coming up on r t one of the biggest conventions in the cyber world is underway in las vegas artie is on the ground at def con twenty thirty a report just ahead. now that edward snowden has been given temporary asylum in russia what's next for him we'll give you the latest updates on the n.s.a. whistleblower and what's being said about him back here in the states. there it's friday august second four pm here in washington d.c. i'm aaron aid and you're watching our two we start in las vegas today where the twenty first annual def-con convention kicked off thursday at the rio hotel and casino in sin city now def-con is one of the world's largest annual hacker

conventions and archie's very own andrew blake is there covering the event we go to him now live from las vegas are you there andrew. there absolutely are you good good good now you've been attending definite and all morning can you start off by telling us what stood out so far as the best. you know what's really really shifted me is actually just the whole community vibe here there's people from you know from practically toddlers to senior citizens walking around trying to get their hands on things to learn more this is really all about learning it's not necessarily breaking stuff it's pushing the bill and trying to learn new new tools and tricks to make everyone more happy you know everything from improving robotics to improving computer code to improving personal security it's all people who want to improve things that we you know are using more and more every single day whether it's a computer system a computer server or just the way we communicate with one another it's all people

getting together who are all interested in advancing these things to the point where you know things are going to be just that much better that much secure than what we have right now now and if this pick my interest what about this hacking driverless vehicles panel can you tell me more about that. yeah i actually just got out of that around an hour ago it was with a fellow named like a pretty well known hacker and he spent around an hour giving a packed room this demonstration about how any sort of self moving vehicle can easily be compromised or depend easy's kind of a relative term but you know think of it this way like you know we have those google cars autonomous moving vehicles there's also you a vizio drones used by the air force and the navy and you know civilian drones are going to be here this summer actually i think by august we're going to see our first two license civilian very own so what zazi was talking about was if you can override the technologies that these devices use you know for instance in an automated self moving car it relies on g.p.s.

a lot relies on laser rate laser radar excuse me ever lies on cameras and there's ways to either spoof in jam all of these things to pretty much take anything from a google self driving vehicle to a civilian drone perhaps even a military drone if you can break the encryption compromising those vehicles and then doing whatever you want to do with it and spent around forty five minutes explaining that you know it's not that difficult if you know what you're doing you can pretty much. do the have your way it's all about finding the weakest link and exploiting it well that's that's concerning now def-con is filled with people who they define themselves as hackers but are they a cohesive group is there a sort of hacker culture that you see evident there. you know no i mean. there's been such a demonizing of the word hacker in recent years i mean the other day last week the prosecution in the case of bradley manning used the word hacker to to demonize him

to try to say hey judge put this guy away for life he's nothing but an evil hacker i'm paraphrasing of course but you know it's not it's got this negative connotation going back from like late sixties and seventies to more like made eighty's think matthew broderick in wargames you know nerds getting on computers and compromising national security systems what i'm seeing are a bunch of people who are interested in learning and actually as said during that hacking vehicles thing just earlier today it's about pushing the on the little it's about learning and it's a you know just community sharing networking these are people who are all coming together because they have a common interest in improving their own personal grasp on technology so you know sure you get some of the stereotypical long bearded top wearing introverted hacker sorts that you see portrayed in the media but you know you also get just regular people you know just normal guys and girls walking around trying to learn

something it's very very very interesting community and to how surprised are the hackers about these new snowden revelations. i mean is anyone really that surprised that the government's been spying on anyone it's been something that's been discussed at length during just the last thirty hours or so since things kicked off here in vegas i mean i just left an a.c.l.u. presentation where mr snowden's name was brought up and a few thousand people started applauding yesterday i spoke with john draper he was actually when most realm known well known hackers in the world going back to the early seventy's he was known as captain crunch and found a way to spoof telephone systems and make calls anywhere and when i spoke with mr draper he was actually talking about which was a government surveillance system going back decades and decades ago and we actually talked a little bit about that i mean i've known about the n.s.a. as antics for a long time back in the day when i was phone phreaking back in the sixty's they had

