coming up on our t.v. news statistics are out on the number of deaths caused by u.s. drone strikes this is the future of the drone program is revealed we'll talk all things you way the ahead and there's a new man in charge of new york city but will mayor bill de blasio keep the current controversial stop and frisk program in place or will they make major changes we've got a report from the big apple coming up and before you ship or receive that new digital package here hold the n.s.a. you might be getting your mail before you do plus encrypting your computer might not be might be more challenging now that the n.s.a. is racing to stay three steps ahead of you by building get this quantum computers that's later in the show.

it's friday january third eight pm in washington d.c. i'm maggie lopez and you are watching r.t. well we begin this hour with a closer look at the u.s. drone program its effectiveness and its future new estimates released by the bureau of investigative journalism the long war journal and the new america foundation are shedding light on just how expansive unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have been since two thousand and two and all there i've been a total of four hundred sixty one air strikes in pakistan yemen and somalia resulting in some three thousand five hundred twenty deaths of the people killed four hundred fifty seven or eleven percent were civilians meanwhile the defense department released its annual report on the use of unmanned systems the report laid out a road map through twenty thirty eight of how the u.a.e. program will continue to develop take a look at this chart this is an inventory of the to. model number of unmanned

aircraft the department of defense currently has in its possession and those are just the ones that fly the d.o.d. also has thousands of ground and maritime systems the agency estimates it will spend four point one billion dollars on unmanned systems and twenty fourteen a thirty percent drop from twenty thirteen but still quite a bit of money i spoke earlier with abraham wagner in los angeles he's an adjunct professor at columbia university's school of international and public affairs i also spoke with mary ellen o'connell she is a professor of law and a research professor of international dispute resolution at the kroc institute for peace studies at the university of notre dom i began by asking mary ellen what she thought about these numbers. well i'm very critical of this new statistic being released by the council on foreign relations it is simply misleading that there have only been eleven percent of all persons killed designated as civilians this is

simply incorrect the only place where i go for statistics and i am one of the experts one of the people who has been tracking and looking into killings by drones since the very first one in a man outside in a combat zone in two thousand and two and i am a professor of international law in my studies i only look at the bureau investigative journalism and i look at their low but also their high numbers and the bureau reports total numbers of four thousand one hundred persons killed that's the statistic we should be looking at and even more importantly we should focus as americans on the number of two hundred six two hundred six that is the high number of children we may have killed those are the relevant statistics and they should be reinforcing americans views that drone killings outside official recognized legal combat zones should come to an end and abraham what do you think about those numbers i know the military would probably say that

a lot in percent of civilian casualties is relatively low when you look at the effectiveness of these programs overall that is is that your sense of it. no it really isn't. i think that the number of casualties given the situation are fairly low the eleven per cent at a risk mary it's hard to you know pick any particular source and say this number is right or that number is right even if we accept the four thousand number as a reasonable estimate and we look at the eleven percent number and think those reports from the council on foreign relations and you know it's an aggregate number the number of civilian deaths for example if we look at the not for the past four years in pakistan we're talking in the one to three percent range there for a looking at the emmen the numbers are much higher in the fourteen percent range but warfare is not sanitary there really is no such thing as surgical

strikes and any time you're engaged in warfare there is going to be collateral damage and it's highly unfortunate that the collateral damage often involves civilians women and children but that's the nature of warfare and the nature of warfare these days as we've seen post nine eleven is not the same type of warfare we faced in decades prior they are not declared wars they're not necessarily official wars and you know i'm a law professor as well at columbia also at u.c.l.a. and when we teach the law of war the sort of things we're teaching our old wars we're in a new environment and a new regime now mary ellen you kind of touched on it before but one of the problems is the classification of what exactly a militant is an often is defined as all military aged males in a strike zone regardless of whether or not they participated in combat activities could the civilian death toll be even higher than the u.s.

