march against mom something to the close an arch. or two don't come. coming up on our t.v. american whistle blowers have made a trip to russia for a secret meeting with former n.s.a. contractor edward snowden they presented him with a special award for revealing the surveillance program more on that up ahead. day ten of the government shutdown republicans are now pushing for a short term debt ceiling increase but don't get your hopes up that doesn't mean that the government will be back to business so what does this mean for our economy find out coming up. climate change global warming it doesn't matter what you call it scientists say we're getting closer to the point of no return the new documentary sheds light on what could happen if humans fail to curb their carbon emissions we'll talk with the man behind the documentary later in the show.

it's thursday october tenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you are watching our t.v. well starting off this hour for the first time since she was convicted of the largest leak in u.s. history chelsea manning formerly known as private bradley manning has released a letter to her supporters that clarifying her reasoning for the mass document drop and criticizing people for speaking on her behalf without her consent the letter which was delivered to the guardian reads in part from my perspective at least it's not terribly clear to me that my actions were explicitly done for peace i don't consider myself a pacifist antiwar or especially a conscientious objector now i accept that there may be peaceful or antiwar implications to my actions but this is purely based on. your subjective

interpretation of the primary source documents released in two thousand and ten in two thousand and eleven later on in the letter manning did clarify what she is writing i am a transparency advocate i feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don't even know the most rudimentary details about them in there are facts and he was convicted in august by a military judge in fort meade maryland for twenty eight charges including violations of the espionage act along with death and fraud she was sentenced to thirty five years in prison but is eligible for parole in just seven years. and speaking of whistle blowers former n.s.a. contractor edward snowden had some special visitors travel all the way to moscow to meet with him this week f.b.i. whistleblower just live right act n.s.a. whistleblower thomas drake former cia analyst ray mcgovern and f.b.i. whistle blower coleen rowley met snowden in

a secret location they are the first americans known to have met him since he was granted asylum in russia in august to travel to moscow to present snowden with the sam adams award for integrity and intelligence also launched snowden edwards father arrived at the sheremetyevo airport this morning one has yet to meet with his son but is planning to see him the next couple of days artie's kevin owen caught up with a group of whistleblowers earlier today for a sort of meeting of the minds here's a wrap up of that conversation well you know some would call them veteran whistleblowers jesselyn radek. red mcgovern colin rowley all sides around the table with me earlier to tell me their experiences of whistle blowing themselves and how they were treated by the authorities as a result just earlier they met snowden at undisclosed location here in russia we still under heavy security to present him with the sam adams a war that's been presented to a new league since two thousand and two to intelligence professionals who take a stand for integrity and ethics what they see is the greater good incidentally

samuel adams was a cia whistleblower during the vietnam war we've been extensively covering edward snowden story in r.t. for a long time the first thing i wanted to ask was i was really i thought he looked great he seemed very centered and and. brilliant smart funny very engaged. i thought he looked very well but of course the obvious question was given the time edward snowden is now it reflected what he's done did he have any regrets well have fun i'm a governor former federal employee you served on the seven u.s. presidents over twenty seven years but then in two thousand and two went on to criticize. president george w. bush's use of government intelligence in the lead up to the war in iraq put the very same thought to edward this is an extraordinary person he's made his peace with what he did he's convinced to do put he did was right he has no regrets and he's willing to face whatever the future holds for him is that the person you saw

in front of you kohli yes actually we discuss this intel and integrity and intelligence issue quite extensively and we talked about prior examples of great people in history that had themselves been under this type of pressure and he's remarkably centered and thoughts went to was about the future when i asked him if edward snowden had shared any of his plans for the media the long term future their response focused on the future reforms he's paved the way for by his revelations i think is primary concern is about reform not about his future or what's going to happen to him but more about how i think the reform that is beginning that has begun in the united states and more importantly or just importantly around the world because it really is a global issue to the extent that the n.s.a. is spying on everybody friend or foe and that that conversation needs to continue and also people need to realize that there's

