coming up on our t.v. more is learned about the n.s.a. and their top secret surveillance the latest leak reveals a program that stores the internet activity of millions and that that is excessive all without a warrant we've got extensive coverage of the growing surveillance state ahead and in montreal police have found a new way to track protesters involves using specially u.v. ink to mark interact people who took part in a protest more on that ahead in the show and the big old constituency should be celebrating in new york an appellate court there rejected mayor bloomberg soda ban will dive into the soda debate later in the show. it's wednesday july thirty first four pm in washington d.c.

and i'm sam sax you're watching are two and we begin with edward snowden's latest leak it exposes an n.s.a. program known as x. keyscore which allows analysts to search through enormous databases containing everything that someone would do on the internet from e-mail to chat logs to web browsing the internet activity of millions of individuals are stored in these databases and n.s.a. analysts can access them without any prior authorization or a warrant of any kind the program seems to confirm one of n.s.a. whistleblower edward snowden's most controversial claims saying that he sitting at his desk can wiretap anyone including the president of the united states if he just had a personal e-mail address according to n.s.a. documents x. keyscore is the widest reaching system for gathering intel on computer networks series of power point slides shows how the program works. allowing analysts to

query these massive databases with questions regarding phone numbers e-mail addresses and logon information. said claims this program is you strictly to target foreign threats in counterterror investigations but this revelation further confirms that analysts at the n.s.a. have at least the technological capabilities if not the individual authority to monitor and store the online activities of virtually all americans. now edward snowden's leak about excuse store keyscore excuse me comes just as the senate judiciary committee convened a hearing this morning to talk about the n.s.a. in fi's a court oversight archies liz wall was at the hearing there's a report the senate hearing today on fly succumbs up there at us a leaker edward snowden revealed the u.s. as expansive government surveillance program their evolution has sparked concerns over privacy rights and government secrecy the big question today was how do we

strike a balance between privacy and national security interests senators question top officials the n.s.a. f.b.i. and justice department for a twenty nine year old school drop out to come in. and take a massive massive amounts of data it's obvious there were adequate controls. been fired those are not yet as early as anybody been and more and officials said at this point no one has been fired nor has anyone residing in the wake of the leaks brought up today was the vastness of the program that collects phone records of millions of americans on a daily basis whether or not it's constitutional to do so intelligence officials assured senators that the government only spies on actual conversations when they're suspected of terrorist activity fact according to executive branch of officials the surveillance program has thwarted fifty four attacks throughout the

world but a spokesperson from the a.c.l.u. said that such a broad collection of information on innocent citizens is unconstitutional pervasive surveillance is also poisonous for free speech and free association people who know the government could be monitoring their every move their every phone call or their every google search that will comport themselves differently they'll hesitate before visiting controversial web. they'll hesitate before joining controversial advocacy groups and don't hesitate before exercising rights that the constitution guarantees that video attorney general james cole said he was open to changing that by step process to make it more transparent and washington liz wahl our team meanwhile on the other side of capitol hill in the house of representatives efforts continue there as well to inject more oversight into the n.s.a. surveillance programs and the top secret pfizer court one of those members of congress

a leading the effort is adam schiff from california he joined me earlier and i asked him how his reforms to the pfizer court will protect america's first and fourth amendment rights. i think i'll have the cumulative impact of making the pfizer court much more transparent so the american people can understand that what's being done in their name in the name of national security so that we can have a more informed debate over the balance between privacy and security i think this can be accomplished while also maintaining sources and methods and not compromising some of the very real national security concerns at stake. it also will mean in terms of the appointment of five judges a more diverse set of judges them those that were chosen by the chief justice alone it'll mean the american people during that vetting process of senate confirmation have a better sense of where those judges stand on fourth amendment issues it will mean that through the declassification of opinions we get a sense more of the constitutional principles involved and how the courts are

