closing video for your media project free media r t dot com. 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 data is accessible without a warrant we've got extensive coverage of the growing surveillance state head 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 and update on the case in the protests the guilty verdict spawns. and later in montreal police have found a new way to track protesters involves using specially u.v. aim to market in truck people who took part in a protest more on that ahead in tonight's show.

it's wednesday july thirty first eight pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sax and you're watching arctic. then we begin with edward snowden's latest leak that 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 city and his desk can wiretap anyone including the president of the united states if he just had a personal e-mail according to n.s.a. documents x. keyscore is the widest reaching system for gathering intel on computer networks and a series of powerpoint slides shows how the program works allowing analysts to

query these massive databases with questions regarding phone numbers e-mail addresses and logon information and other stuff the n.s.a. claims this program is you strictly to target foreign threats and 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 can read a hearing this morning to talk about n.s.a. in pfizer a court oversight or tease liz wall was at that hearing here's her report the senate hearing today on pfeiffer comes up there as a leaker edward snowden revealed the u.s. of expansive government surveillance program there on the way should have sparked concerns over privacy rights and government secrecy the big question today with 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 the twenty nine year old school drop come in and take massive massive amounts of data it's obvious there were adequate controls. he might have been fired those are not yet as are they has anybody been admonish officials that at this point no one has been fired nor has anyone residing in the wake of the leak brought up a 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 in fact according to rebecca 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 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 websites hesitate before joining controversial advocacy groups and all hesitate before exercising rights that the constitution guarantees that getting attorney general james cole said he was open to changing the fight the process make it more transparent and washington was well. 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 in the pfizer court and one of those members of congress

a leading the effort is adam schiff from california he's proposed reforms to have pfizer court judges approved by the senate as well as declassifying certain pfizer . 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 pfizer court will protect americans 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 pfizer 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. we get a sense more of the constitutional principles involved and how the courts are interpreting provisions of the wall 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 could 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 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 should 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 country 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 have again 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 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 fires that were 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 of 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 and so 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 been existence on nine eleven so we want to set a sun say sunset at the end of two thousand and 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 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 vote 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. you know we don't condone and 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 become 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 the 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 and a razor thin vote on the air matia amendment r t serenade 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 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 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 and 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 emotion and then 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 face circuit court of appeals ruled that law enforcement doesn't need a warrant to collect your cell phone location information cell phone towers can

track the location of your cell phone and thus 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 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 and they say is not currently receiving cell site location data and has no current plans to do so although clapper does add additional information is provided in the classified supplement so 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 earlier i spoke with brian do good technologist at new america foundation to open technology institute and i asked him

how these latest revelations about internet data collection jive with programs we already know about like prism. 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 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 oh 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 within 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 and gather info about an individual in the news that are these databases cure i mean can we trust and i say analysts with this information

of course the these these databases rely on back doors into the database as google the databases of facebook the data back doors in. to the machines they use their laptops and desktops the thing to remember about back doors is that a 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 a 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 mentioned the intro in which was specifically asked clapper about abuses 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 the. interview was 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 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 of the n.s.a. at that site it 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. moving on now to. the fate of bradley manning one day after a judge convicted manning of violating the espionage act charges that carry a maximum one hundred thirty six years in prison the sentencing phase of the trial begins today tonight 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 in the middle of all this is wiki leaks and its founder julian assange made this statement yesterday after the 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 reversed. it can never be the conveying true information to the public is it's because of course

archie will stay on top of the story now speaking of protests cops in montreal have doctored a new tactic to keep protesters under their control and evolve something called inking archies margaret how reports ah sitting on the ground hands tied as cops pepper sprayed the face of demonstrators forcing them to keep their heads up this at the university of california davis it's 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 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. counter someone with property they suspect is stolen they have

a way to prove it and trace it to 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 in 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 and 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 for you little pools here and in each of these pools three is a unique d.n.a. code with the right now is designed to allow the police and law enforcement and the predators you know right to a crack controlled situation where the planets are deployed through this gun and they hit the skin and actually leave you see the name because there's going to be people who do you realize they can be friends with me analyze them and 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 howell r.t. more than seven months ago internet activists aaron swartz killed himself as he was facing several charges for allegedly hacking into computers at m.i.t. university on tuesday mit released its report on the source matter claiming the university didn't target sorts nor did it seek federal prosecution or jail time for sorts this seems to shift most the responsibility for aaron's legal problems onto the shoulders of the department of justice which aggressively pursue charges against swartz that could carry with them dozens of years in prison but family members and friends of sorts aren't ready to let mit off the hook parents father robert swartz released a statement saying having now read abol since report is clear the mit in fact played a central role in aaron suicide and mighty made numerous mistakes that warrant further examination in sick. if it didn't changes mit was not neutral in the legal

case against aaron and whether mighty was neutral or not it is a red herring the university had a moral obligation to advocate on aaron's behalf mit says it will reconsider its neutral policies in the future and may involve itself in the ongoing debate about reforming laws that swartz was charged with breaking. in the u.s. there's an increasing demand for environmentally friendly products but what happens when the government considers something green but in reality it's more like black small og the answer to that from the residence lori harvest.

leadership in energy and environmental design for lead this is a program that provides third party verification of green building if a building receives a lead certification it means that the building is good for the environment or at least that's what corporations would like you to fake when they issued press releases about their sleeves certification such was the case with the bank of america tower in new york city when it opened up in two thousand and ten the press praised it as one of the world's most environmentally responsible high rise office buildings it was so green it received a platinum lead certification the highest level and the first ever for a skyscraper its developer said it would be the most sustainable in the country al gore moved his company and bragged about it bank of america milked that lead certification for all the press that could. cut to two years later last fall new york city released data that were veals the bank of america tower actually produces

more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot then any office building in manhattan of its size it uses twice as much energy per square foot as the empire state building which is eighty years old the bank of america tower is far from green so what happened to become certified buildings in turn leads point by doing things like using green building materials using light dimmers installing bike racks that kind of thing. one of building accumulates enough points it's awarded a lead certification too often builders focus on getting the point instead of making decisions that are environmentally conscious and under the lead core and shell program builders are freed from being the font of all or how their tenant will actually use the building so the bank of america tower puts up

a bunch of recycling signs to get certified to brag about it and then have the traders move in and gobble up this thing heaps of energy by writing floors of servers and computers twenty four seven. it was even a lead platinum certification and is one of the least environmentally sound buildings in this city. league might have started with great intentions and potential but like everything else in corporate america businesses have found a way to exploit it and to use it to their advantage not the environment once again corporations in america manage to turn something with good potential into just another tool for their own greed standard tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the resident. that does it for now for more on these stories recovered go to youtube dot com

slash r t america or check out our website r t v dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter sam sachs and don't forget to tune in tonight at nine pm for larry king no special guest bill ran sick the star couple from the style network t.v. series giuliana and bill until then take it easy. the guantanamo bay detention facility was were eleven years old the broken presidential promises the congressional subtile the never ending war on terror all forces and conspired together to keep this prison open but now a hunger strike brings the tear it all down because this hunger strike there six months or two takes a closer look at the prison just to be close. that

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