coming up on our t.v. n.s.a. has joined the game of drones according to a new read and vogue agency is playing a big role in the u.s. drone program more details just ahead and it's the real life get out of jail free card the u.s. supreme court tells the state of california to release thousands of prisoners we'll take a look at the ruling ahead and it's the war over water and states are now battling over water rights we'll take a deeper look at the fight that's been pitting the neighboring states against each other for more than two decades. it's thursday october seventeenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm lynn neary david and you're watching our t.v.

we begin today with the latest n.s.a. revelations leaked by former government contractor edward snowden the documents which were obtained by the washington post outline the extent to which the n.s.a. has been involved in the cia's counterterrorism activities the document specifically detailed the agency's engagement and the u.s. drone campaign which involves using armed unmanned vehicles to scope out an attack those thought to be affiliated with terrorism in the past the program has been presented as an exclusive initiative of the cia but now we're learning that the u.s. drone wars depend heavily on the n.s.a.'s ability to collect information from e-mails telephone calls and from a myriad of other sources according to the washington post the n.s.a. has even created a secret unit called the counterterrorism mission aligned cell or c t.-mac which allowed the agency to focus large amounts of resources on hard to find individuals and response to this latest release the n.s.a. has said quote our activities are directed against valid foreign intelligence

targets in response to requirements from u.s. leaders in order to. attacked the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction however this kind of involvement from the n.s.a. has attracted intense criticism from americans who argue that the n.s.a. surveillance program has grossly overstepped its boundaries and word snowden the former government contractor who leaked the revealing n.s.a. documents to the media remains in russia where he was granted a one year asylum his father long snowden visited him this week and arrived back in the u.s. yesterday take a listen to the advice he has given to his son to stay. to stay what do you plan to touch my advice that you got this really what my son will be. called the old he's happy that he used to be committed to what he's done. long stone and says his son still has more secrets to share and of course we will continue following that story . well believe it or not that the eleventh hour the united states congress found

a resolution to reopen the government and avoid defaulting on its debt and it only took sixteen days just one day short of the october seventeenth deadline set by the u.s. treasury secretary yesterday senate leaders announced the final deal that would end the partial government shutdown and after passing in the senate the bill was brought to the house floor late last night where it was cleared with two hundred eighty five congressmen voting for the bill and one hundred forty four against it let's take a quick look at what this bailout bill actually entails the deal will fund the government until january fifteenth if both sides have agreed on a long term solution by that point we could see another government shutdown under the plan they also agreed to lift the debt limit through february seventh but perhaps the most interesting aspect of the bill is that earmark spending that's made its way in two point two billion dollars has been authorized for a project that involves a dam that flows through the home state of senate minority leader mitch mcconnell

and that's on top of the seven hundred seventy five million dollars that's already been allocated to the project the president signed that bill early this morning and later at a news conference he called out the republican party for their involvement in the country's near default if you don't like a particular policy or a particular president then argue for your position go out there and win an election push to change it but don't break it don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building that's. being faithful to what this country's about. with the bill signed sealed and delivered hundreds of thousands of federal employees were finally able to return to work today for the first time in over two weeks but before breathing

a sigh of relief remember that this is not the last time we'll be hearing about the ominous debt ceiling unfortunately. and this week the u.s. supreme court declined to take up a long running dispute regarding the overcrowding of california's prison system california governor jerry brown had asked the court to overturn a two thousand and eleven judicial order that required the state to reduce the prison population by nearly one hundred forty percent california prisons have been in the national spotlight over the course of the past year as a state grappled with severe overcrowding leading to concerns about prison health conditions one particular concern for the prison advocates has been the state's employment of a long term solitary confinement policy the controversy which led to a major hunger strike by california prisoners earlier this year now of the roughly one hundred twenty thousand prisoners in the california prison population the court has ordered that the state free about nine thousand six hundred additional inmates by the end of the year california have cut its prison population by twenty five

thousand inmates in the past two years so to discuss this and the mass incarceration that seemed to define this country earlier i was joined by ernest dal then a partner at rosen bean galvin and grunfeld i first asked him why the court ordered the release of so many inmates from the california prison system well the federal courts in california have been grappling with inhumane conditions in the california prison system for twenty years and during that time the state has tried to put more resources into minimally humane care for prisoners but at the same time we run incarceration binge and the state can ask the laws increasing sentences and sending more people into prison for minor offenses and drug offenses. the prisons just became so overcrowded that you couldn't you couldn't do basic things like respond to a person who was bleeding and people would bleed to death in their cells the places were just too crowded and so the courts finally in two thousand and eight said