interpreting provisions of walls and then finally i think that the opinions themselves will benefit by having an adversarial process in key cases where the court has the benefit of hearing the other side of seeing opposing case law as all of these i think will improve public confidence in the system and it can be accomplished without compromising national security last week this program interviewed one of your colleagues congressman rush holt he's introduced legislation to repeal the patriot act as well as the amendments act and congressman hold said that when he served on the intelligence committee in two thousand and five he asked about domestic surveillance and he said that he was deceived by the n.s.a. director at the time to the extent of which the surveillance was being conducted on american citizens but you're a member of the intelligence committees do you think that these agencies have been completely truthful with you and others on the committee about what's going on. you know i think that the by and large the members of the intelligence committee both that have come in and testified and that work in the various agencies are

a dedicated honest people they're there doing the job that they've been assigned to do and many of them have had a lot of success in terms of protecting the come. i haven't seen evidence in the years that i've been on the committee of any intention to mislead any malicious. manipulation of these programs for nefarious purposes i know the game the content of communications when that wasn't authorized so we can have a debate over whether the agency should have this authority we can have a debate over how we reform the pfizer board in the process but i haven't seen the evidence of malice so i wouldn't make that same claim that as a member of the intelligence committee you're privy to a lot of information that other members aren't and that the general public isn't privy to if you get information about domestic programs that you're uncomfortable with how do you go about talking about that or doing something about that or informing your constituents that they should be concerned about it something when

you're sworn to classified information. whether to real challenges as a member of the intelligence committee as the one is the one you've mentioned which is it's very hard to discuss these issues with your constituents or others when they're classified and can only be discussed in a classified setting with people who work cleared so that is certainly one challenge there's another challenge i would point to as well and that is that institutionally the members of congress are at a great disadvantage in the sense that we don't have any kind of the resources to investigate some of these questions that the intelligence community does so we see you know in essence what the intelligence committee wants us to see and sometimes it's hard to know the questions to ask and when you don't have an equivalent. resource at your beck and call in congress as the intelligence community does all that being said you know we've got to do the best we can we've got to raise these issues in committee we can raise these issues outside of committee and select ways

but it is a challenge and some of that is a necessary challenge because a lot of the work simply has to be classified but there's a substantial degree. to which we can declassify things that won't impair national security that will allow a more full debate that will allow better momentum behind reform and that's what i'm trying to do with these pfizer work bills last week you you as well as lots of other democrats and lots of tea party republicans supported the conyers amendment which would have defunded the n.s.a.'s collection of data on american citizens under section two fifteen at the patriot act and it cobbled together an interesting coalition of progressives and in somewhat libertarian republicans what do you make of this new coalition and moving forward what can this sort of coalition accomplish in other areas for example you're trying to repeal the a u m f is that something that you can kind of use the same coalition to push forward.

well you know there was an interesting coalition that gathered in support of a mushroom moment and it was very difficult to divine where people were going to come down on that until you saw the votes go up on the board i think that hypo total that was very important in moving towards a restructuring of the n.s.a. program something that i've been urging for some time and my view there's no reason why the telecommunications companies can't retain their own data and then we would only go to the companies when it was necessary when we had a recent article facts supporting a number that was associated with terrorism rather than the government taking hold of all that metadata so i think that both will help propel that structural change in the program but yes there's a coalition that is looking at a lot of the national security issues a lot of the so-called war on terror issues including the authorization to use military force many of us on both sides of the aisle feel that that authorization now no longer really accurately describes the nature of the threat that we're

confronting it's used as a basis to use force against organizations that may not have even in existence. on nine eleven so we want to set a sun say sunset at the end of twenty fourteen when we drawdown our troops in afghanistan it may be that that will need to be followed by a subsequent off was a shorter and more narrowly tailored authorization but my concern is without any hard deadline will simply punt this issue as congress does and so many other items of difficulty but of great significance but one more question congressman given that this entire discussion as well as last week's on the emotion moment the legislation you proposed the hearings that we've had on these issues given that all of this would have been possible without edward snowden it and his leaks what should you and other members of congress make of him. well you know we don't condone it can't condone people deciding for themselves what to declassify

