today. coming up on r t 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 data is accessible without a warrant and we've got extensive coverage of the growing surveillance state ahead and yesterday bradley manning was convicted of violating the espionage act now the sentencing phase begins with manning possibly facing over one hundred years in prison an update on the case and the protests the guilty verdict spawns. and in montreal police have found a new way to track protesters it involves using specially u.v. aim to mark and track people who took part in protests more on that ahead later in the show.

it's wednesday july thirty first five pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sax and you're watching our ticket and we begin with the edward snowden leak about a new program called 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 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 has a personal e-mail address to n.s.a. documents x. keyscore is the widest reaching system for gathering intel on computer networks and

a series of powerpoint slide shows how the program where. works allowing analysts to query these massive databases with questions regarding phone numbers e-mail addresses and logon information yes they claims this program is use 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 x. keyscore comes just as the senate judiciary committee convened a hearing this morning to talk about n.s.a. and pfizer court oversight archies those wall was at that hearing and here's her report. the senate hearing today on life but comes up there at the same leaker edward snowden revealed the u.s.

is expansive government surveillance program the revelations have 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 from the n.s.a. f.b.i. and justice department for twenty nine year old school drop come in and take a massive massive amounts of data it's obvious there were adequate controls. ezine but even fire those are not yet as though they presumably been admonish officials that at this point no one has been fired nor has anyone residing in the wake of the leak 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 files on actual conversations when

they're suspected of terrorist activities back according to the second branch of officials a 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 base of 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 will comport themselves differently they'll hesitate before visiting controversial web site still hesitate before. joining controversial advocacy groups and don't hesitate before exercising rights that the constitution guarantees that pretty attorney general james cole thank you with open to changing the my thought process to make it more transparent and washington mismo our team meanwhile in the house of representatives efforts continue there as well to inject

more oversight into the n.s.a. surveillance programs and the pfizer court one of those members of congress leading the effort is adam schiff from california he's proposed reforms to have a court judges approved by the senate as well as declassifying certifies a court opinions and allowing a special privacy advocate to argue before the court he joined me earlier and i asked him how his reforms to the secret files a court will protect americans first and fourth amendment rights. i think i'll have the commit of impact of making the pfizer court much more transparent so the american people can understand 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 than 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 be class patient 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 so all of these i think will improve public confidence in the system and 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. 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. well there are two real challenges as a member of the intelligence committee and 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 the 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 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 what 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 impera 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 and 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 in 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 vote 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 short a more narrowly tailored authorization but my concern is without a hard deadline we'll simply punt this issue as congress doesn't 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 vote on the emotion moment the legislation you proposed the hearings that we've had on these issues given that

all of this wouldn't 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 or 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 take them 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 of the n.s.a. works congressman adam shift representing california twenty eighth district thank

you so much for coming on. 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 a mushroom admit 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 emotion madmen now proposed by michigan representative republican justin amash the amendment was designed to forbid the n.s.a. from spending any money on collecting americans 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 mathlete representatives that voted against the emotion n.s.a. 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 anti emotional presented of wall pro emotional moment representatives received on average less than one hundred thousand dollars from those firms and the defense companies are not fans of representative emotions self 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 emotional moment and the party affiliation and the money don't lie both in dollars and in votes for r.t. i marinated. 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 can track the location of your cell phone in the us the location of you and this information can reveal a lot about a person basically wherever they go and who they associate with telecom companies usually store this information and now thanks to this latest court ruling the government can access it without notifying you or a judge this was a specific issue raised by senator ron wyden recently in a letter to the director of national intelligence james clapper wyden asked has 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 and earlier i spoke with brian do get technologist the new america foundation to open technology institute and i asked him how these latest revelations about internet data collection drop job with programs we already know about like prison. 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 moodle so that is a google search in 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 it's original author whether you 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. be a target of someone working with the n.s.a.

to access this information gather info about an individual in the news that are these databases cure i mean can we trust an essay analysts with this information of course the these these databases rely on back doors into the databases will the databases of facebook data back doors. to the machines that you use your 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 zine solutions designed back doors can also be reverse engineered and then there's the problem of how secure is the n.s.a. no one knows the answer to that how concerning is this latest ruling about cell site tracking of your phones and and this letter i mention in the interim which was specifically asked clapper about and he says under this program we don't

considering that the n.s.a. scooping up all sorts of metadata why wouldn't they be scooping this up as well of course the key words there are of course under this program and please check the classified attachment to this document and that's the that is 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 the cell side location data of course is extremely dangerous because the location data 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're in the area or when you when you go to the doctor's office or you know where your 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 the n.s.a. at that site is hard to take clappers word when he says no we're not doing that because i think we've heard him say no to previous chryslers before brian do a good technologist at the open technology institute thank you thank you and moving on to the. 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 we can you accept its founder julian assange made this statement after the manning verdict . this is the espionage conviction against a whistle blow in the united states it is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extruding ism is the

