for your media project a free media are t.v. dot com. coming up on r t los vegas was the scene for one of the world's biggest conventions on and about cyberspace defcon as a grand gathering of hackers where the tools of the trade are shared are two goes inside the event. and relations between the u.s. and russia have hit a snag president obama has canceled a planned meeting with president vladimir putin in moscow just days after russia were granted edward snowden temporary asylum so is the reset in danger will have a full report coming out. and the t.s.a. is expanding beyond just airports zick your agency is branching out to sporting events train terminals and much much more but is this a good move considering the number of complaints the t.s.a. gets each year more on this later in the show.

i mean it's wednesday august seventh eight pm here in washington d.c. i marinate and you're watching our two. now we begin tonight with hackers you've probably seen them represented on the big screen and in television as nefarious little geeks wrecking havoc on the world from the safe confines of their parents' basement but this representation is misleading these days hackers are just as likely to find and fix security breaches as they are to create them ortiz web producer andrew blake just returned from def con two thousand and thirteen defcon is one of the longest running underground hacking conferences held annually in las vegas were old school hackers meet the new generations to discuss everything from hacking cars to appliances to pacemakers now andrew explains how and why hacking is much more about curiosity than the ferias intent and about the real hackers to fear

how they are operating outside the inside of us intelligence agencies. they might look like an unassuming bunch of for one we can hear their people causing unimaginable havoc in one of the busiest cities in america around fifteen thousand hackers and security experts descended on los vegas for the twenty first annual def con just the latest and greatest exploits in vulnerabilities targeting seemingly anything and everything sure this computer could be hacked or this phone or this t.v. or care might just like this one at def con hackers go to learn how to which attacks on just about anything but more importantly how to prevent them there was a session on how to hack into those driving cars. you know people like hacking into a.t.m. hacking and pacemakers happing hacking and you know refrigerators it's i don't think there's a limit to what you know some of these people with with the creativity and the and

the skills that they have you know i don't think there's any limit to what they can reverse engineer but it's not just breaking into boring systems and servers at def con either xaus is an australian computer scientist who's life revolves around robots sometimes he builds them but it def con he discusses ways to break them if there's a system that can be tinkered or toward with at def con they'll do it this year i came to give a talk about hacking driverless vehicles because i'm really into autonomous robots i'm involved in autonomous robot competitions and i felt like now we're on the cost of she did use acceptance of driverless vehicles on the roads she had in space with you a.b.s. and so it's time to think about adversarial relationships and how we can make sure we build these systems bulletproof yes driverless vehicles like this. and you avi's are on manned aerial vehicles like this one so as has been at def con is either an attendee or presenter going back to the one nine hundred ninety s. and this year a few thousand people packed a conference room to watch him show how drones and driverless cars alike can be compromised with just a couple of tricks like almost everyone at def con though says he has for good now

for bad people here at def con in mind people there are people who are curious and they want to learn they come here to find out how things work and how they can you know use it past and they can sometimes make things do things that they weren't supposed to do and in a good way often improvise and adapt and to learn from each other and to show off what they've done so this is primarily a conference with you will come to learn things and to engage the curiosity and so that's what i like about it so much because if you have something that you are interested in just that there are people here that can be interested in it too in addition to hacking household appliances you and all sorts of other gizmos and gadgets security experts come to def-con to discuss exploits and vulnerabilities a political to just about anything john draper also known as captain crunch started compromising computer systems in the one nine hundred sixty s. when he used a homemade device called a blue box to make free phone calls around the world why did you do it was it because you didn't want to pay for phone goes. that wasn't the real reason the real

reason behind my experiment around the system was to learn the system and understand how it works much like what's happening today with people breaking into computers draper went on to show a few guys named steve and steve how to hack phones too and eventually they moved on to make millions then billions off their own endeavors but while you won't find the c.e.o. of apple computers walking around def-con in one hundred degree heat draper still shows up discuss his sordid past where his sheer curiosity usually kept him close to trouble he says he never wanted to hack for harm though and relied on hacks and exploits to explore systems that were still in their infancy and just to have a little fun back in the mid seventies we. we found this number by accident i mean hundred number because we're standing for numbers. and it went into the white house was in a way white house and cia crisis hotline number so we sat on that white house line for a while when we learned president nixon's me was olympus. so we couple weeks later i wrote down that and i had a cup we were a party in so we called the white house number and we asked for olympus and the