this thing called the esperance system telephone conversations are all being tapped and they have these are monitored and if you see a certain keyword like bomb terrorist and stuff like that and it switches on a recorder to record the conversation and it also a book or the number you're calling in you're calling from that was archie web producer andrew blake from las vegas now we've seen a flurry of legislative proposals on capitol hill to scale back the level of surveillance in government after it was revealed through edward snowden's leaks now these proposals include reforms in the face of courts and efforts to repeal or change the patriot act however many of the same legislators who base their bills on information from snowden are the same legislators calling for him to spend the rest of his life in jail new york times journalist james rice and he's currently involved in a weak case of his own had this to say on the matter to c.n.n. last night. we wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't for them that's true

why do you think why do you think i mean that's the thing i don't understand about the climate in washington these days is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail snowden was granted temporary asylum in russia on thursday the n.s.a. leaker has now left the moscow airport which is called home for the past five weeks here's a photo of him leaving the airport yesterday snowden's russian lawyer said the thirty year old has found shelter in a private home of american expatriates in russia and russia rejected the u.s. government's appeal to extradite the american fugitive back to the u.s. where he faces charges under the espionage act instead russia granted him one year of asylum and travel documents the move has angered u.s. officials the white house has signaled that president barack obama may boycott a september summit with president vladimir putin r t correspondent guy and she can has more on how these tensions are playing out. cher has now become the object of

washington's wrath fiery remarks are coming from congress senator lindsey graham says americans and washington should consider this a game changer in our relationship with russia senator john mccain goes it's a slap in the face of all americans we cannot allow today's action by pointing to stand without serious repr cautions the white house touched upon some of those are precautions saying moscow's decision on snowden undermines the growing cooperation between russian and u.s. security services the white house spokesperson said washington is quoted extremely disappointed with moscow also this mr snowden is not a whistleblower he is accused of leaking classified information and has been charged with three fairly villany counts and he should be returned to the united states polls show the majority of americans actually disagree with the white house on whether or not mr snowden is a whistle blower they think it is but it seems the white house and some lawmakers are only happy to focus on russia because it takes the thunder away from the

conversation about the surveillance state but the conversation is happening as much as the government would want to be can't put a lid on it new laws are being proposed to rein in n.s.a. surveillance last week congress killed one such bill by only twelve votes lawmakers have indicated there will be more such proposals in response to snowden's revelations senior intelligence officials have testified in congress releasing classified documents but they wouldn't be having that conversation if it weren't for snowden from snowden we first learned about the prism program a system the n.s.a. uses to gain access to the private communications of users of nine popular internet services the government said the n.s.a. does that only with a warrant from the feis a court those are secret court orders snowden said the fisa court merely rubber sems such warrants and he revealed one such secret court order for a telecommunications company to hand over its clients data in bulk the government has acknowledged all collection of communications but said no one can look at the content of those. communications without

a warrant snowden said yes they can this week the guardian relying on the documents that snowden had earlier provided his release details of a program that makes it possible we learned about x. keyscore which allows to search through vast amounts of data collected by other programs having sekret finest his career and his comfortable lifestyle snowden said he wanted to expose the government's line and he pocket see among other things he revealed that while washington is complaining about china's spying the n.s.a. spies on china all the time and chinese research centers on the chinese university and so on he has also exposed all the country's intelligence services which are quote unquote bed with the n.s.a. and are essentially doing the same thing like the u.k. is g.c. . so it's not just civil liberties advocates on this side of the atlantic who are grateful to snowden in washington i'm going to shut them. and it seems like the hits to the n.s.a. just keep coming to new zealand sunday star times reported that new zealand