made or that this report estimates given that the classification. well i have to disagree with abraham when he said that we're in a new kind of warfare and therefore the way we classify people has to change under international law the definitions in the geneva conventions and there are additional protocols the definition of who is a civilian and who is a combatant who may lawfully be killed in combat or who may not lawfully intentionally be killed in combat has not changed and the united states is fully on board with the definitions under international law and under those definitions there are few if any of the people that the united states has killed in yemen pakistan and somalia who are legally defined as combatants and those are the only people we may and tension they killed abraham is talking about the dirtiness of war and collateral damage but outside of an armed conflict zone and we're talking about yemen pakistan somalia none of those persons should have been killed under armed

conflict rules they perhaps could be killed in the attempt to arrest then resisting arrest under peace time law enforcement rules but we haven't been invited to do any of that kind of arrests in any of these countries so let's be clear under international law which is the law that binds the united states and all countries resorting to military force four thousand people killed is an unacceptable unlawful and reprehensible number and it should and abraham do you want to respond to that. i don't agree we've selectively decided to ignore international law and these definitions since nine eleven when it suits our desire to do so the kinds of definitions that are contained in those conventions are antiquated that people that took out thirty some. civilians in the last couple of days in russia were not following these rules the activities we've been engaged in post nine eleven don't

necessarily follow these rules and these definitions that i probably agree with because i'm for alleged fraud and probably mary-ellen that these definitions are in fact antiquated you're not going to find the people that seek to do us harm that seek to kill americans qualifying under adequate to definitions and says in the piece these definitions need to be modernized and changed this is not the nature of foreign policy today we made a decision as a nation following nine eleven and something called the bush doctrine now to go after terrorists who seek to do us evil and those who support them wherever they may be we haven't changed that doctrine and continue to operate and are that so long as we do that have an issue instead of the doctrine that abrams the doctor navy doctor and abraham is talking about is a unilaterally imposed political view of the bush administration this is not what

president obama was talking about in may of this year twenty third last year twenty thirteen when he said the united states would comply with international law he did not say that these were antiquated rules his lawyers and he tried to to shove what they were doing into the accepted current rules of international law they didn't talk about antiquated rules so i'm afraid abraham's view about the united states' position on international law is incorrect we have not. sought to change the rules we had just thought to go. to to evade analysis of the actual facts of what the united states is doing that's i assume why there's so little official u.s. commentary. to justify under international law these killings when they were harry reasoner him and mary ellen let me jump in there every now and then i own c.n.n. report says it is reducing the amount of money it spends on unmanned technology is that a good sign in your opinion i think it's

a bad sign of the one thing i think most people will agree on is that on man vehicles or drones and i guess the new tour. that the defense department is calling a non piloted aircraft these things save lives and they save money one of the great numbers which we you know need to focus on is that since we've started military operations in the tribal areas places like was era stand which are horribly and hospitable we have lost absolutely no american lives in aircraft no and thank you all we've almost all over for i'm sorry i have to cut you off there abraham we're just out of time this is a wonderful discussion one that needs to continue mary ellen o'connell a professor of law at the university of notre dame in new york and abraham wagner adjunct professor at columbia university in los angeles new york stop and frisk program had a number of roadblocks this past year first with a high profile trial over the legality of the practice and then with allegations of

abuse by individual police officers but with the end of michael bloomberg his reign as mayor and the beginning of build a blasio was where does the future of the stop and frisk program stand for more on that we turn to our key correspondent ana stasia charkha. the n.y.p.d. stop and frisk policy reached the peak of its criticism and controversy during twelve years under mayor bloomberg the stopping and tearing gating and searching of new yorkers on the streets overwhelmingly in communities of color without warrants and often under flimsy pretenses hundreds of thousands of stops need each year human rights groups and advocates have dubbed the policy of moral illegal discriminatory and a violation of civil and privacy rights whereas officials have been saying that it actually helps prevent crime groups like the american civil liberties union has been saying that nine out of ten cases people were found to be completely innocent