a greater issue of human rights that is brought up by asylum and the fact that a number of people involved in his case like sarah harrison glenn greenwald laura portress people are having trouble even moving around and getting where they're going to be personally and say we're worried about coming into your country we are worried about getting back into our own country and and that should not be that already the our united states is a ban on the rule of law that's one change itself from its very own constitution the mechanism by which we govern ourselves so when you when you have been as a rule of law and use a secret law secret pete seeger interpretation the law we're in a whole new ball game it's pandora's box and of course these last twenty four hours we also think he's vain or about to be reunited with these over him mosco as well who i'm sure behind closed doors to begin tonight with the support that only a father can. that was kevin owens from martine moscow now it's important to keep

in mind while we are discussing edward snowden that because of his revelations we are still learning more about exactly what the n.s.a. is monitoring and how the agency is going about it one of the people who has spent a lot of time combing through these papers a security technologist schneier he wrote the book out liar liars and outliers enabling the trust that society needs to thrive he spoke on wednesday at the cato institute conference on n.s.a. surveillance along with a number of journalists and a few politicians i had a chance to catch up with him right after his speech and i asked him what he looks for in the all of these n.s.a. documents in order to come up with stories. well i'm looking for technology stories you know the people looking for different things but what i want to know is how surveillance works when a large nation does it so we can build the internet to to protect ourselves share and is there any way that you can direct other other journalists that are trying to

dig through all this stuff to to help them find these these newsworthy stories that just aren't being covered you know i mean people are looking through the documents and writing their own stories i mean the stories coming out of the guardian the stories coming out of the washington post new york times there's that organization in brazil or in germany so i mean people looking for different things and i'm sure different reporters have different things are looking for something is a lot of coordination or or direction and i'm now involved in technology that's what i'm looking for now obviously as i said earlier part of this huge n.s.a. leak how much more is there to come out how much more of this pandora's box have we got to look at me i don't know i mean i'm not in charge of the stories you know if i find something that that's a story you know will write about it but you know what else is happening you know i don't have a i don't have a window into that sure now journalists often times when they're digging through these n.s.a. surveillance stories they as we heard a little bit earlier in the cato institute n.s.a.

conference we heard them talking about how journalists themselves are not protecting either themselves and also the sources that they talk to are not protecting themselves are you in fact protecting yourself it with encryption techniques i am and every journalist i work with them and everybody who's seen documents as far as i know is protecting themselves i mean they might do a better or worse job but people are actually taking this very seriously these documents are not floating around the guardian has them in a locked room protected by guards you know people by encryption and the conversations are encrypted people are taking this seriously documents are being redacted so no secrets aren't revealed that involve you know the. bad guys so i think all the reporters i've been impressed by how seriously they all take us now barton gellman of the washington post said that there is a zero percent chance of protecting yourself from sophisticated government opponents who are trying to in fact get your information do you think that's true i do i think in general we learned from the stories so far is that if

a government and not just united states and a large government want to target your computer they can get in but we actually knew that already we we know that attack is easier than defense we know that a concerted cyber criminal can break into your computer so it's certainly true but it's not really a surprise now say opine from the wall street journal said that the n.s.a. has become almost too big to fail what the amount of information and data that it collects do you think that that's an accurate statement and if so or if not can we reform it now i think reform is possible and fundamentally n.s.a. has two missions to protect communications and to eavesdrop on communications of the adversaries and what's happened is one mission the attack mission has gotten out of control and it's just really a matter of pulling in the balance now that is the united states reaction to worry about the rest of the world and i think we all have to realize that we collectively

all nations are safer if nobody can eavesdrop than if everybody can use drop it once we realize that the arms race there's actually a positive sum game then we have to deal with the so the non compliant actors the non nation states the criminals who are going to abide by that kind of rule and once you have coordination among the nations i think that's doable this is a hard process but i think that is really the way forward and one of your articles that you recently wrote for the guardian you said that this is an essay surveillance is actually making the american public and the internet community and in general less secure or can you explain that. so one of the things you know the n.s.a. is doing is a deliberately weakening security products so they are inserting vulnerabilities that they can later exploit and those vulnerabilities if you think about it are there for everybody so everybody can exploit them so by weakening the security standards they're making us less safe against everybody who might want to use drop