military with the assistance of u.s. intelligence agencies like the n.s.a. intercepted the phone metadata from a journalist working for mcclatchy mcclatchy is the third largest newspaper chain in the united states now the mcclatchy journalist is john stephenson who reports from afghanistan the sunday star times that the intelligence agencies targeted stephenson first reporting on how the afghan detainees were handled and sought his source for the confidential information the military allegedly used the metadata from stevenson's phone to determine who had called and then who those people called afterwards is created a phone tree of the journalist associates her to walk us through this issue and its effects on the press freedom is craig aaron the president and c.e.o. of free press thank you for being here today thanks for having me now first question now mcclatchy he's written a strongly worded letter to james clapper the director of the national intelligence regarding this incident and it says here we have a record here absent absent a well founded good faith belief that a journalist is engaged in terrorist activity compiling and analyzing

a journalist metadata would violate core first amendment principles and u.s. law now the associated press they also wrote a strongly worded letter to the part of the department of justice however after they found out that one of their journalists was also being spied on tell me do these strongly worded letters do anything well i think they're an important start i mean certainly you have to put things on the record and one thing in being the associated press or mcclatchy is you do have a megaphone and so the letter is a way to get that story out there and allow your own reporters to cover what's happening to your company that said these are serious serious allegations i mean stevenson was a reporter who has broken stories about alleged war crimes so accusing a new zealand soldiers of committing war crimes while in afghanistan very serious allegations the idea that he was being spied on because maybe the new zealand military. like this story doesn't want it out there wants to know who his sources are inside very very serious allegations also mcclatchy is

a chain that's done very serious and critical reporting on the war on terror for years going back to the run up in the war in iraq so the notion that we're sort of exporting these attacks on press freedom that we're using intelligence gathered in a war zone to potentially punish journalists for doing those jobs doing their jobs that's a very serious and deeply concerning allegation indeed it is now can you talk to me about the affects of taking metadata from john stevens and phone on the freedom of press it just seems like you said who or what is and what you need to understand about metadata is as the snowden revelations have i think suggest is that it can tell you a lot about maybe even more than what recording a conversation could tell you because with the metadata you know where they were standing when they made a call how long they talked to which numbers they called this can give you a lot of information really all of the information you need about where somebody was and who they were trying to talk to so by reconstructing this you're able to

figure out you know who this journalist is calling and who's calling him that's a lot of information on how they're doing their jobs and we're talking about journalists you know that's how they do their chops in who they call who they use the phone to talk to that's that's that's everything now the reason for collecting john stevensons metadata in the first place the government says it is because that he did this report on the mistreatment of afghan detainees and they said that was a justifiable reason because he was talking to potential terrorists in your opinion what is a justifiable reason for taking the price that's you know i think a just the only justifiable reason would be clear evidence that someone was actually involved in terrorist or criminal activity so if the journalists themselves they had reason to believe was doing something to break the law or to plan an attack certainly in cases like that you could see going after metadata but the idea that a government would go after the phone wrecker. as of a journalist simply because they don't like the stories they're doing that that's a real big problem and it is now we're learning that you know there's all these

different government branches that are surveilling us and journalists has this been going on for a long time and we're now just making noise about it i mean i think the question is we don't really know you know we know that the associated press here in washington d.c. figured out that the government had gone in and did a broad sweep of their phone records we know that they've gone after a journalist at fox news for the records of him going in and out of the state department you know in this case we don't know as much this was a war zone there's obviously a lot of communications and intelligence being swept up we don't know exactly how this new zealand instance was carried out but i think we have real reasons to question whether this administration whether the military is protecting press freedom these are constitutionally protected activities and the idea that the government would be going in with no knowledge to these companies no knowledge should the journalists that are affected and spying on them that should have very very serious concerns because as a citizen we don't have any other eyes or ears in

a war zone we have no other way to get information about what the government's doing and so the idea that they're going out of their way to try to piece together who's talking to these journalists that has an incredible chilling effect on any journalist ability to hold national security state or the military accountable it sure does now what do you see as a just resolution to this situation well transparency i think that we really need as the mcclatchy letter suggests we need the director of national intelligence to come clean now we're getting to have a very long list of the things we need the director of national intelligence to come clean about but this certainly should be right up there what did the u.s. do why was this intelligence collected who is it shared with and under what auspices i think we need answers to those questions so we can know what was really going on here now you say transparency that would be a just resolution what do you actually think the rest of your life well i mean so far i thing. there's been a lot of dodging innovating when it comes to these questions of press freedom i mean the justice department here in the united states did make an effort to change

