why you should care about. is why you should care only. big british brother is watching the middle east the independent newspaper says the u.k. is running a secret snooping station intercepting e-mails phone calls and web traffic. syria's opposition says it will allow access to the site of an alleged massive chemical attack near damascus following russia's request arty looks at how terrorist groups are taking advantage of the chaos being caused there. braced for more on risk in egypt islamists have gathered for new protests a day after deposed leader hosni mubarak was let out of prison anger among muslim brotherhood supporters our top stories this hour.

international news and comments live from our studio center here in moscow has just turned nine pm this is r.t. the u.k. is reportedly been operating a secret data gathering base in the middle east part of a one of the half billion dollar investment in global surveillance britain's independent newspaper claims it obtain this information from edward snowden's leaks that the n.s.a. whistleblower himself says he has not released any information linked to these allegations or smith has the details. well the independent friday morning published an article that says came from leaks made by edward snowden about this secret internet monitoring station of based in the middle east to intercept all sorts of internet traffic in the middle east and then cost that on to western intelligence agencies basically what it does is taps into internet cables that run into the the sea extracts that they set and then passes it to the h.q. here in the u.k.

and to the n.s.a. in the states is particularly valuable according to the independent because it can access cables that apos between submarines to very sensitive data and it's part of the much dogshit project which is designed to use to intercept global digital communications all in the world e-mails text messages that everything there are over the whole a million miles of cable internet cable all the facts going against that running under the sea all over the world in a very old world instead i think that even though we. think will face the countries every time you send e-mails when you want to work and before they have to go through these cables. the cables that make landfall at various points and we show you a map of how the cables lie you can see that a lot of them make landfall in the u.k. those transatlantic ones so the u.k. is very important in this operations married now says that this week didn't come from him a tall and glenn greenwald in the guardian says that it's the type of disclosure

it's exactly the type of discussion that the journalists working with snowden have deliberately avoided given that it relates to middle east surveillance and the potential impact that that could have on surveillance operations that then did release that wolf notion says that he thinks it was the british government itself he says that the government's trying to trying to make out that the leaks from snowden generally harmful across the board not in the public interest across the board and that these they're doing that by deliberately releasing harmful information themselves and pretending that it comes from. him in order to discredit him and the journalist that he's working directly with glenn greenwald says that at the very moment that there's this huge scandal of attention of his partner. over the weekend and the government is trying to tell the court that the release of this information is not in the public interest it could potentially be dangerous here is a disclosure that could potentially be dangerous so it really fits in according to

the guardian and to snowden himself with what the government's trying to do. we're constantly learning more about the massive collection of data but what exactly does it mean for the average citizen. with whom this prisoner is through contact with and you will be able to identify all the computers and also the type of communications. or to examine what exactly intelligence agencies can find out about your life a little later in the program. the syrian opposition says it will guarantee safe access for u.n. investigators to inspect the site of an alleged chemical attack the statement follows demands from russia a u.n. official is also expected in damascus on saturday to negotiate government permission to look into the reported so let's get more now from authors and in english joins me in the studio so you know this latest statement from the opposition what's the impact will that have on any investigation well we can expect

probably very little impact because you have to understand that the statement came from the syrian national council which is essentially based in turkey and it's a bunch of men in suits and they're notoriously disjointed there has been a lot of criticism about their actions they can't seem to come to an agreement at the same time we also have to understand that we're talking about syria which is at this point penetrated by a whole number of rebel fighters a lot of who are actually associated with al qaida who are not exactly working together with the s.n.c. so this is they can say yes of course come in and take a look and actually they're insisting that the. u.n. inspectors have to call and take a look and do their investigation within the next forty eight hours it's absolutely vital but the same time there is no guarantee that they will actually provide safe access considering that this is the area where the fighting continues between the forces and the rebel forces in fact we've had reports that it was especially intense on friday again absolutely no guarantee that the u.n. inspection team will have safe passage into the area of the alleged attack and of

course u.n. inspection team it's been in the country for a few days anyway looking at previous reports no camera starts but what sort of progress has it made any developments not entirely because you have to understand that these are these reports that they're now investigating came a month ago right on the very similar circumstances again they were coming from the syrian opposition takes several months for the u.n. or the team of the u.n. inspectors to get there but the irony is that we still have absolutely no credible support to those statements as well in fact russian minister of foreign affairs said that there has been a rocket fired indeed on wednesday but it was very similar to a rocket that was fired by the syrian opposition some months ago and that rocket was indeed laden. with chemical agent of unknown origin so again it's all up to the team of u.n. investigators to finally get down to on the ground to this area which again is controlled by the rebels and find out what is happening although there are