share now i want to play a quick clip from senator wyden when he spoke at cato n.s.a. conference let's let's take a listen to that. there is a real difference between secret operations and secret law operations have to be kept secret because that's what affects the well being of the dedicated people who work in the intelligence field and i don't take a backseat to anybody in terms of keeping secret operations secret that's not the same thing as keeping the laws secret the laws ought to be public all the time because the american people have to know what the law says in order to make judgments about how they feel about policies and elected officials so do they add words snowden leaks help us get a better understanding of what these secret larc laws are and when are we actually

going to see them more welly well i mean we're seeing stories are ready and and the court is actually very correct that this two kinds of secrecy there's the programs of the methodology and those should be made public because we as society need to decide whether they're a good idea or not whether our tax dollars should support them whether they're moral the things like the targets you know who the n.s.a. is spying on what the methods they're using i'm making this up to attack the chinese those kind of things do have to remain secret and to the credit of all the reporters those operational things are being redacted so well. are seeing the broad outlines of the programs the things we need to debate publicly we're not seeing the operational details that give the terrorists undue advantage now you recently made a call for more whistleblowers to come to you you said that their safety in numbers have you had any more you know i've had

a few people come to me talk about examples where the n.s.a. has asked for a backdoor none with have gotten with them and most people are still unwilling to be public about it and my hope is as these stories continue as there's more public outrage to what's going on that more engineers will come forward and will come forward publicly but there have been some stories and i'm hoping for more and when they come forward and you come out with that article we'd love to have you back on to talk about it thank you so much for joining us thank you. well it is day ten of the government shutdown and i don't need to tell you this but people are peeved how mad are they well remember when we were comparing their approval ratings to cockroaches or to toenail fungus new polls by public policy polling found that members of congress are now less popular than which is b.s. jury duty potholes hipsters the d.m.v. the i.r.s. daqduq and oh yeah hemorrhoids congress's approval rating now stands at just five

percent according to the associated press sixty one percent of americans lay the majority of the blame on republicans although fifty two percent say president obama should be doing more to help the situation but there does seem to be some progress within the walls of capitol hill today house republicans have proposed a six week extension to the nation's sixteen point seven trillion dollar debt limit as a way of avoiding the first ever u.s. default so is their hope yet for this unpopular bunch to tell me more i'm joined now by anthony around as oh director of economic research at the reason foundation and i can guarantee you that anthony is much more popular than zombies are. which is what have you had a very anthony on so let's start off with the latest news that's coming out from the g.o.p. they want to extend the debt limit temporarily but continue this debate this debate over spending doesn't seem like a tangible solution to pacify the stock market well in terms of

a solution for the stock market i don't necessarily think so my popularity is probably based on the audiences that just you ask in which comes to congress his popularity and you talk of the stock market there on the so looking at those polls they're looking at a much more long term picture in the simple reality is that the president doesn't want to negotiate at all on the government shutdown and he said if congress passes a clean debt ceiling raise for the next six weeks till accept it he'll sign it but he still doesn't want to negotiate on the shutdown so what are we looking at here how tangible is this debt limits solution really or are we just kicking the can down the road with the debt ceiling is always been a can kicked down the road from the outset it was pretty clear the republicans didn't really want to play with fire on the debt ceiling the republicans buy into the same idea that democrats do that if the united states government defaults it's an economic catastrophe i don't necessarily think that's the case. from the outset

it didn't look like they were going to to really play chicken and this offer on the table i think proves that the debt ceiling is a mere political tool it doesn't mean anything when push comes to shove both parties are happy to increase the amount of debt that the u.s. government has a we probably should just get rid of it we'd much better off with the spending cap sure i know that this is also coming if they do in fact kick it down the road it comes during the holiday season which could make it a little more tricky when it comes to that debt debate now an a.p. poll found that four in five americans say they haven't felt any personal effects from this shutdown should they expect to feel it sooner or later. it all depends on what it is you do so that people who have been feeling the effects the most are either government workers or people that use national parks people that are fishermen on the federal coast lines they'll continue to feel the same effects of the shutdown the simple reality is and i'm sure that the white house says internal