enough is enough you're operating this place at two hundred percent of your capacity and you're killing people and so you need to get it down to something more reasonable and they said they ordered a cap on the on the capacity and then. the state has been complying with that kept trying to comply with that cap since about two thousand and eight and the population is down somewhat and now we're just fighting over the last seven or eight thousand people after four years of this process of bringing the prison population under control and what were the conditions like for some of the inmates that you specifically represented. well i represent the people the most vulnerable people in the population and in my case the people with severe mental illness i mean in america we've had a trend since the one nine hundred sixty s. and closing down mental hospitals and there was a promise when we did that there would be more community based mental health

services so people who had been treated in institutions for the end same could be treated in their communities well that promise never materialized and essentially we we took people from the mental hospitals put them on the street they deteriorated got involved with law enforcement and ended up in prison and so something like twenty five to thirty percent of state prisoners in california are people with a severe mental illness and those people were in her if it conditions they would be very symptomatic to compensate commit suicide be in cells where they're they're basically losing touch with reality smearing themselves with their own waste and there just wasn't enough capacity to care for them the other companion cases ism is a medical case where you just have people with with medical conditions range ranging from infections to cancer who also were not getting minimal care and they're in prison it's not like they can just go to the doctor or call nine one one

the only care they can get is the care that the prison system gives them and california is simply just stuffing too many people into these prisons to deliver even minimal care and that definitely sounds unbearable what do you make of this argument being made by municipalities and by california governor jerry brown that the influx of inmates into society will be overly burdensome and dangerous it's false i mean that it's already happened when we filed for overcrowding relief in late two thousand and six at that point the state policymakers already knew that they had a problem and they could see this ruling coming down the pike and so they started reducing the prison population on their own. peak in two thousand and seven we had one hundred seventy four thousand prisoners in our state prison system and since two thousand and seven they're down about forty thousand prisoners so we're down to about one hundred twenty thousand one hundred twenty four thousand prisoners now so

we've already had this enormous reduction in the prison population and we haven't had a crime and in fact from two thousand and seven to two thousand and twelve which of the latest crime statistics we have crime in california is down more than ten percent i think what we've learned in this country we went on incarceration in banbridge in response to crime waves of the seventy's and we ended up with the highest incarceration rate in the world and now some states either voluntarily like in new york state or through litigation like in california are starting to get over the incarceration binge drinking their very prison populations under control and they're not suffering crime ways new york state as as enjoyed the greatest reduction in crime in history while reducing its prison population voluntarily i think your communities are correct to agitate and lobby as much as possible for more funds and what i hope one of the results of my cases will be is to take the

ten billion dollars a year that we throw into the prison system into a system that doesn't work and return some of that money to the communities to counties and cities so they can use it on things that do work we know that putting more police on the street works to reduce crime we know that more services for people with mental illness works to reduce crime and so we need to get that money out of prisons where it's just wasted warehousing people and into these communities so they are the communities are right they they should get the resources that we're now freeing up from the prison system and aid i want to ask you one last question and we only have about a minute left you know the idea that these prisoners are being freed isn't necessarily true in many cases there are plans to move many of these inmates from state prisons to local and private prisons is the solving a problem or perhaps just shifting it. well the gov last month when it became clear that they were not going probably not going to get relief from the

supreme court of the united states the governor in california's legislative leaders passed a bill to that authorize funding to move this last eight thousand or so to as you said private contracted prisons in different parts of california using that we have a big private prison industry in america. that may buy them some breathing time i think you are correct to say that it's not a long term solution a long term solution would be to use the proven crime reduction policies that we know about and not waste money giving into the private prison industry but if it does by the policymakers some more time then and they use that time wisely then it could be a good thing absolutely will all very very important information they give so much for coming on and breaking it down for us as galban a partner at rosen by and calvin and grunfeld thank you you thank. didn't get much media attention at the time but in the days following the boston marathon bombing

of florida a florida chechen immigrant named ybor team to dodge it was shot and killed by the f.b.i. on force and officers had been interrogating to da shit for his alleged relationship with boston bombing suspect and the camera lens are naive as the eye authorities claim that to dodge have turned violent and was killed by officers in an act of self-defense but today should family has long claimed that this was cold murder man shot dead despite being completely unarmed but the pursuit and interrogation has seemed to extend past just todashev the involvement his family is now accusing u.s. authorities of mounting a campaign of quote intimidation and harassment against the dosh of the soci it's to break down the very latest i was doing earlier by r t's on the stasi a church cannot who has been following the case very closely i first asked her what we know about the friends were allegedly being intimidated. well i mean around the to the first person we're talking about is such an aggressive a twenty year old who's had to have been a very games roommates lover and girlfriend the way she described their