its rules and regulations on how it approaches the press we need to see if that's really going to happen in practice and so far the indications aren't very good there is some movement when things get exposed but what we keep finding out almost every week is there it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and we don't really know what the government's doing i think that's why the public needs to get involved and be answering these questions holding its political leaders accountable because we need a free press are going to have a functioning democracy current thank you for your insight we appreciate having you here today and what you have to tell us that was craig aaron president and c.e.o. of free press u.s. secretary of state john kerry went to pakistan for a surprise visit to restart partnership talks that collapsed two years ago and made excuse me amid intense anger and islamic jihad over the impunity of u.s. drone strikes impacts pakistan kerry went on pakistani television with this to say about the strikes. and there is no timeline that you and the sausage for ending

this. strike with i think the president has a very real to and we hope it's going to be very very soon now kerry may hope that drone strikes in pakistan will end soon but several hours after his comments the state department didn't exactly have the same timeline handy a spokesperson for the state department said quote in no way would we ever deprive ourselves of a tool to fight a threat as it arises the tour they were talking about was of course drones. now elsewhere the u.s. has issued a worldwide travel alert to all americans effective through august thirty first due to an unspecified al qaeda threat the ok to threat is linked to an announcement by the state department that it was closing several consulates and embassies around the world on sunday u.s. intelligence has picked up signs of a plot against american diplomatic posts in the middle east and other muslim countries now the move comes as the holy days that mark the end of ramadan approach

and nearly a year after the deadly attack on the u.s. mission in benghazi libya all embassies in the middle east that would have quote normally been open on sunday will be shut down we still don't know whether they will be open again this coming monday and in new york city mayoral elections are in full swing with the democratic primary coming up on september tenth but the media coverage is focused on someone focusing on someone who want to appear on the ballot someone is carlos danger that's the pseudonym get it anthony weiner used when sending out some of his infamous crotch shots so why is all the focus on wiener our correspondent honest church the church she looks into this for us. new york mayoral candidate anthony weiner his ever widening sexting scandal wiener is once again seeking redemption being called a pervert and all of this. last for an entire week a media mesmerized by a politician and a body part he belongs to and i'm interested in why it's such

a big story and i could be that big of a story but then of course we wind up making it that much more of a story because the story becomes why is this story important a democrat with the guts to send receive photos to random women online the thing that's really interesting and that very few people have mentioned is she just how boring this particular kink is i mean you know it's kind of like looking at that ish magazines on the newsstand not that i would ever do such a thing and you're like people are into this anthony wiener clearly was he got caught once today i'm announcing my resignation from congress two years later running for new york mayor the man is back in the spotlight not for his politics but rather for flaunting his stuff even less discreetly yet again as i have said they don't they're texting photos we're likely to find out even his wife was seemingly by her husband's fun times behind her back was. ever given. was worth six to ten i suppose but the media simply refusing to put this story to

bed this is the kind of stories that cable news in america lives for a prominent politicians sexting wiener or rather his alias carlos danger stealing the headlines like nothing else in the world matters and to me when are we in or when or where or just don't we john if you can get away if you just avoid that you can be fine you can kill you can you can drone bomb all you want doesn't matter you can have the largest and it's a surveillance system ever created just don't tweet your junk from jokes new york new york the city that never sleeps just got one more thing to keep it up at night. to criticisms to endless debate on the matter it's as if t.v.'s have been force feeding winners indiscretions to americans with puritanism as the side dish i don't think that he wanted to be that big of a deal no pun intended people probably want to do it themselves and they're