polling that most people haven't felt the effects and that i think has made the president feel comfortable in continuing to to push back on the republicans and say look i gave in to you before in two thousand and eleven i'm not going to give in again the republicans thought that they could push around the president like they had in the past it looks like they can't as long as that polling suggests that most people aren't feeling the effects the white house will probably continue to take this stand so i mean we are in day ten how much longer can we go on like this. you know it's all is going to depend on really who blinks in this political game and it's unfortunate it's political game because it really shouldn't be but i think that's what's going on in washington i mean i've spent about five years there i know people on capitol hill and they see this in political terms they want to be able to claim victory unfortunately both sides are going to claim victory no matter what happens so they probably could just go through with anything built each side is still going to claim they won this game. how we get out of this somebody is

going to have to politically blink as the language has been going along with one side is going to have to give in the federal government is not going to remain shut down for three four five months it's just a matter of which side begins to feel the political pain to the point where they think that they have to break and i'm glad you brought that political game up one of the major criticisms that i have heard coming out from the democrats anyway is that the shutdown is a result of a fringe group of republicans however according to that same a.p. poll that i referenced earlier more than four in ten republicans in the public identified with the tea party and insist that their leaders hold firm in the standoff so it is this idea of an ideological standoff becoming more popular even if it means closing shop on the entire country the thing is if you are republican that is in a district that got elected with sixty seventy percent and it was a tea party wave as much as congress has

a low approval rating you're fine it's moderate republicans people who are in these districts that are incumbents who are now losing in the polls to democrats that care the most about it you do have a group of people that actually kind of like the president don't worry about being voted out of office next november and so is long as those people have the strongest voice they will try to continue and they will see this as a political gain unfortunately i think that you do have the tea party looking at this is a game and you also have the. he was looking at it as a game he doesn't want to break his will he doesn't want to give in he wants to make sure that the republicans can't push him around anymore i understand i sympathize with their it's coming from they both see it as a game i don't know what the outcome is but we'll have to wait and see will have to wait and see indeed and all of us tend to be the pawns in this political chess match anthony rand as our director of economic research at the reason foundation thank you so much for having me move over al gore there's

a new documentary out on the internet that attacks the issue of global warming take a look sort of. late. because i mean. it's hard to imagine earth without life we take life for granted but life has not always flourished. recognize that voice well if you're an avid r.t. america viewer you should big picture host tom hartman is a man behind the documentary it's called the last hour and it takes a different look at global warming or at least one that is less popularized is a ten minute film so short sweet to the point definitely worth a watch tom hartman joined me just a short time ago to talk about his new project and we started off by speaking about the permian mass extinction which is the period of time when the dinosaurs died the facts behind that mass die off play a major role in this film so i asked tom why we in the twenty first century should

be so worried about an event that happened over two hundred fifty million years ago les it. well the mass extinction first of all is the worst of the five mass explain extinctions that the planet has experienced ninety five ninety six percent of all life on earth vanished all five extinctions involve the crust of the earth being punctured and and greenhouse gases principally carbon dioxide coming out and warming the planet they were all caused by global warming and if you were and the in the case of the permian it started because of this massive lava flow up in siberia in what's called the siberian traps that went on for thousands of years so if you were standing in you know somewhere far away from where the lava flow was you know on the other side the continent during the early years of the permian even the early thousand years of the permian looking around the atmosphere you might see that the skies get a little redder at night and things like that but other than that you would not

have any idea that an extinction had started it had passed a tipping point that there was no way to stop it and that within a certain period time ninety six percent of all life would be gone. but we use that not as a metaphor but example because we are within. possibly centuries possibly decades of tipping points that could lead to another mass extinction. is probably a closer example than the permian the permian you've seen the whole maximum but it's like we want to bring the word that you were the extinction word of the conversation sure and you certainly did that with some very startling graphs that actually appeared in that film now it's interesting because one of the things that i noticed was that you chose to bring climate scientists and geologists together to talk about this talk about why you decided to bring these two disciplines together back in the one nine hundred sixty s.