relationship we do know that she had attended one of the voluntary interviews with the f.b.i. prior to this killing she was deported from the united states this weekend and is now back home in moldova after spending several weeks at an immigration detention center in florida now prior to that this summer she has also spent several months behind bars for having been staying in the u.s. after her u.s. visa these are to the u.s. expired and the reason that she's been talked about as a person being intimidated and harassed is largely said to be because she had given an interview about it bragging because she spoke to the media about him describing him as a good person and she herself has said that she believes that this is why she's being harassed this is also an opinion shared by a bragging family including his father and also the council of american islamic ana american islamic relations who has been closely following this case and has providing has been providing a lot of legal assistance to the dosh of family the second person is sure modern

era leave a twenty year old who we have actually met when we interviewed the father verbruggen he has been in jail since september eighteenth after being charged with tampering with a witness battery case involving to dosh of his however not linked at all to the boston bombings or the f.b.i. so both of these people twenty year old friends of the bragging they both were refused lawyers and the young man in one case is detained on a federal detainer meaning he won't be released until a federal agency decides this might be the case and how involved have these friends then in the investigation into the circumstances of. well law obviously they were close with him in terms of the das we do know in terms of the investigation we do know of course like i said that the girlfriend had attended interviews with him on had a close relationship with him the young man we met him when he broke into the shed father of dubai he was in florida trying to push for an investigation in terms of

what kind of reasoning was behind the brutal murder of his son the young man was helping the father who doesn't speak english driving him around it's likely to say that they were kind of living together and the father was staying with him so they were certainly very close but in terms of how how far they went into the investigation is unclear because we of course do know that the f.b.i. keeps any results if they have any under wraps as well as care the organization that has been helping the family are waiting for official results to be announced in order to go ahead and kind of talk more and bring more light and launch any potential civil legal action in this case and out of that the i know that you had the chance a while back to speak to tell doshas father he is convinced that his son was murdered by the f.b.i. what exactly does he think happened well i mean he basically says that what happened to his son was a cold blooded murder he has these gruesome photos of his dead son with the bullets in his chest and we do know that he was also shot in his head and certainly he's

just completely flabbergasted by what happened certainly in tahrir in terms of this latest what they call intimidation and harassment of the friends he's not surprised really after what happened to his son because when we saw him in august he was in florida to try to get answers and it's been months and still he has not heard any kind of official reasoning although he has been saying that officials did promise to keep him in the loop he has now returned to chechnya to his hometown grazin and has been waiting for more results but nothing has really been coming out and this heartbroken father including the rest of the family are just waiting for the officials to say something. and how is the f.b.i. responding to all of this well you know i mean right it's curious that the f.b.i. has not commented on the deporting of the roommate or the girlfriend to tianna they have also not commented on these allegations of intimidation and harassment they keep saying that an investigation is ongoing that they are working on bringing more

light on this case but organizations such as care following the story closely believe that the f.b.i. is very unlikely to obviously police themselves and are not really expecting many results it is worth mentioning that two other separate investigation in this case are going on the department of justice is carrying out one and also the state attorney for the orlando area so likely that some more lights will be shot even though many have lots of doubts considering how murky this case has been since the killing of a bragging took place on may twenty second most certainly very mysterious we're going to continue to follow it thank you so much for all of your great reporting it was our t. correspondent on a stuff future going on water water everywhere but not a drop to drink most of us know it as an old adage but for people throughout the united states assange has turned into an unfortunate reality as more and more states begin to run out of clean drinking water and back this lack of resources is now playing out at the judicial level as states equal resolution in court most

recently the state of florida filed suit against georgia blaming it scarcity of water on a burgeoning population in the city of atlanta artie's lives wall has more. for over two decades three states have been in a bitter battles over water now. have a stake in the app. bucci flynn's river system is the source of drinking water fishing business and recreation or i'm standing right now i am and georgia just on the other side of this river that's alabama of the water is flowing down south into the state of florida and with all three states having a stake in this river it's leading to a war over water early october florida filed a lawsuit against georgia in the supreme court the sunshine state charged its northern neighbor with using too much water florida says georgia's water

consumption is drying out business for oyster farmers oysters need a healthy mix of fresh and salt water to thrive so who is sucking up the most water many blame out lana the city is growing and so is its thirst for water a little. is population growth this code is climate change is coming we're starting to scratch our water resources particularly periods of drought but outside florida experts keeping an eye on the water level of the chattahoochee river say it's not all atlanta's fault i think there's a lot a lot of climate change trends we see less rainfall in the nail the last ten years and that certainly affects the flow into have a logic probe and there's a lot of other variables that effect always years other than just praise waters the neighboring states have been fighting over their rivers resources for over twenty years one lawsuit after another there's been no solution that quenches everyone's

