coming up on r t the white house ramps up pressure to strike syria today one support from top republican congressional leaders still many others are not convinced it's the right thing to do a report from capitol hill in just a moment. and eighteen t. in the d.d.a. are creating big controversy bigger than the n.s.a. scandal the telecommunications giant has been handing over to proves a phone call data to the government more on this revelation coming out. and putting business before people that's the shared sentiment among homeowners in north carolina after state officials approved a proposal that could force fracking on their properties more on that internet show .

even though it's tuesday september third eight pm here in washington d.c. i marinate and you're watching are to. will congress vote for military intervention in syria that was the question on hand today on capitol hill where the secretary of state secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff addressed the senate foreign relations committee to defend their proposal for military strikes in syria the three hour plus session that listed a variety of responses from senators and led to several testy back and forth between secretary of state kerry and members of the senate foreign relations committee senator bob menendez chairman of the committee explained off camera to secretary of state why he would vote in favor of intervention in syria while senator rand paul question why the u.s. is yet again trying to get involved in a war in the middle east. this weekend i was at a soccer tournament and i had a group of moms come up to me and say senator we we saw those pictures

they're horrific can't imagine. the devastation those parents must feel about their children but why us why us and so i ask you would you tell them that we would be more secure or less secure. by the actions that are being considered i haven't had one person come up to me and say they're for this war not one person we get calls by the thousands nobody's calling in favor of this war i did me while i was home all month i went to forty cities and have one person come up and say do they all agree it's a horrendous thing yes we all agree that chemical attacks aren't as they but people are not excited about getting involved they also don't think it's going to work and there's skip meanwhile in an exclusive interview with french newspaper le figaro syrian president bashar al assad challenge the u.s.

to come up with a single piece of evidence that he has used chemical weapons assad said quote the middle east is a powder keg and today the fuse is getting shorter whoever is doing the accusing must come up with proof we have challenges the united states and france to provide a single piece of proof obama and all along haven't been able to do so even to their own people our chief political commentator sam sacks is on the hill covering the hearings for us today here is his full report. senators on the foreign relations committee held the first in a series of hearings on capitol hill regarding military intervention in syria secretary of state john kerry secretary of defense chuck hagel the chairman of joint chiefs of staff general martin dempsey all made the case for military strikes and he was secretary john kerry explaining the national security risk of not responding to alleged chemical weapons use by syrian president bashar al assad we know that assad would read our stepping away or our silence as an invitation to use

those weapons with the beauty and in creating impunity we will be creating opportunity the opportunity for other dictators and or terrorists to pursue their own weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons and the two chairman of the foreign relations committee senators bob menendez and corker both support president obama's intervention but they're concerned the scope of it that it might be too broad and then the authorization doesn't specifically prohibit u.s. troops on the ground secretary kerry address those concerns so let me be clear president obama is not asking america to go to war and i say that sitting next to two men secretary hagel and chairman dempsey who know what war is senator mccain knows what war is they know the difference between going to war and what president obama is requesting now. we all agree there will be no american boots on the ground

now the question is can an authorization pass congress it's believed there are enough hawks and interventionist in the senate for it to pass the big question is in the house where there are more civil libertarians like representative just a mash and progressives like alan grayson who oppose intervention and you can already see similarities between supporters of the a monster amendment that nearly passed a few months ago to define the n.s.a. and those who today oppose intervention in syria who are manes to b. c. of house leadership like speaker the house john boehner eric cantor nancy pelosi who all support intervention can keep their members in one ultimately though the white house never said military strikes him john congressional approval they've been careful not to say that in fact senator chris coons is confident however that the president is listening to congress members i welcome and respect the president coming to congress to seek authorization i don't think he had to i think

constitutionally he has the power to act in exigent circumstances i think both what we decide and how we decide it here in the congress is important of both as a role model of how democracy can work and in order to end up hopefully with sort of unified support behind a narrow and clear path forward part of the problem here though is in my biggest complain about it is you know i want to be proud of the president for bringing this forward but then they say well they won't adamantly say they're going to adhere to congressional verdict so is the vote just feed or is it just pretend and that's a pretty important thing if the president wants credit for believing in current question authority and coming forward with us he needs to say yes the votes binding absolutely i would never go to war if i lose the vote but it's telling that they're not willing to say that so you can imagine a scenario in which congress can't get the votes to pass anything they just keep debating and then ultimately the president goes it alone saying he tried to go to congress but congress is paralyzed like the u.n. security council. so we'll see if the coming debate this week and next will