even oakwood into the n.y.p.d. official records now in new york city new york has a new mayor bill de blasio for throughout his election campaign promised to alter this policy and put and to. discrimination and he has now appointed a new police commissioner who right off the bat promised to bring about change in return trust to communities in there in communication and being together walking hand in hand with the n.y.p.d. on a daily basis however despite these promises the irony here is that new york's new top cop is also known to be one of the initial proponents of the original form of the controversial practice because when he was first police commissioner back in the ninety's under mayor giuliani he did enforce more aggressive tactics in the police force which led to bringing down crime but also reading stop and frisk

so many community leaders and groups here in new york have been voicing their concern and criticism because of this nomination they're saying they can't trust a man who was known to have embrace this policy prior to in previous. years and certainly they're saying they want a man to one the job of altering the controversial stop and frisk policy to be someone who represents change and not just a continuation of the process so the question now is whether the new commissioner will be the right or wrong man for the job and also what the politicians promise is can actually be turned into real action of change and most importantly whether many new yorkers can begin to trust their police force again after decades of using and escalating a practice that has been dubbed unconstitutional by critics and. you are also coming out of new york of queens based journalist who was covering the occupy wall street anniversary protest back in two thousand and twelve has filed

a lawsuit against new york city the n.y.p.d. and ten individual police officers for poor claims he was detained beaten searched and arrested without probable cause even after he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist thirty four year old christopher roan was writing for the boston phoenix at the time of his arrest charges of disorderly conduct were eventually dismissed however flown says he was functioning within his rights as a journalist to photograph observe and investigate the september seventeenth demonstration but police officers disagree claiming he used explicit and derogatory language for own is now seeking unspecified damages a court date has yet to be set well let's turn now to the latest information coming out about the national security agency just today we learned that the foreign intelligence surveillance court of the feis a court approved the obama administration's outlook ation to renew the bulk collection of telephone metadata for another ninety days this will give the

administration time to consider the record recommendations made by a white house appointed panel on how to reform the n.s.a. this is the first renewal since the two conflicting federal court rulings came out that they had the judges dealing with the constitutionality of this. program the justice department also filed a formal appeal against the judge who ruled that phone records program the collection of it anyway is likely unconstitutional that came out today another development this week on thursday we learned that the n.s.a. is well on its way to developing a quantum supercomputer this incredibly intricate system has eluded researchers for years due to its complexity and fragility is the n.s.a. succeeds a working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest and corruption tools in use today including a standard known as r s eight meaning that you can kiss your digital privacy goodbye for good no matter how many measures you take to protect yourself now the

completion of a project like this is still likely at least five years off but that's not the only computer you should be worried about the other one is your own according to a new report by der spiegel deficient of the n.s.a. is intercepting computers and other electronics on their shipping routes then before the packages are delivered n.s.a. agents load malware and backdoor access onto the technology the whole process is called interdiction earlier i spoke with r.t. where producer andrew blake and political commentator sam sacks i first asked andrew how this program works. spiegel first came out with this report a few days ago and we've only really seen what's in that report keep in mind that only a handful of people have access to the classified n.s.a. documentation which is kind of stuff is talked about security researcher named jack apple presented in hamburg germany last week actually in conjunction with their spiegel article and managed to you to shine

a little bit more light on this on interdiction program and what we do know is kind of limited right now what the public knows at least is that when the n.s.a. has a particular target whether it's a foreign state run agency or a malicious hacker or some sort of you know international criminal the trying to track down the can be you know ideally monitoring their sort of internet transactions and if that person say you know according to apple order something off of amazon dot com the n.s.a. is able to intercept that able to divert it to a side location and then literally just break inside the computer and add back doors and all sorts of different things terrible terrible things to the companies but you know why are they participating in this so so far almost all of the companies that were named by either mr apple bomb or into their spiegel article have issued statements either dismissing the notion that they helped the n.s.a. or else. they had never even heard of this you know one of the companies particularly that ball mentioned in his presentation was dell computers there's