thirst it's not very often that they come to. a consensus around something that both people have some given taking in the you either win or lose usually in court you think of the cost of twenty three years of litigation and these deals and then the federal agencies that are involved it's in the limits for the most part the river is. regulated by the army corps of engineers if florida gets its way the corps would force atlanta to cut back on its water consumption and divvy up the water among the three states but some that have a stake in the river still hold out hope that the dispute can be settled outside the court i would hope that within the next five years the three states can get to the table and and bring resolution of this in columbus georgia liz wahl r.t. and to discuss this issue further i was joined earlier by manu lolla director at

the columbia water center i first asked him if there were any other states facing similar complex like the one between georgia and florida. water conflicts of this color are actually not that uncommon. if you look at the history of america in the rest what it was what and then there was sawyer by developing callbacks across the water like even the most famous of those little rabbit look on back which i thought they'd been i think twenty it turned out that every part about what i. mean that what it does so people today talk about change but i make it continuously agree. with me you can have. i've been the subject of what twenty years maybe try. if you do like they did with the colorado to come to an agreement where you look at the waters off thirty of the

. two different states also different all get a station. in proportion to what you think is the average but used. to advice you like saturday. to. effectively. was that. state of the colorado utah. wyoming and so forth to develop enough. for that issue it is an issue. operation. of our country doing there is a view shared with the department of state video everything absolutely you know in the florida georgia case in particular to the dispute was mainly over the following revenue for our eastern businesses do you think it takes business interests to really spur change. i paid is what it's going to come to because

since the 1980's when president reagan was in office the federal government environmental regulation has gotten out of the business of managing our planning or developing the water resource so all of us started the fight state board of programs like when it comes to an issue which is across the there's really no clear favorite either one for doing the people who are the groups that are most often. defined i showed in pairs of this this is food supply chain on backwater most of the water in the country is used for food production or for energy production so those other business in. the full frame office to be sure well you know we've heard people say now that water is the new oil to oil in the next generation do you think that's a fair comparison. not quite it's obviously very valuable as

a person who works on water i love it when people try to extol the what you it's all water under value but realistically there's a few different the key difference is that water is a reviewable resource we have the hydrological cycle that we are loaded or in kindergarten so there's a certain amount of the rich soil that we received thirty of us process. color on which is essentially being buying however beyond that places such as over the. united states or sector that. are in parts of florida. we do have water which is one hundred two hundred thousand years old and people have been expecting. we might be looking at. oil on the other hand that are in the prices of the value of oil seemed to be pretty well established by the market average water because this trade as

a public sector resource is sure to be priced and so we don't really know what we should assign a value to it and i think that's going to come first before we start having. that was a monologue director of the quantity of water center. have you ever watched the news or read an article in which a poll is the main piece of evidence used to come to a conclusion how many times you believe that the findings in the poll are accurate and today's resident laurie harkness takes a look at the polling system to find out which polls present substantial findings and which ones do not.

i confess i use polls as supporting information when i'm trying to make a point before but two new polls and recent news are so ludicrous that i think it's time to address the fact that polls are generally stupid crapp stupid poll number one the pew internet and american life project recently released new data on how americans engage with mind video they found that only twelve percent of all american adults who go online watch porn and that is some crap right there there is no way that only twelve percent of american adults online have watched bored even pew itself noted in the survey that people might have lied about the porn question stupid and much more insidious toll number two the national health and nutrition examination survey or may hate you is

a research program that's been at ministers and funded by the c.d.c. for the past forty years it's the most comprehensive health survey in the u.s. and it's used for important things like determining what initiatives will get funding and making all those big statements like how many americans are obese that kind of thing in the survey tens of thousands of people are given checkups and are asked to report what they ate for the past twenty four hours just recently independent researchers took a closer look at nih hanes findings over the past forty years and discover. the result is the logically impossible the data clearly demonstrate that the people surveyed were lying about how many calories they ate which means that forty years of health information about americans is probably wrong so polls are full of crap because they rely on people telling the truth that's ludicrous enough

but polls also ask only a relatively small amount of people questions and assuming their answers reflect the feelings of an entire population and pollsters also control how they frame those questions which can oftentimes be misleading so the bottom line is there are many reasons to never rely on or quote a poll unless of course the poll bindings are something you agree with then they can totally be used as you refutable scientific proof to back up whatever point you're trying to make tonight let's talk about bad by following me on twitter at the rested. and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered today go to youtube dot com slash r t america check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can follow me on twitter at david for now have

a great night. technology innovation and the developments around. the future covered. hello there i marinate and this is boom bust here and some of the stories are tracking for you today. yes the shutdown is over news for those of you who might have been hiding under a rock in one of the newly rio.