actually influence the president's decision but an interesting little note here is that this coming week in congress was supposed to be filled with hearings in debates on the latest n.s.a. revelations those are on the backburner now with syria to debate the white house feels a lot more comfortable winning in washington same sex are to. and wall the senate foreign relations committee hearing was the main focus of almost every us media outlet today it did fail to hold the undivided attention of one senator senator of arizona former presidential candidate and advocate for syrian intervention john mccain he was playing poker on his i phone during the hearing through ups's not to awesome for mccain an hour mccain took it in stride reading this after the washington post published that photo scandal caught playing i phone game at three plus hours senate hearing worst of all i lost. can you do it happens anyway in

other news we knew that the national security agency wasn't the only government agency keeping piles and piles of phone data on its subscribers but now thanks to some new documents obtained by peace activists we know about it the drug enforcement administration's hemisphere project they've been keeping tabs on every call that goes through the eight hundred eighty s. which dating as far back as one thousand nine hundred seventy now that database goes even further than the n.s.a. is records and unlike the n.s.a. eighteen teased out includes location information and fact telephone company employees are actually paid by the government to sit alongside d.h. and supply them with data the american civil liberties union says the public private partnership of data gathering raises fourth amendment concerns however the justice department says hemisphere merely streamlines the process of getting access to records maintained by the phone company now i was joined earlier by heidi big ocean executive director of the national lawyers guild and i started off by asking

her if she could put this database into context. revelations of hemisphere are rather breathtaking given the scope of the records that a.t.t. is making accessible to a agents and by the fact that the government is actually paying eighteen thousand employees to sit next to police officers and agents and assist them in their job. they're using administrative subpoenas which are not run by a judge a few years ago the justice department inspector general actually said that the f.b.i. has been abusing administrative subpoenas using them saying that they're necessary in the war on terrorism but i think the trouble with this program is a the government is paying eighteen t. to do things that the government would not lawfully be able to access itself it's relying once again on private corporations to do its intelligence but there's no

oversight to the process now heidi in your legal opinion is this legal. i think that n.s.a. spying and hemisphere skirts the law and probably based on the depth of the program going back twenty six years being able to access all records of phone calls from two decades ago and doing it out without judicial warrant and oversight to me makes it very questionable legally given that the f.b.i. itself has said that the inspector general has said that it's misused i think that's cause for alarm now after the n.s.a. revelations one proposal on capitol hill was to actually have private companies rather than government agencies store customer data how does the discovery of this hemisphere project kind of complicate that solution. well i think that we've seen such a close partnership between government agencies and private corporations and we've

seen how the private industry has really burgeoned as the surveillance apparatus has increased the problem is that industry is not accountable to the strictures of the u.s. constitution and on reasonable searches and seizures and we don't want to give them carte blanche to hold our records and then possibly tamper with them but we also want to make sure that if they work with the government there's proper oversight transparency and protections so that really the government is accountable to the people and to the constitution now reuters they came out with a report showing that the da was using american citizen american citizen data from databases like this and then obscuring the trail of evidence during the trial of the trail of where they actually got that data does that conflict with a person's right to a free and fair trial most definitely using what we call secret evidence that it

really amounts to and then creating the fiction of a narrative of how that information was gathered violates the right to a fair trial violates the right of the person involved to really confront the sources of how that information was gathered that's troubling and i think the revelations of this latest program raise the question if the deal is using administrative subpoenas how many other government agencies are we know that they have been under the patriot act for years. to gather personal information access to medical records financial records i think we're seeing day by day more of the iceberg being exposed. i hate everyone knows that cell phones have just become an integral part of our lives how can we as citizens protect our own privacy while using a cell phone. well if you're concerned about location privacy then if you have the kind of cell phone that you can remove the battery from some people do that they

also have been said to be able to listen in so if you care about your privacy when you're having a talk at a cafe just take out that battery i think the lesson people are learning is that if you really want to keep something private you have to have an in person conversation not on cell phone not on computer and just be aware that virtually every transaction you make is being gathered collected sold to third parties and then accessed in the future which is troublesome well thank you hardy that was how you bigger fish and executive director of the national lawyers guild thank you for your input thank you. in the mid atlantic it's been a grim scene along the coast this summer after dead dolphins started washing up on shore now especially here you'll see on the map in virginia beach where the largest number of dolphins have made landfall now genetic tests point to a virus playing a major role in the massive dolphin vitale's are to correspondent megan lopez has

the full report. nine am and most beachgoers are just waking up in the tourist town of virginia beach but the virginia stranding response team is already in action this is by far the most serious event that i've ever seen this group is responsible for sea life recovery in the entire state of virginia and they've been working on the mystery of don't things washing up on the shores of the atlantic we have one bottle nosed dolphin stranding that we just got a call for about ten minutes ago the responding to a call from a local resident we have no why where today a team of three packs a stretcher cart and genetics kid into a trunk and heads out. a twenty minute drive takes them to a remote part of chick's beach and they're halfway on the shore but not far enough to escape the wrath of the waves. are first dead dolphin of the day it's a boy. the whole carcass immediately the group gets to work photographing the