probably jealous that he did it. i don't know people are repressed sexually and i think they get obsessed with these things because in reality it's a prostitution is the oldest profession i think it's politicians grabbing asses it's the oldest profession and america is certainly no stranger to this these are proteges this wife. of the clintons who went through the same sort of thing in the ninety's who came out of it smelling like roses even though americans might question anthony weiner's judgment and most of us would prefer not to be next to receive one of his special picture messages the one thing more awkward than this politician's games is the frenzy surrounding this victimless crime but the media more outraged than his own wife was this is. york there you have it now is friday happy hour approaches we bring you all the latest in breaking libation news now americans are increasingly ordering the top shelf items at bars around the country and in the process porn big profits into the companies that make the good

stuff and despite the decreases in sales alcohol companies like diaz you posted gains in american profits now smirnoff aka johnny walker black label and gin noted in its earnings report that north america accounted for forty percent of profit in the recent quarter now this is despite representing only a third of achieving one third of the company's sales so why are drinkers here in the u.s. so lucrative for companies like oh we sent our to correspondent liz wahl to a local bar in d.c. shelly's to find out who was. there and who is your at a local bar here in d.c. can you break down these numbers for us. yes that's right i am indeed at a local bar in d.c. it's almost half the hours so that means this place is going to fill up pretty soon that's usually a favorite past time you're in d.c. of people like to get out of work and go to happy hour and what we're seeing aaron

based on these figures is that we actually we should point out that it's not necessarily the bars that are cashing in it's the companies that make the beer that make the blues that are cashing in and going to give you an example of a company that's making the big profits ideology go you mentioned earlier they make some of the big labels that you see when you're at the bar when you're at the liquor store sneer and often we can bring them up here severe enough crown right out captain morgan tangere a capital one johnnie walker blue all these big labels that we know this company makes them and they're making good profits as we'll see here they just filed their figures and in fiscal year two thousand and thirteen we see that their north america that's forty percent of their profits come from north america so big market here and also they're making good money at their profit their net profit is up five percent and so as you know it's a good year good year for the liquor companies and as you mentioned aaron americans

they like their top shelf stuff they like their higher and higher end stuff and as we see it there they're willing to pay more for it now lives are lower and libations also seen the same high payoff for these big companies. lower and yeah that's that's what's interesting that you know sometimes people will try to save money so they get the well drones like papa vodka for example but even though americans like their higher end drinks when it comes to their lower end drinks the prices are being jacked up there to about ten percent according to bloomberg businessweek so so even if you're trying to save money apparently a pair of americans don't notice because we're seeing that the. they're not cutting back on their bar tabs how do these happy hour growers feel about this. well i think i think a lot of them don't really notice i think that it's kind of something we're seeing in times of recession which doesn't matter what the economy is like people like

like to have a good drink there is always a good reason to have a drink whether whether it's you have a bad day or trying to celebrate something half the hour is very very popular here in d.c. is so you know to be honest with you i don't think people really really do notice that there is that there is much of a price difference there and now lives most important question of the day top or bottom shelf for you what do you go on with. well i do want to make it clear what i'm drinking right now is just water it's still work hours so i am just drinking water right now it is friday so. it is almost the weekend and i'll probably grab a drink after work air and i'm not sure what i'll be i'll let you know later report to you later. we'll have a full report on that later that was our tease ball thank you. that does it for now for more on the stories we covered you can go to youtube dot com forward slash r t

america and check out our website at www dot com forward slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at aaron aid stay tune prime interest is coming up. 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 r.t. takes a closer look at the prison just can't be closed. says

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good afternoon o. welcome to prime interest i'm harry and bring in i'm bob english let's get to today's headline. left time jobs are we sounding like a broken record yes the unemployment rate ticked down this morning from the seven point six to a seven point four percent the number of payrolls or jobs added with one hundred sixty two thousand a bit short of expectations and as usual we'll largest contributing factors part time and low quality jobs so basically bernanke you and co have complete freedom to do whatever they want come september and according to experts the september of one see meeting is the big one because that's when our beloved chairman gets to take softball questions from such journalistic luminaries as john olsen route and.