they were just beginning to figure out what caused mass extinctions is a huge debate and the assumption in fact back then was that probably all five of them had been the result of meteorite impacts it turns out only one was the k.t. extinction sixty five million years ago killed the dinosaurs they didn't really figure that out until the late one nine hundred eighty s. and they didn't really nail it down until the one nine hundred ninety s. they were still debating the permian mass extinction one cause that up until the early two thousand and b.b.c. did a brilliant documentary in two thousand and two called the day the earth nearly died where they brought together a bunch of these geologists to lay out exactly why the permian happened and in that documentary they talk about how the giant. volcanic lava flow in siberia produced a six degree warming celsius of the earth and that was enough to warm the oceans six degrees which was enough to melt the hundreds of thousands of billions of tons of methane methane clathrates methane hydrate that is frozen that is

a lattice kind of a slurry like a snow cone thing at the bottom of the oceans to melt that so it went into the atmosphere this methane is one hundred times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas so this sudden eruption of methane into the atmosphere then doubled the rate of global warming and that killed off all the life on earth and so . you know what we're what we're pointing it out right now is that that methane is down there again it's still there and you know we need to. be very careful that we don't warm this planet up enough that the methane starts coming out and it's already starting to come out from the siberian tundra right now and of all the different documentaries that i've watched that others have watched about global warming very few actually mention that methane that's on the bottom of the ocean why is this like one of the first times that we're actually hearing about this well it's this is sort of a follow on to your last question why do we talk about the permian and all this because we just discovered this i mean two thousand and two is real recent science and and there's

a huge. debate is the wrong word because there's no debate it's an inquiry nobody really knows how much carbon is out there the range the guestimated range for curb in in the form of methane in the in the frozen slurries of around the continental shelves is anywhere from three trillion tons on the low end which is enough to produce the permian mass extinction that was two trillion tons from three trillion tons in the low gas to around ten trillion tons on the high guess the amount this just in the arctic is pretty closely you know a good guestimate is probably two to two and a half trillion tons the car of experiment the carbon arctic reserve experiment the nasa is doing right now you can't visit their website because they're shut down because of the government shutdown but we had one of their scientists in the video and he was talking about how there's forty to fifty billion tons of carbon that is ready to be activated right now i mean this close enough to the surface that just a little bit of warming could bring it out and then you get that positive feedback

loop that spirals you into an uncontrollable global global warming which five times in the past history of the planet has produced an extinction where more than half of all life dies but at the same time i know that if you are sitting at home are going to ask the question if that's the station's happen like that's where the ocean warmed up before without humans contributing to it how are we contributing it to it these days that's really a question each time in the past five times the crust of the earth ripped open. carbon dioxide came out four times it was apparently from tectonic activity continents moving around you know massive volcanic eruptions as a consequence of that one time it was because a meteorite punched through down there came punch through the surface of the of the crust what we have been doing for the last hundred fifty years is very methodically drilling holes through the crust of the earth and we're not doing it in a big clumsy fashion like a meteorite where you hit some areas that have a lot of carbon and some areas that don't have a lot of carbon we're doing a very specifically going just for those areas where we know that there's

a lot of carbon and we're pulling that carbon out in the form of coal oil and gas and burning it and throwing the carbon dioxide into the air so we are and we have been over the course of the last century and a half replicating the mechanism by which the previous five extinctions happened which is the puncturing of the earth's crust the release of the scourge of that accident and quickly where can they find this documentary to watch last hours dot org thank you so much tom hartman host of the big picture joining me with his new documentary thank you maggie that doesn't find out why meghan lopez. the plot was terrible they come up very hard to take out plots against someone here there's a plug hat in that that was the perfect there's no lens let's come

up. with a. little please. please. look upon. this immediately though so we leave that maybe. by the same motion security for your party there's a goal to wear shoes that no one is asking with the guests that you deserve answers from it's all on politics only on our t.v. .

ali. you know. a pleasure to have you with us here on our team today.