dolphin measuring its length counting teeth and assigning it a number this guy is probably older. older worn look this dolphin is case number one two two two actually given that there are definitely days older it's a site that would set in most beachgoers but for these researchers it's another opportunity to get to the bottom of these mysterious deaths are there some good information out there right as the team drags the dolphin back into the truck and loaded in another call comes in another dead dolphin reported the team heads off to find it up and soundly east coast hundred dead dolphins have. and washing up on the shores particularly here in virginia beach now experts simply don't know what is causing all these hundreds of dolphins to die but scientists say that dolphins in particular are a good measure of the health of the ocean so having all these carcasses washed up on shore certainly isn't a good day any time you see a marine mammal like

a bottle is often in trouble that's concerning because they're there mammals just like you and i it's kind of devastating really to see it and certainly it's not a good sign for the ocean environment back at the lab another group begins an autopsy to find some possible answers to these mysterious deaths. that. scientists have been flying in from across the country to help the smell here is almost indescribable a mixture of fish and rotting flesh the smell sticks to your skin and clothing thanks to a thick blanket of humidity up to this point over two hundred ten dolphin carcasses have washed up on virginia's shores this summer four times the amount of previous years but after months of tireless research ocean scientists think they may have finally discovered the cause we don't know all the factors we do know that this dolphin morbillivirus is the primary agent that seems to be causing this event but but there could be other complicating factors you know we know that these animals

are exposed to a lot of different pollutants in the water they're stressed as a result of that whether that has has any implications in this event or not it's way too early to tell but it is concerning it's the same disease that killed over seven hundred dolphins between one nine hundred eighty seven and one nine hundred eighty eight but the problem is that even with this diagnosis there's little scientists can do to stop the spread of the disease the bottom line is in something like this this is a this is not only a wild animal population but it's a wild animal population that spends its entire life at sea and living under water it's impossible for us to actually do anything out there to really alleviate this so even if. that is the morbillivirus closing this all scientists can do is wait for the dolphins to wash up on shore and they were expecting many more before this disease runs its course in virginia beach maybe lopez are to. and the land owners in north carolina may soon be forced to sell energy companies the rights to the

natural gas underneath their property is now in rally last week state officials approved a non-binding proposal orts proponents argue would protect local residents from being uncompensated for gas inadvertently extracted from their land however environmentalists argue that the fracking rain recommendation forces property owners to sell their natural gas under their homes whether or not they really want to now earlier i was joined by teresa vick from the blue ridge environmental defense league to discuss the tremendous pressure on homeowners to sell their properties first start off by asking her to characterize this proposal for us i've been following this issue almost since its inception with the study group and. what was decided last winston essentially was to keep law that were put in place in one thousand. it was designed to learn invention no gas no oil development which is very different. today and.

designed because to do just like you just mentioned to protect landowners from folks you know from their next door neighbor sucked in their resources out from under the under the ground and that doesn't happen in a tight situation. so there's some real question about whether we even need to change this law or not and what can happen now is that if your neighbors and gas companies. and the government decide that you're in a drilling unit and they need your piece so to speak. to you mate. things more. cost effective to prevent wastefulness as i say they can force you into selling your resource and as you mentioned it's you know whether you want to or not you know for whatever reason you don't want to do it whether you want to wait until the price goes up whether you like to save that for your children or grandchildren or whether you just don't just don't have

a moral reason for not doing so and this study group could have recommended that we repeal the statute and they did not do so. and they've just left the door wide open for you know for the whole and gas industry to come in and and make people. you know sell their gas whether they want to or not now at this point this is just a nonbinding proposal it's not law what steps need to be taken for this proposal to become law well my understanding is that some pieces of it will go to the full mining and energy commission for incorporation into some of the rule sets that they're developing but the north carolina department of environment natural resources will be taking the recommendation to our legislature. and it's anybody's guess you know what will happen at that point. another thing i want to point out is

that this this does two things the side you know establishing the ability for this violation of property rights to occur it also gives the land man and the gas companies a big stick to approach people when they're considering whether they want to listen not to say well you know you can either lease now all we can make you know and so it's just patently unfair and you know there's even folks who have leased their land to gas companies already who don't feel that it's right. to be for the. and to be able to tell their neighbors like today's it's it's it's very sad it was a very very disturbing vision now the news and observer newspaper they said that this proposal has a very good chance of becoming law what do you personally think. like i said i think all bets are off. i would think it would be my feeling that conservatives in