person who. nixon came on the line and we said sir we have a national crisis on our hands server we're out of toilet paper and we hung up. and we were the first people to mix and. of course hacking phone lines and prank calling the president our child's play compared to some of the other stuff that goes on at def con people learn how to hack high tech toys made for toddlers digital cameras drones and all sorts of other goodies of course what's perhaps the most frightening of the hacks being done by uncle sam compromising each one of our personal conversations i spoke today i gave. a one hour talk all about how the f.b.i. and local law enforcement agencies are now in the hocking business how they're not going to be post bitters crist's agoing is a principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the a.c.l.u. speech privacy and technology project and he spoke a number of times at def con this year about issues that aren't of interest only

hackers civil libertarians likes to go and have long assumed the government was getting communications from anyone they wanted but the recent revelations have confirmed the suspicions now as to going says he hopes people start to speak up they've been doing this for a while but they've kept it under wraps and i think it's time that we have a public debate about whether law enforcement agencies should really be in this business whether we want local cops or the f.b.i. to have the capability to hack into any computer anyone's smart phone i mean if cybersecurity is a national concern which i think it should be then i don't really think these tools to be floating around i think we should be prioritizing cybersecurity. you know this is just not of the bait we but just weeks after this guy gave the world a glimpse of what the government is actually doing that discussion is one that might finally be on the verge of making it mean stream from las vegas nevada and you blink our teeth. elsewhere the relationship between the u.s. and russia continues to cool after the white house confirms president obama has pulled out of talks with a lot of her putin that were scheduled to be held in russia next month during

a bilateral summit this after moscow granted temporary asylum to n.s.a. leaker edward snowden r.t. correspondent guy and she can brings us a full report washington has been thinking for a while on how to best punish moscow for snowden there were rumors that president obama may not go to the g. twenty summit in st petersburg last night he confirmed that he is going this morning we learned that while he is going to russia for the g twenty the white house has scrapped the bilateral summit with the russian president and here's president obama's advisors here's what he said will still work with russia on issues where we can find common ground but it was the unanimous view of the president and his national security team that a summit did not make sense in the current environment so now as far as the current day vironment here is what we heard from the president last night a lot of what's been going on has been. major

breaks in the relationship there's still help us supplying our troops in afghanistan there's still helping us on counterterrorism work they were helpful after the boston bombing and that investigation and so there's still a lot of business that we can do with them but there's been times where they slip back into cold war thinking and a cold war mentality to russia's decision on snowden washington responded by scrapping the meeting with the russian president was to put tac moves like that it seems we are indeed slipping into a cold war thinking by the way there's very little doubt here that had the roles of being the reverse then had it been a russian whistleblower seeking refuge here in the u.s. the u.s. would do the same as what russia has done well as much as the white house likes to attack snowden in russia. he's revelations certainly have put the white house on the defensive the majority of americans say edward snowden is a whistleblower not a traitor and this tuesday at a late night show with jay leno president obama tried once again to defend the

surveillance state by saying that there is no domestic spying program snowden as we remember has revealed that the n.s.a. has all the programs for domestic spying they're just not labeled for domestic spying but the programs in place certainly allowed to do that the president went on to say that the powers are there it's about whether or not the government has abused those powers on the other hand how would people know that when the programs are shrouded in secrecy one way or another there is no denying that the fact that we're even having this conversation is because of edward snowden's revelations the president suggested that snowden should have done it differently he said you can come forward to come to the appropriate individuals and say look i've got a problem with what's going on here i'm not sure whether it's being done properly and those are the president's words there so you can imagine going to that big government machine and saying i've got a problem here people have done it before including some n.s.a.