a number of hardware pieces servers that are manufactured by dell and have been for years to call the servers and the n.s.a. advertises among its employees that it has programs that can let it literally just hack right into those pieces of dell machinery also the n.s.a. advertises that it has a one hundred percent success rate when it needs to target a apple i.o.'s device so you know one thing he brought up during his speech was well what does the n.s.a. have a one hundred percent accuracy when it comes to this because they pretty much know know you. direct cooperation there that's something that apple is you know are they going to deny it well you know it's there's a whole lot of questions that were brought up about colluding between american companies and the n.s.a. and i don't think we really don't know the full answer for a while and what about you and me is there any way for us to know if this is happening to us or to our computers i mean i don't think you personally you're a good girl and i think you know rob think anyone trying to break in your computer

but if you buy something from dell if you buy something from western digital if you buy something by samsung if you buy something by cisco these are all companies where the n.s.a. has a list of vulnerabilities in those products so the biggest computer names apple if you have an i phone the n.s.a. knows how to break it are they going to break in your i phone i don't know i hope not but they know how. it's not just really tech companies are all shipping companies to you. who are the ones redirecting these packages they were reach whether or not they knew about these programs or whether they were cooperating or participating in they said we weren't cooperating or participating but they didn't say whether they knew about the programs or not that's an interesting point sam now i know vermont senator bernie sanders wrote to n.s.a. director keith alexander he asked this quote how does the n.s.a. spying or is the n.s.a. currently spying on members of congress or other american elected officials sam do you expect alexander to answer that question honestly given his track record and

based on the disclosures that we've seen so far from the n.s.a. or this is a pretty tricky way of talking to members of congress will say something in public in public letters and then you may remember ron wyden asked collecting cell site location data. we're not currently doing that but you might want to see the classified ad for another search to that question but this is a pretty simple question yes they are spying because senator sanders goes on letter to say by spying i mean are you collecting metadata on personal phone calls yes they're spying on everybody they're collecting all everyone's metadata in the united states pretty much so that's a pretty easy way the cloud. can respond to that now service in new york times in the guardian published calling for clemency for edward snowden yesterday have elected officials in the u.s. followed suit has anyone shown any support for it there's been a few members you've tweeted out some support congressman alan grayson has congressman jim mcgovern congressman peter welch. really rather really going to

come out full thought the throat for clemency a lot of other members of congress want to see some really serious charges dropped everything like that well to really sort of did what they couldn't do but wanted to do ron wyden has been saying for years the american people be horrified if they have a say knew what they were doing but he took his oath more seriously i guess or wasn't willing to expose cause violations like edward snowden was and your we have thirty seconds what do you make of the new york times calling for both snowden and chelsea manning's kind of pardons well i don't think the new york times has gone as far as to call for a pardon for chelsea manning which is kind of sad seeing as how even as recently as last month mainstream established media have been citing diplomatic cables and and war logs released by private manning those information are still newsworthy and still use that a regular basis and if you're going to ask for clemency for snowden i don't see why you should also ask for manning all right archie web producer andrew blake and political commentator sam sachs thanks for working as. well we are just about

a month away from the twenty fourteen winter olympic games taking place in sochi officials in the olympic staff are making their final preparations before they head off to russia to participate in the games here's a look behind the scenes at some of the other things there are to do in sochi before the games begin with r t is to say. you bought your ticket thousands of kilometers blog hundreds of the blade and now you're in sochi for the twenty fourteen winter games so when you know watching the skiing hockey or skating what else is they to do well the perk of a winter games in sochi is a tropical coastline on the blackfeet beaches and parks along fine monuments and museums allow you to take in a bit of history and experience the lifestyle of the beach front is lined with local shops so grab a souvenir while enjoying the views. and did not get your party shoes on because when they meet unlike the bugs in clubs come along. that also includes