particular property rights proponent and others would be very concerned about this because. you know eminent domain also comes around comes along with the gas industry but this is just this is a little different because this is a private industry that is going to the government and using the might in the blessing of the government to take you know they they do reimburse you but to to make you sell your resource whether you want to or not and you know you can't remember think before peace of mind and you're talking about folks home and in lake county in particular. even with the high recommended percentage you're still talking about the few controlling the mannie and is very concerning i worked pretty closely with landowners in that area. not sure it's a major argument for fracking is that it will generate jobs in north carolina what

a response to this. i feel like that that argument is overblown we have a small resource here we have a small. additional money a lot of the jobs of transit there are folks who come into town and they do what they're here to do their contract workers and when they're done they leave. in so i don't feel. i just from what i've read and what i understood and what i've studied i don't feel it's going to be a long lasting. economic development strategy for north carolina and it's going to have negative costs such as road damage infrastructure problems social services and so on. may not be considered so it's really hard to think that it's going to be a big moneymaker. that was theresa vic from the blue ridge environmental defense

league. now one day before president barack obama's scheduled visit to sweden julian assange co-founder of the transparency organization of wiki leaks has filed an affidavit and criminal complaint with police at stockholm's our london airport our son just witnessed swedish police to investigate a suitcase that he says was stolen from him in two thousand and ten by intelligence agents while traveling from sweden to germany in the affidavit assan suggests that the bag quote may have been illegally seized as part of an intelligence operation with the purpose of gathering information now according to we can be a wiki leaks spokes person similar complaints will be filed in other countries including germany and denmark both wall of unlawful us intelligence operations against songe what she claims occurred after wiki leaks publish classified documents about the u.s. war in afghanistan now according to wiki leaks this is the first of four planned criminal complaints they'll file in the month of september alone the organization

says they waited until after the trial of private first class. chelsea manning ended before filing any movements of their own julian a son's remains in the ecuadorian embassy in london where he's been for more than a year he's been granted asylum in ecuador but will be extradited to sweden for questioning if he leaves that embassy. and your parents might have told you that storks bring babies to their families but one of gyptian arrested a bird after some suspicion about its well well intentioned this is the stork that in egyptian fisherman brought to a local police station after noticing an electronic device attached to its feathers egypt has become increasingly volatile since democratically elected president mohamed morsi was forced from power by the military leaving citizenry concerned about foreign influence now the egyptian fisherman was convinced that the stork was spying on behalf of an on behalf of another government so he did what any concerned citizen would do when he conducted

a citizen's arrest of the bird. the bird was actually being tracked by french scientists interested in gathering more information about the storks and migration patterns so not a clandestine stork after all which makes sense considering we've learned that spies would rather use your cell phone data than to touch one to a bird. finally with the public hearing more about expanding government surveillance the phrase big brother has made a huge comeback but we also live in a digital age of little brother where private citizens have ways of surveilling each other and there are numerous companies that offer such services for the average sleuth for more on this residence laurie harkness.

you can't turn on the news or surf the internet for ten seconds before you see a story about. whether it's through a government or a corporation and the man is intent on surreptitiously collecting every scrap of digital data and all of us it's pretty bad which begs the question is spying ever good a firm called deal listening believes it can be a monitor social network postings made by kids on behalf of school they watch what the kids are posting to facebook twitter instagram and elsewhere monitoring for bullying suicidal thoughts truancy violence or other important issues that kids might feel too embarrassed about to bring up two adults california's glendale unified school district just paid over forty thousand dollars for a year's worth of the service delisting will provide school officials with

a daily report about the district's thirteen thousand students on line activity when the kids got wind of this they of course turned to twitter to express their outrage on the schools by tweeting things like what else does the school district want to do put cameras in our room. to listening is not alone in providing spying services that target kids you know kids is a robust phone at it automatically polls all of a child's facebook twitter and instagram activities so the parent can monitor what their kid is doing online in real time. and if the kid has an android phone the app can collect all of their text messages contacts images downloads location history pretty much everything athletic teams are also getting into the spying game with services like varsity monitor and pundit alert they offer ways for organizations to

keep track of their athletes on line to make sure they don't post anything stupid and they're living clean if they post something about getting drunk for instance here team managers will be alerted immediately all of these examples of spying are designed by companies who believe they have good intentions but ultimately what they're doing is enabling digital spy which is what we're all outraged about so the question remains can spying ever be justifiable. considering they spied on those buyers bradley manning and edward snowden might think so tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the red button. that does it for now for more on the stories we've covered you can go to youtube dot com slash r t america and check out our website at www dot com slash usa you

can also follow me on twitter at any it thank you for watching and have a great monday night. technology innovation all the developments around. the future covered. wealthy british style. market. can. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max concert for a no holds barred look at the global fine.