that would not allow us to have any kind of a national security system so i think we have to take that very seriously just as that we took the man in case very seriously. so you know we need to find other mechanisms to raise these issues i think bring in more transparency of the pfizer will allow us to do that but we don't want to rely on people to be. you know to basically decide for themselves because everyone's going to have a different judgment about where the line ought to be drawn so i think we have to condemn these leaks taken very seriously and find a better way to raise these substantive issues and at the same time use use them to try and reform the form how the n.s.a. works congressman adam shift representing california twenty eight district thank you so much for coming on. you about thank you for staying on the issue of privacy on tuesday the fifth circuit court of appeals ruled that law enforcement doesn't need a warrant to collect your cellphone location information cell phone towers contract

the location of your cell phone and that's the location of you and this information can reveal a lot about a person basically wherever they go in whoever they associate with. telecom companies usually store this information in now thanks to this latest ruling the government can access it without notifying you or a judge this was a specific issue raised by senator ron wyden in a recent letter to the director of national intelligence james clapper wyden asked as the n.s.a. collected or made any plans to collect american cell site location data in bulk clapper responded with under this program n.s.a. is not currently receiving cell site location data and has no current plans to do so though clapper does add additional information is provided in the classified supplement so if the n.s.a. is not collecting cell site location data then what more information needs to be provided in the classified supplement well this is just one of a number of questions still unanswered about the surveillance state and for more

i'm joined by brian doogan a technologist at new america foundation is open technology institute brian welcome to show. so there's a lot to get to here let's start with this latest revelation about x. keyscore it appears to be some sort of program that the n.s.a. uses to go through troves of internet data on basically anyone how is it different to other programs we learned about like pro prism which also is some sort of internet data collection program x. keyscore appears to be an interface to the amount of programs that we've already learned about prism. is just the name of a database for example x. keyscore is the interface that allows an n.s.a. agent to do what amounts to a google search against your data and in many cases they're doing that search against the data they got from moules so that is a google search and almost a very literal sense so when edward snowden said that he and other analysts came

from their desk hack into someone's e-mail as long as they have an e-mail address it seems to point to this program where you just search an e-mail address and you have access to that so yes absolutely the data that they are looking for is. the contacts that you you know exchanged e-mail with the documents that you've exchanged with other people how that how that document got to you where it came from its original author whether you've ever used any kind of software or tool to protect yourself from this kind of surveillance and then whether you done that whether or not they can exploit your machine to defeat that defense mechanism so it's it's a it's a database that fingerprints almost everything that you do online i'm thinking about bad actors in this situation no edward snowden didn't go with the flow with the n.s.a. he thought it was going wrong so he acted against the n.s.a. to release this information you can also imagine other people working with him within the n.s.a. who might want to access this information for nefarious purposes so that anyone who

has even the slightest bit of power or influence whether it's a business leader you know a politician a doctor. could this be a target of someone working with the n.s.a. to access this information and gather info about an individual in the news that are these databases cure i mean can we trust and say analysts with this information of course the these these databases rely on back doors into the databases google the databases of facebook the database back doors into the machines that you use or laptops and desktops the thing to remember about back doors of the back door for one in this case the n.s.a. is in fact a back door for all it doesn't matter if the back door is a flaw that was unintended to be there that can be exploited or discovered by anyone or whether it was designed because the solutions designed back doors can also be reverse engineered and then there's a problem of how secure is the n.s.a. no one knows the answer to that how concerning is this latest ruling about tracking

of your phones. and this letter i mentioned the intro in which one specifically asked clapper about and he says under this program we don't consider that the n.s.a. scooping up all sorts of metadata why wouldn't they be scooping this up as well as the keywords there are of course under this program and please check the classified attachment to this document and that's the that has been the mechanism by which companies have been able to deny any involvement in the surveillance apparatus when . when interviewers when. when journalists ask companies whether they have had any involvement in a specific program companies can deny any involvement whatsoever because they may never have been informed about the name of the specific program they've only been told to do so site location data of course is extremely dangerous because the location data is only has a resolution of about a block and so if the n.s.a.