a ski resort is lined with european hotels restaurants and shops at least one luxury hotel office spiced up comedy ation just a step from the slopes yes enjoy stunning mountain views designer rooms and an on site spine health club i went to see the best that money can buy what they need to look for i think is the person and what they want if you look for skiers you want to have a cozy hotel where you feel warm and relaxed and you think that's what we can offer you here we have state of the art slopes we have state of the art equipment connection infrastructure so i think for for skiers it's just the perfect spot to the. next stop because even with a twist of french restaurant to the pinch of russian offering in frog legs alongside more local dishes like. you know here it's good because you really need to see these pieces and. you can i decide to leave here you know.

and there's a stay in front of the bar but here in russia we say option. finally some relegation and a sponge treatment is a temptation for any skia visiting the black sea resort to. it's just the place. haven't been in russia for a while i've never really been to a russian or what is also known as a russian sauna but now i'm in saudi and the world we congregated here during the winter games and i thought why not give it a try something traditional and russia so let's see if the british banja is using the right. sometimes equated to a turkish bath the buying experience is usually considered an indispensable pitstop on the journey to discover russian culture when you first arrive there's a sense of serenity in the incense burning meditation music in the background and

a couple of herbal tea to the body down the belt had to wear wearing a binah head gibli want to protect the aid from this intense heat of the sun. the misuse of friendly experienced and she has some health tips about what the russian by now does for the body the experience amazing. i also had one more treatment to test out the hedgehog fluck this will become one of those places that all of the spectators athletes might want to visit another thought that i find myself in a big giant heart but this point would be a mountain one come for every to bond with a insular g r t. while saying those red and blue lights in your rearview mirror is never a good sign whether your conference speeding double parking running a red light or even driving to slowly and the and police stations make money for

american cities tonight's resident takes a look at sweetwater florida where police officers illegally charge people with hefty fines after towing their cars take a look. you. you you you you you. you you you you you you you. police stations are pretty creative when it comes to making money for american city parking tickets weird fines quotas you name it they've started it and executed it no matter how believe gold and in sweetwater florida it's just been discovered that police there were raking in money through towing cars the city made a ton of money from towing cars by collecting

a five hundred dollars administrative sign for every car towed and they depended on the stream up income in fact they set a yearly goal of one hundred sixty eight thousand dollars in. in their budget that translates to more than three hundred thousand cars getting towed it that might be why thirty seven percent of all arrests last year in that city involve a car getting towed that's a crazy number the numbers seem to indicate that people were arrested just so police could tow their cars for instance in cases last year where the toes involved a criminal charge seventy seven percent of the cases were completely dropped only eleven percent of them lead to actual convictions but in one hundred percent of those cases the towing fine was collected and in forty percent of all cases officers released the subjects but the promise to appear in court and charges were

dropped but again the towing fees were still collect the. records show that the police called the towing company over and over again even when the vehicles were illegally parked or when people had valid licenses meanwhile about a third of those arrested were unemployed and seriously strapped for money when faced with a five hundred dollars ministre to feed plus the storage fee they had to pay the towing company and the towing company that did all this telling called southland is the craziest part of the story because that company was partly owned by this city's mayor manny marone go talk about a racket he was mayor until the f.b.i. arrested him in august of this year and kicked back and bribery charges naturally so not only was the city raking it in their mayor was rolling in dough from the toes to after all this came out the new mayor set a new guidelines for policing sweet water filled when it's appropriate to tow cars

and the city is now towing less than ten percent of what it used to prove what a sham it was it's just another example of police towing the. why between enforcing the law and blatantly breaking it to make some money here in the us tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the president. all right that's going to do it for me for tonight but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america or check out our website r.t. dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez but for now have a great night. science

technology innovation all the developments from around russia we've got the future of coverage. i would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question. and.