short sighted judgment that cannot be tolerated and it must be reposed it can never be the conveying true information to the public is it's beyond of course r.t. will stay on top of the story. speaking of protests cops in montreal have adopted a new tactic to keep protesters under their control involve something called in king artie's margaret howell reports. ah sitting on the ground hands tied as props pepper spray 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 there was a protest for several months in which people occupied a certain 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 polices they accepted because that was the condition 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 have 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. 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. pellet marking system which fires these little pools here and in each of these pools there's a unique d.n.a. code with the right now he's designed to allow the police and law enforcement and the printers you know right situation. the planet to deploy through this gun and this and that he leaves the name because it was going to be simpler do you realize

they can be friends and allies around the perpetrator to be part of 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 how will are to outsourcing that word is becoming very well known to discuss our nation's joblessness problem excuse me but outsourcing is also taking place in our nation's armed forces namely the outsourcing of duties that used to be performed by members of the military to private defense contractors like ones formally known as blackwater but relying on private contractors may not be exclusive to the united states the united nations may get in the game too today the u.n. is holding a special panel discussion to discuss using private contractors in peace and humanitarian missions artie's on a stasi of turkey reports the u.n. working group on the use of mercenaries set up in two thousand and five to monitor private security companies activities around the world held an event to discuss the

use of private military and security companies by the united nations using contractors as armed guards and in peacekeeping operations worldwide now in theory on issues such as security of the un relies on host governments turning to private security companies only as a last resort but in practice the un has been widely using private military and security contractors in a handful of conflict zones for purposes like guy. supporting humanitarian activities and so on and a lot of controversy really stems from the debate regarding the risks associated with armed men providing even quite simply securities for security for you on staff do these hired our men decrease or potentially increase security and this is an open question since there is increasing concern of possible criminal activity reported by un staff from certain remote and high risk locations and the key challenges when it comes to using these private contractors stem from things like the lack of a chain of accountability and

a real uniform regulation and the use of companies with dubious records this is something the u.s. is familiar with of course thanks to the blackwater controversy when human rights atrocities committed were left with impunity and insufficient insufficient screening process of who exactly is hired by these private companies is also yet to be addressed the existing guidelines allow the hire company to screen it simple as itself and then report to the u.n. and understandably this raises eyebrows in the meantime the distinction between private military security companies and mercenaries so-called soldiers for hire in armed conflicts that offer services to governments and those opposing them for substantial amounts of cash is another huge problem on basically they can be hired by anyone from legitimate governments to opposition groups to criminal groups and bodies over the last decades have implemented over one hundred resolutions condemning mercenary activities and those who turn to it in conflicts and laws of

war applying differently to mercenaries than they would to soldiers serving in an army which leads to more often than not complete lack of accountability in combat which of course you know the influence often being foreigners from outside and from the definition of who can and can't be considered a mercenary to how and on what levels they should be prohibited to who should regulate and hold them and those who hire them accountable on. an international basis and on a state by state basis to most importantly how to distinguish between the gym and services provided by private contractors to the to those that can be considered mercenary many of these questions remain very murky all of these points raised today at the discussions held at the un much of the legal framework surrounding these issues continues to be developed basically as we speak so while all of these issues are complicated on a state by state level they could be even more confusing when applied to the united nations involvement with private military contractors including even a popular opinion that such use should not occur at all so the question is whether

or not the international community will move to specific measures that would actually work on the ground from these wide discussions and while experts hopes hope that one way to improve the situation would be a unified database of companies being used by the un this is really far from the case for now and this year one working group on the use of mercenaries will present a special year long study on the use of private companies by you one bodies worldwide to the united nations general assembly in the months to come let's wait to let's find out what the study reveals and this is our team new york then finally be careful what you write up about young rapper from newport news virginia was arrested recently and charged with murdering two people back in two thousand and seven because had gone cold but authorities may have received new information about it thanks to a lyric from rapper antwan stewart known as gaudi's song titled hip full of guns i will now attempt to or suds to the relevant lyric everybody saw when i choked him

but nobody saw when i smoked him roped him short of the shank then i poked him. so i jumped him it is between six feet over tolga with my money. stuart is now being held without bond in the newport news city jail does it for now i'm sam sachs more news back to date. the guantanamo bay detention facility is now over eleven years old the broken presidential promises the congressional sabotage the never ending war on terror all forces and conspired together to keep this prison open but now a hunger strike threatens the tear it all down as this hunger strike near six months party takes a closer look at the prison i just can't be close. lisa

. cohen welcome to cross talk we're all things considered i'm peter lavelle the arab muslim world is a place with conflict and turmoil be it revolution civil wars or external meddling it could be no doubt this region will never be the same again it would also appear that the old neo colonial order for much of the region is coming to an end but what is we placing it and who is on the right side of history.