or law enforcement are targeting groups such as you may or may not agree with whether they be green activists or other type of activists and you are in the area or. when you go to the doctor's office or you know where you are where the rest of your family lives these are all accessible to the n.s.a. and of course accessible to anyone who has access to the backdoor of the n.s.a. as i said it's hard to tell kloppers word when he says no we're not doing that because i think we've heard him say no to a previous question for brian do a good technologist at the open technology institute thank you thank you now last week you might remember the house of representatives nearly defunded these n.s.a. domestic spying programs in a razor thin vote on the air marshal moment artie's aaron eight has some interesting numbers about why members of congress voted in the way they did. last wednesday an extremely important vote took place in congress it was the house vote on the a mock amendment now proposed by michigan representative republican justin amash the amendment was designed to forbid the n.s.a. from spending any money on collecting american phone records however the house

voted two hundred five votes to two hundred seventeen in favor of not reigning in the n.s.a.'s phone fine dragnet and it turns out that the two hundred seventeen people who voted no receive twice as much campaign financing from the defense industry as those who voted yes now take a look at this data compiled by open secrets dot org and analyzed by a nonprofit organization map late representatives that voted against the a mosque and essay amendment received on average one hundred twenty two percent more in campaign donations between two thousand and ten and two thousand and twelve from defense contractors than the representatives who voted in favor of the bill now defense and intelligence firms such as lockheed martin boeing united technologies and honeywell international they donated on average forty one thousand six hundred thirty five dollars to representative while pro a mosh amendment representatives received on average less than one hundred thousand dollars from those firms and the defense companies are not fans of representative a mosque himself he ranked in the bottom fifty for the two year period and only

received fourteen hundred dollars now of the top ten moneymakers only one house member voted to end the program now the investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of the members votes on the emotion moment and the party affiliation and the money don't both in dollars and in votes for archie. moving on to the fate of bradley manning one day after a judge convicted manning of violating the espionage act charges that carry a maximum of one hundred thirty six years in prison the sentencing phase of the trial begins today last night supporters of bradley manning took to the streets of washington d.c. marching to the white house to demand president obama recognize manning as a whistleblower who should be protected and in the middle of all of this is wiki leaks and its founder julian assange made this statement after the verdict this is the first ever espionage conviction against was a blow in the united states it is

a dangerous precedent and an example of national security experience them is the short sighted judgment that cannot be tolerated and it must be reversed it can never be that conveying true mation to the public is is beyond. of course archie will stay on top of the story. speaking of protests cops in montreal have adopted a new tactic to keep protesters under their control and involve something called in king parties margaret howell reports. sitting on the ground hands tied as cops pepper sprayed the faces of demonstrators forcing them to keep their heads up this at the university of california davis is one of many scenes that came out of the occupy movement police took many approaches to crowd control some more visible than others occupy montreal protesters allegedly faced

a different matter several of them were marked by invisible ink on their hands by cops constitutional attorney julius gray represented several of these protesters he had this to say it was a protest for several months and weeks people occupied the square in montreal and the police arrested some of the people told the others to disperse but only let them go if they were if you like mark with invisible ink and some people even said they didn't accept the police as they accepted because that was the condition and they say it's a reasonable condition in the to circumstances there is a trend of cops using invisible ink as advertised on this website used by some police departments to purchase tools labeled as a defensive device so it was an invisible ink pen just like this one that cops used to mark those occupy montreal protesters marking their hands with invisible ink so that they could identify these law abiding demonstrators later on it turns out

police departments in the us a found uses for this ink police when people to use the pens to mark their property with either an address or phone number officers are getting special flashlights that really invisible ink so when they encounter someone with property they suspect a stolen they have a way to prove. it and trace the owner but what happens when inking property turns into inking people as it did for the protesters in montreal when cops can mark citizens and protest with invisible ink what else can they use introduced to the police market and d.n.a. gun featured in the las vegas shot show this year a d.n.a. gun that leaves an invisible trace on the skin what we have here is a d.n.a. to let mark in a system which fires these little wounds here and in each of these pools there's a unique d.n.a. code with the right now is designed to allow the police and law enforcement to offenders in a riot or character and proceed to ation and when the planet to deploy through this