officials where remember thomas drake for example he tried to go through official channels and ended up fired and was investigated for a violation of the espionage act so it was noted perfectly knew what it what he was facing had he stayed in the u.s. after all the example of bradley manning was was there for him and the reaction of the u.s. congress has been very interesting for the past few weeks we've seen a number of lawmakers coming forward with initiatives based on edward snowden's leaks but at the same time to save lawmakers would criticize and condemn edward snowden as though it's the same as saying thank you for your leaks but we still want to punish you. that was our tease guy and she can reporting. and other news a small victory for bradley manning's defense team as the sentencing portion of the trial continues yesterday judge denise allin agreed that some of the twenty counts the soldier was convicted on should be merged cutting down his sentence to

a maximum of nineteen years this is down from the maximum of one hundred thirty six years he was facing manning was found guilty of espionage and theft in the largest leak of classified intelligence in u.s. history to transparency organization wiki leaks he was acquitted on the most serious count aiding the enemy still the twenty five year old soldier could spend most if not all of his remaining years inside a prison. now if you've ever boarded a plane in the u.s. you are likely to be intimately familiar with the t.s.a. will get ready to start seeing a lot more of them the transportation and security administration is expanding its reach to sporting events music festivals rodeos and train terminals it's all part of the t.s.a. is intermodal prevention and response or teams for short however complaints about the t.s.a. as misconduct have increased by twenty seven percent in the last two years this is per a recent government accountability office report so is this agency really best situated to search americans everywhere they go earlier i was joined by michael brooks

producer for the majority report i asked him what he thinks about the t.s.a. expansion and what it means for american civil liberties. well i think you know again there's this sort of inch forward in a number of different areas when it comes to national security surveillance and kind of conflating different functions together so i think. it's not great for american civil liberties and we already see that we already see certain places that this squad has been deployed people being randomly searched and that's led to arrests were very for you know relatively minor crime certainly nothing on the scale of terrorism i think that it's important to see these programs as kind of growing organically in terms of their role in government and all of the contractors and special interests that's around them now do you believe this expanded t.s.a. presence is actually needed could it possibly be

a good thing and an important measure like in the effort to keep us safe overall i mean look you know there is some type of terrorist threat right like there are there are legitimate threats and there does need to be some monitoring of that but again what is the t.s.a. even trained to do you know we don't know that these people are trained to respond in the types of situations that are being put into we know them from their kind of role in the airport and now they're being unleashed in all these different different types of situations so i think even if there is some need for some types of monitoring in these public events or in trains. again why this specific agency and why are they being deployed as are being deployed it just doesn't make very much now when will we start seeing this increased security presence does the t.s.a. plan to just phase it in or will it happen all at once well it's already being phased in and we see different train stations and amtrak stations across the

country it's already led to some controversy as i mentioned before with some people being randomly searched by these agents of that leading to things like drug charges and other things that don't have anything to do with a national security threat so it's being phased in i think the program started in two thousand and five after the madrid attacks on spain's rail system now what can we expect in terms of the scope to the t.s.a. security increase should be anticipated t.s.a. pat downs and metal detectors at the next sporting event that we have and. i definitely hope and. i think we're already seeing again as we're seeing random searches we're seeing these really kind of intrusive squads being placed at different events. and i don't think that there's any specific plans for those types of activities but again as. this activity increases the

consequences are hard to predict in the long term now according to the government accountability office t.s.a. misconduct increased by twenty seven percent from two thousand and ten to two thousand and twelve with more t.s.a. agents and searches going on do you think that the number is only going to increase more more and. you know that could be the case obviously some of those reports of misconduct are things like being late or not showing up for work so i think that you know there's a number of different things that distinguish there but broadly speaking obviously the more you grow an agency the more you grow an agency that performs a really sensitive job and not always respectfully people that obviously leaves more room for for potential abuse of misconduct as well as a real mis allotment of public resources now is it fair to say that these t.s.a. agents they are properly trained right now we had a another guest on before who was saying that their their training is equal to that