a lot of questions still about these reports and just finally what is the international reaction to those obligations. is behind this alleged chemical. like russia for example there are some countries there calling on immediate investigation there saying the u.n. should pay very close attention to these reports of bloodshed there have been some studies which insist the u.n. security council should immediately look into this into the into the investigation and if the chemical attacks are proven to have taken place then the u.n. should use force sooner. and russia again reiterated their point that this is absolutely unacceptable to exert this kind of pressure on the syrian government which by the way seems to appear as if they are absolutely willing to cooperate with the u.n. inspection team in terms. of the talk of chemical of chemical stuff some sort of being being used because again it's not in the syrian government's interest for

that question to be kind of up in the air and mr foreign affairs of russia has actually said that this looks like another wave of antigovernment syrian propaganda which is essentially being perpetuated by the syrian opposition thanks very much indeed for that he's only going to live here in the studio with me. when we more pressure on the syrian government is being made worse by american insisting that the rebels are not capable of carrying out such attacks on occasions i've just been talking about with marina then michael maloof he's a former senior security policy analyst in the office of the usa could you defend says that the media is being largely distracted by unverified reports coming from the opposition the syrian government has actually called upon the you went to investigate but they cannot. open up areas that are under the opposition control they can certainly. ask that the u.n. come in and look at whatever documentation they might have but so i think that this is a very serious development and what's happening is that the regular media is just assuming

that it's the it's the syrian government when in fact they're being fed information from the opposition so i think everyone has to be very careful and certainly policymakers need to be very careful before they take any action it's going to be very very difficult to really get to the bottom of this latest episode. the turmoil in syria and across the region is proving fertile ground for radicalism groups and that's adding a new dimension to the u.s. war on terror as artie's gun which now explains. while washington says he has crippled al qaeda in afghanistan and pakistan wising from the ashes of the arab spring is new all different affiliated groups metastasizing in the middle east and africa feeling more and more comfortable in countries torn apart by terror in the north of syria in the territories presumably controlled by the rebels the al qaeda affiliated is planning to announce an islamic state terror is not the only way

they're winning support their exercising its soft power to somewhere between preaching terror here you see militants doing some ice cream diplomacy with children and all kind of sponsored ice cream contests for kids what could be more innocent all kind of mind it or affiliated groups feel very comfortable in the post revolution chaos of libya in iraq after a decade of civil war still stages terror on a regular basis in less than a week more than two thousand prisoners many of them all qaeda fighters have escaped from prisons in iraq libya and pakistan those were violent raids around the same time washington closed almost two dozen of its missions in the middle east and africa fearing some major terrorist attack and yet at the same time washington says this as a result of the enormous pressure we've put on the group we have eliminated all of al qaeda senior leadership in afghanistan and pakistan and because the current

leaders leaders of al qaeda core so worried about their personal safety they're far less able to plan attacks the question some ask is how can washington simultaneously be so paranoid about the war on terror and be so dismissive of the threat of terror at the same time in different countries the u.s. has repeated we put the threat of terror on the back burner for some greater goal in of ghana's than the goal was to defeat the soviet union the u.s. directly helped al qaeda and bin laden there in iraq the goal was to get rid of saddam hussein there was no al qaeda in iraq before the civil war broke out follow . in the u.s. invasion now in syria the greater goal is to remove assad from power to offer what helping al-qaeda directly or indirectly become that trade off that these west was willing to make to achieve a greater goal or whatever it was but having made their trade up the u.s. would then spend decades fighting what it had sparked in washington i'm going to

check out. all card has been embracing the media to promote itself recently by launching an online magazine even allegedly attempting to advertise itself via twitter all over this month an account purportedly belonging to the terrorist group asked its followers for p.r. ideas but the campaign was torn apart by trolls security analyst jim berger urged social networkers to bombard the account with tweets that mocks them and one of them including a proposal to release a film entitled dude where's my car bomb another user advised al qaeda to use more caps in the videos there was also a suggestion to open a fast food chain called jihad joe's and among other ideas was to sell some of bin laden's porn collection and all this trolling caused the account to be suspended but beyond the humor column cavell who wrote the book exporting made in america democracy believes that the u.s. is paying the price for allowing al qaeda to exist in the first place.

al qaeda is merely an instrument that the united states has. developed. and facilitated censors origin's in afghanistan we funded the foreign mercenaries these jihadists are a security agency believe that they are so earth skill that they can manipulate these the hardest. to their own ends but it's a cynical paternalism that many of the jihad is should be aware of because they see them as easily manipulable but as we saw with september eleventh to those along the attacks on the united states and other attacks that is not the case . after the break coal tells in gulf floods already broken two century old records but levels of still expected to rise we'll bring you all the latest from the flood stricken far east russia coming your way in just

a few minutes plus other stories. we speak your language. school music programs and documentaries in spanish what matters to you breaking news a little turn to angles the stories. you hear. that try to alter the spanish find out more visit.

