is it just indiscriminate bombing well it's a number of factors the fact of the matter is is it very often. that the people

there may be targets but if there are very low level. people the al qaeda there is like joining a gang here and so one thing you start to realize right away is that a lot of times the drone strikes are not precise like we're hearing as most americans do believe it's a very precise technology and very often the intelligence is bad so we may think that we're targeting terrorists but we're not and then there's also collateral damage no matter how precise it is you're still have situations where civilians are just in the area and they're getting killed as well and if they are played with al qaida it's very often very low level people you know people maybe joining because they needed a job and one very telling comment i heard from one person there is that if you're really trying to stabilize the country you can do it the easy way which means easy for us to be in this killing people but you're going to do it. and again and again

because you're not getting at the root causes which is poverty for instance or you do it the hard way which means you really try to invest in the country and get at the reasons why somebody might might join. some of the people that you talked to in the neighborhood said that some of these folks that are that are getting going down by drones or by by aircraft could have just as easily been apprehended if that's the case and why is that not not the policy because it's not easy because actually from an american point of view it's much easier for us to sit in some control room and push a little lever you know and in a way that's best from all that's from the u.s. is that right but then you also see that the yemeni government is complicit in these drone strikes how does that work is it that they just allow one of the also conducted some of these strikes well. currently that's actually not really a noun i mean it's in the people's perspective it's very confusing they never really quite sure it is clear that when president saleh was in power he played it

both ways sometimes he cooperated with the u.s. sometimes he didn't do it all depended you played a game to try to get more aid but then when heidi took power who is the return current interim president he is clearly authorizing giving giving permission for their own strike because he's afraid but that the people the vast majority are against the drone strikes in fact there's something going on right now called the national dialogue conference that you may have heard about it's a real experiment in democracy where they're trying to get all sides of the table to talk and they actually just passed by a wide margin resolution that said no more expeditious traditional killings including drone strikes no i want to see something that you mentioned earlier what it what it means like to be affiliated with al qaida and you kind of make the comparison that it's a lonely joint again united states and when we're talking about guantanamo. fifty six of the eighty six prisoners that have been cleared for release a quantum of r r u m e why is that why is the why are so many of them from yemen

well you know there's a number of factors there too but like in most cases what we heard from a lot of the people they were they were happened to be in afghanistan or pakistan and they would go there for employment or try to in try to find a job teaching and they would just get picked up off the streets it could be that they did have some low level involvement or oftentimes this poor intelligence there's a lot of situations where somebody would turn in some of these names to either settle in old school or to get a bounty you know there's a lot of stories like that and you talk to their families you talk to the families a lot of several of these detainees what did he tell you about the sort of the tactics of how they were captured or how they came to find out that they were that they were in guantanamo and that's the thing that was most disturbing to me no matter what the story was behind a particular individual the one common thread i ever remember thinking to myself that this could i could be listening to stories of pinochet or some third world despot instead of as the us these people were disappeared you know they've gone to

another country to look for a job in most cases or to go to school and they just disappeared one day off the streets and the families had no idea what happen to them in most cases for over a year until they got a call if that's when the red cross and then if they found out where they were their loved one was no no trace they just disappeared no no no trial the families do nothing and that to me is the hallmark of one of these countries that we consider you know the countries of that we label as sort of road test but this this is a good state and my understanding is you look at the people who are cleared for release they fall in a couple different categories there's one group i think around twenty two we have no evidence for we basically have made a huge mistake as another group that we just had suspicions evidence again nothing nothing strong enough to even take the trial other group. maybe has my facial but they're very low level like i said these are these are people who may be. affiliated with them for a job they weren't they weren't masterminds they weren't planning anything and so

this is why they've been cleared for release in two thousand and eight so we're going to lose what happens to them when the when they do get if they do get released right that's the operative term is if even before president obama set up the moratorium there were twenty two detainees yemeni detainees that were released before the moratorium what happened to those detainees i don't have and most the majority of. integrated back into their communities there are a couple i don't have the statistics right now who may be ended ended up. with a group that we consider a terrorist group and i guess i would also have to question that and that's reason why by the way obama then stopped releasing the damage because he considered the country too unstable and what happened that he used to be sucked back into terrorism now of course you know in his speech in may he left that oratory him but he said there has to be a rehabilitation center and we're going to go to him is that actually going to happen. us seems very reluctant to pour any money into that program i mean yemen is very committed they want their people back they are looking for money to establish

rehabilitation center in my mind the u.s. should fund it completely because they've basically would have ruined these people's lives you know all these people have been cleared for release which means we do not have enough evidence on them to justify holding them they've been there for twelve years they've been tortured and expat speaking of torture guantanamo does this latest hunger strike the people it's the month of ramadan a lot of them are protesting the four speeding's that are going on during the day there is some kind of light being about right now do you think that that might be a game changer in putting pressure on the obama absolutely i think that the hunger strike was very effective at refocusing public attention on the i think it's a shame that that's what is required because you know obama talked about closing guantanamo when he when he was first you know when he was when he was elected and then you know that's what happens when the tension gets pulled away. from that that that happens so you need something like this where you have people going through terrible pain and force feeding is is. tantamount to torture you know it takes

a back to get his attention back to what he should have done and there we don't have a few seconds left but there's still a lot of support for drones a lot of support for one time what's going to take to change hearts and minds of american people it takes a lot of education that's why we went to yemen the first place because americans we need to put a human face on the other end of our foreign policy and have this constant activism . and i do see a big change it before it was before i went to yemen they went to pakistan october with code pink and he didn't see drones in the news at all and now you do now there's a lot of debate so let's hope the debate keeps going and believe code pink and freelance writer thank you so much for coming in thank you really appreciate it. that's it for today's show because if you like which is what you see check it out or who page it who dot com slash breaking the set so you can watch the latest episode of breaking the set like friday's show which featured abby's interview with doug kaufman about the upcoming police brutality march scheduled for july twenty first in anaheim california you can also scroll through and watch every show since

the middle of december so favored us and comment on what we're doing at hulu dot com slash breaking the set well guys that's it for tonight's show have a great evening we'll see you right back here tomorrow. let me let me respond then we're going to let me ask you a question. on this is what we're going to debate we have our night. to do this not just about staying there to get here in this race will be an idea we talk about surveillance.

i would rather as questions for people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question more. is it possible to navigate the economy with all the detail since mistakes and misinformation and media hype you up to date by decoding the mainstream status if in your right.

blogs are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture although women have made great strides toward equality in recent years we still have a long way to go and speak with maryland congresswoman donna edwards about her plan to create a fairer economy for all genders also massachusetts senator elizabeth warren is leading the charge to reinstate the glass steagall act and that time we made banking boring again and the process rejuvenated the middle class we'll talk about that and more incidents lone liberal rumble and the mainstream media has ignored a startling fact about the george zimmerman.