of a parking garage attendant would you say there's any truth to that i would say that the t.s.a. training is not very extensive and that's on very much on public record i don't know if it's the equivalent to a parking attendant maybe a parking attendant might have actually better training in some respects but it is not you know at any rate it is not the type of kind of thorough and extensive training in security intelligence that you might expect given the sensitivity and importance of their job. michael thank you that was michael brooks producer at the majority report thank you so much. and financial news the justice department filed a lawsuit against bank of america accusing the bank of defrauding its investors the justice department along with the security and exchange commission's says that the bank vastly understated the risk involved in its sale of residential mortgage backed securities ultimately defrauding investors of eight hundred fifty million

dollars the lawsuit alleges that the bank made misleading statements to these investors and did not disclose important information about the details of the mortgages that comprise the securities now earlier i was joined by anthony randazzo director of economic research at the reason foundation he began by explaining just what these mortgage backed securities were and how they played a role in the financial crisis well sensually bank of america worked with third party groups who gave out mortgages and then they bought the mortgages from those third party groups put them into packages and allowed for institutional investors those are pension funds or big companies that have a lot of money around what they wanted best to buy those pieces of those mortgages to get everytime you pay your mortgage some of that money would go through to the investor so that the mortgage backed security that was being sold to these investors now is the first time the banks or bank of america has faced prosecution

for its role in creating these mortgage backed securities but given the number of lawsuits and a lot of the lawsuits and settlements so far have been about what happened after the crisis particularly in relation to how the banks like bank of america worked with foreclosures this is one of the first big lawsuits about the creation of mortgage backed security and not telling investors everything about them or so the justice department and at c.d.c. claims and so the it what's what's been about this particular case and in addition to its size is whether or not it can be proved that there was a malicious intent of behalf of bank of america defrauded investors. now they have a they bought countrywide which proved to be a very bad financial decision do you think countrywide new toxic mortgages. it's clear that one countrywide individual lenders often were handing out mortgages oftentimes they were doing it knowing that people were going to be able to repay

and a lot a lot of mortgages were given without any sort of serious documentation this particular deal though was for mortgages that were the mortgage backed securities that were sold in january two thousand and eight so this specific deal and it is portent in this particular case is about mortgages that were given out and were sold after the housing bubble already starting to the plate banks had a lot of losses on mortgages in two thousand and seven so by january of two thousand and eight bank of america was well aware that there was problems in the housing industry and investors were well aware that there was problems in the housing industry particularly given the billions of losses that banks had suffered in late two thousand and seven and this is not exactly what was going on in the heart of the housing bubble and so i think what's important to consider is did bank of america have a consistent pattern and countrywide a consistent pattern of defrauding the institutional investors that were buying mortgage backed securities or was it just in this one particular instance but as we

see in department of justice can prove that there was malicious and not a non-disclosure of all the necessary important documents now what do you think this latest newest lawsuit we're talking about means for bank of america and what do you predict will happen. i'm not exactly sure what's going to happen because there's a lot of the paperwork that still needs to be publicly gone through i think that one of the problems with this case is that if you look at that as he sees filing the first thing that they say is they put this in context of the whole financial crisis and this is a deal that was done in january of two thousand and eight while the housing bubble was already starting to deflate not the heart of it and i think that's problematic to try and go after them are probably that being said this is what it does look like is that there were a number of disclosures that warrants issued properly like bank of america so they might be able to prove by the letter the law they definitely violated planes but investors were investing in this because fitch gave

a hundred and twenty two million dollars of this deal to aaa rating so investors and bank of america were depending on a credit rating agency to do a lot of the due diligence on this particular batch of mortgages that credit rating agency gave it a aaa rating for almost all of it and everybody was just hopping kind of went along with it so it may be that they failed to follow the law and it wasn't malicious which given that credit rating i would be surprised if that's what happened but because this was two thousand and eight it would be somewhat surprising that they really didn't know what was going on now be a day they want to loan in their sale of mortgage backed securities there are other banks that did the same thing do you think was in similar lawsuits against other big commercial banks there's been a lot of talk of civil lawsuits against other banks there was a big settlement i believe through this u.b.s. they came down this week about particularly defrauding investors in relation to the