he's continues here in r t islamist supporters of the ousted mohamed morsi have gathered for fresh rallies across egypt after friday prayers hundreds took to the streets in cairo for what the muslim brotherhood dubbed a friday of martyrs and army and police have been deployed these demonstrations come a day after the country's next president hosni mubarak was freed from prison and placed under house arrest in a military hospital over recent months egypt has suffered from the bloodiest civil unrest in its modern history the muslim brotherhood is calling for continuous

protests against the interim military rule which took down president morsi and i too is a lot mohamed believes that the new army backed government is destroying all hope of a democratic egypt. at the end of the day what we're seeing is nothing to do with the muslim brotherhood or morsi but this is a country this is egypt it's bigger than any faction it's bigger than any political or religious group we have about ninety million egyptians living in egypt and what the military coup in the military junta did they came and wiped away all our democratically elected institutions the people empowered there were the ones that were ousted by the military rule were chosen by the people no some themselves what we are witnessing today is people who lost in elections coming back to to power on the back of the tanks and anyone who came out to oppose them and say no this is not the right thing to do and this is not the egypt we want where ultimately either put in jail or killed. time to look at some of the stories artie's online team has

prepared for you today oil inferno a monster blaze was a tanker in eastern siberia injuring some and causing devastation you can watch this footage right now on our in motion page. plus all are bound to defend freedom but apparently not freedom of the written word on turn of a prison bans detainees from reading black russian classic the gulag archipelago leading to accusations america's ignoring its own values on a whim you can find out more naughty dot com. german security documents of showing the country doesn't trust the new windows eight system fearing it provides the n.s.a. with remote access that's according to one of the country's newspapers although the german government denies it early reports indicated the country was a major target for u.s. intelligence let's remind you just how that data is being collected well the n.s.a. has been more active in germany than in any other e.u. state targeted up to half

a billion data connections every month phone calls emails mobile phone messages and web chat logs all of that data eventually made its way to n.s.a. headquarters in washington were burned in apparently a levels this snowden's leaks indicate they work with the n.s.a. no questions asked on a regular day up to thirty million german connections are watched and that could double during particularly busy times so how much and how exactly is the average citizen affected by this will artie's peter all of a has been finding out. should the average person be concerned about their online information being stored by security services you can analyze a person's social graph as it's called so you will know with whom this prison is and contact with and you will be able to identify all the communication partners and also of the type of communication so often and also in respect to events in

germany the country's highest court ruled that storing data on citizens was unconstitutional however leaked documents show very close ties between the german b.m.d. and the n.s.a. with information on germans being passed from one to the other all in the name of security says the woman at the top but since it's impossible to have security without inconveniences those involved in data protection say these inconveniences have now gone too far and we had suspicions that such a scheme was in place but not the sheer the mere extent of this regular and and. unwarranted and disproportionate measures that are taking place taken place by foreign intelligence services and we definitely need limits and effective and transparent controls the major worry for the individual is that a system that we are told is there to protect society has been used to keep the

indiscriminate what we do online this is to me is not working for law enforcement this is no our catching rock to us this is about taking all of our communication and allowing to identify our communication. it's fairly common practice for an employer to check out a prospective employee on social networks to find out more about who they are about to hire however the level of information gathered by security services is in a different league entirely with this level of information you could see exam. who people call in e-mail on a regular basis see that's it doctor the employer may think this guy's going to have too many sick days and go elsewhere using information that's supposed to be confidential on social networking sites like facebook people freely give away information about themselves but long after you've clicked like on

a web page or even search for something online that information follows you like a shadow they will know what you have been in the last three four or five years maybe what you have been interested in through all the time you might not even remember yourself would you have been looking on google but this is done we'll know . peter all over r.t. early we're back in the u.s. those online resources who make privacy a priority are being pressured into sharing customer information with intelligence agencies and we've been covering the shutting down of another bit email provider which was used by edward snowden and my colleague matt trista earlier spoke to the founder of another encrypted messaging service who told him that privacy just doesn't exist in america anymore what's happened is the spies have turned the companies like apple and google into spies themselves i think the whole n.s.a. spying has seriously. negative impact on the trust and faith people have

in the political and legal system in the united states at this point i think that people are looking at moving themselves their assets and their information offshore . in one of your previous interviews you had said that you feel the u.s. could turn into electronic prison can you elaborate on a little bit well if everybody is watching everything that you do and you don't know where that information is going there's no recourse in terms of what happens with the information there's no recourse in terms of. how you can remedy things you know for example the no fly list there's no way you don't even know you're on and so you go to the airport and they say you can't fly and there's no way to get yourself off of it and you don't know what got you want in the first place so you know that's just for flying now we start talking about the electronic surveillance it's becoming a serious problem for a lot of people lot of people are now starting to realize that the terrorists aren't the people they're after it's the people who are just ordinary people paying