gun and they hit the skin and that he leaves an invisible man was going to be deployed to you realize they can be friends with me and allies and i'm the perpetrator to be put at the crime scene from invisible ink pens to d.n.a. guns these gadgets walk a fine line between cops just doing their jobs and civil rights violations in washington margaret howell r.t. now some good news for big old drinkers in new york city on tuesday a new york appellate court rejected mayor michael bloomberg proposed ban on sugary drinks sold in containers sixteen ounces or larger mayor bloomberg who is pushing for the ban to combat the city's obesity problem is promising to appeal the court's ruling so what should new yorkers think about all this well let's ask one of them joining me now is comedian alex barnett alex welcome to the show. well i think it shows that people are free to be fat if they want and they don't worry

about breaking the law. well now that it looks like new yorkers can keep their big gulp steve is everyone breathing a bit easier up there or perhaps breathing rapidly with their heart racing now that so to speak its are flowing in the sugar eyes are spreading. i think i think people are enjoying their soda freely and easily in the hot weather. drinkers or walk around wiping the perspiration from their head taking a big sip of their slushies and blue sodas even as we're speaking so i get it bloomberg has been on big gulps appears to be the most perfect example of the nanny state run amok but doesn't the government have a role in stemming obesity or should we just let them eat cake or drink big gulps. well look i mean i think the answer is you know we don't want to have a lot of fat people around in new york city we have a small amount of space here particularly manhattan in a subway cars are not that big the taxis are getting smaller time so obviously

a lot of obese people doesn't help us on the other hand it makes it easier to catch a cab if you get out of a fat person so it goes both ways. but seriously i mean i think you know look at people are worried that if they ban soda then what's next you know it's a slippery slope till they're bathing chocolat then they're banning i don't know magazines newspapers then you know types of people you know i think that's where people get nervous the american beverage association is applauding this decision is there any you there should be done about these companies and trade groups that are literally peddling poison onto consumers yes i think they should be flogged and shot you know i mean these guys are not good guys they're they're about making money. on the other hand if they want to come to my comedy shows then they're my best friends and i love them and i whatever i just said i take back. now look trade groups are paid to do what they do which is lobby on behalf there of their. some organizations and that's what they're doing there are legitimate sighs the vote

this debate you know public health advocates versus you know free industry and free speech and all that kind of thing free choice freedom of choice. but the trade group guys you know look they're getting paid by certain people to promote certain interest and that's what they're doing so i just want a. question but what would a mayor named wiener do about drinks called big. boy that's a great question i don't know i mean boy something with involving sexting i'm sure . but if they call it that then they could so i don't know. right i don't i don't think that's not his biggest problem right now and fortune there's probably dozens of sex that include the word wiener and big gulp. that was a comedian alex barnett speaking on behalf of the thin people constituency in new york you can learn more about him on his web site alex barnett comic dot com and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com

forward slash our to america and check out our website r t dot com forward slash usa you can also follow me on twitter as sam sachs stay tuned prime interest is next. the arab muslim world is ablaze with conflict and turmoil be revolution civil wars or external meddling there can be no doubt this region will never be the same again it would also appear to be old and new colonial order for much of the region is coming to an end but what is replacing it and who is on the right side of history. 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 everything you thought you don't know i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture.

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good afternoon welcome the prime interests i'm perry i'm boring and i'm bob and good let's get to our headline it's that day and true to form chairman bernanke evil everday baffling or is it wall following message that pretty much gives him authority to do whatever the fed wants on the fly all the while pretending to hear into some sort of play in the evans plan or otherwise tapering might be tabled or not get as zero hedge points out the fannie and freddie also have a hand in all of this now because the government mortgage giants who are supposedly being wound down the treasury sixty six billion dollars in profits so the billions uncle sam doesn't need to borrow as much next quarter which means of fed's eighty five billion dollars per month bond buying.