sale of mortgage backed securities in that particular case the bank did not admits or deny any wrongdoing and that which is had tends to be the case that they're been on a number of these sort of instances i had the certainly isn't. successful. the government isn't proving its case with technology just whether or not there will be more cases like this thank you anthony that was anthony randolph director of economic research the reason foundation is prevalent the obama administration has officially stated that its position on egypt is that it doesn't need to have an official position on egypt that's right during the state department briefing yesterday matthew we have the associated press asked jennifer psaki to clarify the administration's official position on egypt and she had this to say. you remind us all what your position actually is. because as i recall your position was that you don't have a position and that's not quite so is that correct matt i think you know our

position the position means taking is that we're taking a stance or making a determination and since you didn't do that you do not by definition have a position we have correct i would disagree with you matt you have a position on whether what happened in egypt was a coup we have determined that we do not need to make a difference and that it's good to know that the administration has determined that not to determine its determination or something like that. now since the start of the twentieth century there's been a drastic evolution of warfare but there's also an odd years of war as a metaphor a war being waged against a concept or an idea beyond just a fight between two model nations now for this example and many more of the residents laurie harvest.

america has a new war on this one is the war on sugar that's right sugar we've declared war on use so you better gather up your packets and run for the hills the war on sugar has just become a thing. a big new obvious study reveals that american children regularly consume sugary drinks tend to weigh more than those who don't now reports are coming out that reveal how even fruit juice is just as loaded with sugar as soda is and of course mayor bloomberg just famously tried to ban large sodas in an effort to curb access sugar consumption here in new york so the media has rounded up all these stories to declare the war on sugar plastering meth phrase in their headline we

declare war on everything we've had the war on terror since nine eleven it's cost us trillions of dollars under the freeze of the war on terror our government has killed hundreds of thousands of people given billions of dollars to its friends their defense contracts and justified its massive spying programs meanwhile you're over a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident than you are from terrorism we also have the war on drugs which nixon sold to us in the seventy's under that war we've spent a trillion dollars incarcerated over a million us citizens and made private prisons and the drug testing industry credibly wealthy meanwhile states across the nation continue. to legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational use and drug prohibition today causes far more problems than it solves we have the war on women which is

a handy way to radicalize the abortion debate and recent headlines have included the war on consumption the war i'm drones and the war on dern alist and don't forget we have the war on christmas just because it's summer you shouldn't forget that that important and dangerous bore continues to rage odd. the us is actively engaged in seventy four real wars that it is mit's to and who knows how many more it fights covertly we just cannot stop declaring war on things to the point where the word war has lost all of its meaning the fact that people die that families are ruined that our veterans are tossed aside and left to deal with their own p.t.s.d. all of the real ugly truth behind what war actually is undermined by our continued trivialization of the word war it's disgusting to me so

tonight i'm declaring war here wars on america let's talk about that by following the on twitter at the resident. and finally in the czech republic one man's cookware is another man's headwear last week burner resident lucas navi won the right to legally wear a spaghetti strainer honest for his official government photo id navi is a self-proclaimed pasta foreign a member of an ironic religious organization called the church of the flying spaghetti monster now according to its web site the church claims that an invisible and made of spaghetti and meatballs created the universe after drinking have a. the one night and it's only dogma is the rejection of dogma up burn out of city hall spokesman paul zahra said that nobby's application complies with the laws of the czech republic where headgear for religious or medical reasons is permitted so

as long as it doesn't hide the face and believe it or not this isn't the first time an individual has dawned a fetish for dora for an official photo i.d. back in two thousand and eleven australian man nico almost was granted permission to wary of spaghetti strainer on his head after battling with the australian government for three years no word yet on whether or not he plans to celebrate his victory at the old spaghetti factory that does it for now for more on the stories we covered you can go to youtube youtube rather dot com slash r t america or check out our website r t v dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at aaron a and don't forget to tune in at nine pm for larry king now with special guest nigel lythgoe and cat deeley the producer and host of the hit show so you think you can dance for now have a great. old

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