taxes and doing their jobs president obama has said some privacy could be breached in order to provide security where do you think privacy rights are headed in the u.s. where they're headed in the u.s. i don't think they exist anymore in the u.s. that's what i'm hearing from our customers they are you know they understand that there's been it's not just a privacy breach it's like the whole dike has to spin completely excavated the oceans been pouring in massive flooding continues to devastate the far east with more down poles expected and here's a look at just how big the flood zone actually is now it spills over three russian regions as you can see here and to give you an idea you could fit the whole of france and germany in that you know there are pockets of the avoided flooding but many more have simply been engulfed how about off the main city within the flood stricken area risks the same fate and pull scott has more on the done situation

that. well water levels in some parts of this region have already broken records that have stood since the eight hundred seventy knots of six hundred and forty two centimeters in the authorities say that at the moment the water stands out above seven meters and with the rain set to continue on the water levels continuing to rise we could push the eight metre mark which puts the city in real jeopardy now the problem is being caused by the arm or river which you can see behind me it's lost its banks and the real fear is now that it's going to trickle in and start to submerge the city authorities are working around the clock to try and prevent that from happening you can see the sandbags behind me dams have been built but the problem is as the water levels continue to rise the dams need to rise with them so it's a twenty four seventh's around the clock job to try and reinforce the city around eight hundred fifty people have so far been evacuated from the city are all said to be asked to leave their property some of the side of the state some have decided to go those that have gone but being housed in temporary accommodation sent is places

like schools and sports arenas and sports complex as the authorities say they can house around four thousand five hundred from the city at the moment although that figure is expected to rise to about ten thousand should the problem deteriorates two planes of humanitarian aid are also heading this way from moscow including things such as food drinking water and medicine president vladimir putin is heading this way early next week along with prime minister dmitri medvedev and they're expected to assess the damage which at the moment is mainly the rule the remote areas on the outskirts of the city where entire communities have been submerged and destroyed but the fear is with the water level still rising this city could be at risk in the problem could yet get a lot worse. reporting there now some other news from around the world and he made some of may find some of the pictures in our first story disturbing and this is c.c.t.v. footage from one of two deadly blasts in lebanon's northern city of tripoli

authorities say the. attacks on two mosques killed forty two people and left another three hundred fifty injured both blasts targeted friday prayers and parts of the city where syrian opposition clerics are known to preach however it's not clear if either were there lebanon's prime minister has condemned the attack calling it an indicator of just how dangerous a situation the country is now in the. security forces of five tear gas or protesting students in colombia's capital responded with homemade molotov cocktails the black clad youths are said to be part of the urban section of the fog terror group clashes come amid a second wave of national strikes this year with roadblocks paralyzing many areas across the country all week. so i'll be back with the news team with wolf we just have a hoffa now from the mean time abby martin picks up a sledgehammer to bash the mainstream media that's him breaking the set off to the break.

they say geo politics is a lot like a schoolyard and while obama snubbing a meeting with the president of russia to in theory punish him for the stoughton incident sounds kind of amateur that is the kind of stuff the girl you did when you're sixteen would do cancel a date just to show you how much your feelings are hurt let's not mistake this canceled meeting with cutting off diplomatic relations which is the total rejection of any form of discussion with another country which really sends a bold and possibly dangerous but it will message but obama did was more like a minor annoyance he knows that he will talk to putin again in the near future i mean how are they not going to talk in the next g. eight summit what is he just going to have to hide behind merkel the whole time and hope it works out or ducked behind the shrimp cocktail whatever here's

a russian accent one could argue that to appease republicans he had to do something to look strong after the student but this grandstanding just comes across as silly passing something like a new jackson verda commandment yeah that is how you could shows people that you're really mad even if your anger is irrational because stone pretty much did the right thing but that's just my opinion. to live on one hundred thirty three bucks a month for food i sent her i had because you know how fabulous. i mean. that i. really miss. mary so closely. worst chippers. a little light out of the. radio for a minute. i want. to give you never seen anything like this until it.

was up guys on how do you martin well after nine hundred days of being held with no charges whistleblower i mean private bradley manning finally took to the stand yesterday to speak for the first time this case and today he did the same thing provided more details on his harsh treatment on confinement manning spoke of his experience in the leg irons which are handcuffs that essentially chain your legs together and his treatment solitary was locked up for twenty three hours a day so it was so traumatizing that when he was finally transferred to a medium security prison in two thousand and eleven he felt uneasy moving freely around cell block manning was subjected to additional restraints story a nine month period where he was confined to scratching suicide prevention bedding and every night he was forced to strip down naked even being made.