coming up on r.t.e. armed in america over the weekend a shooting inside a maryland law left three people dead we'll take an in-depth look at the growing trend for gun violence across the u.s. just ahead and more silk road fallout now two men involved in big point exchanges have been arrested and charged for money laundering authorities say they wandered one million dollars of virtual currency for the black market website forum that coming up and syria a whistleblower john kiriakou is calling out corruption from his prison cell in pennsylvania his latest letter accuses prison officials of violating his rights by censoring his communication with the press the details from kiriakou behind bars later in the show.

it's tuesday january twenty eighth him in washington d.c. i'm in the area david and you're watching r t america. we begin tonight with gun violence in the u.s. over the weekend a mall shooting took place in columbia maryland a city located just outside of washington d.c. this shooting highlights the increase in gun violence across america in recent years research released by yale school of medicine estimates that out of the over ten thousand kids shot in the u.s. in two thousand and nine at least one third of them died additionally according to a usa today report put out last month nine hundred thirty four people died in mass shootings over the past seven years that's only one percent of all gun related homicides and it's this high volume of shootings that makes the latest incident feel somewhat routine artes make a lopez was in columbia maryland and brings us the story. it's become an

all too common scene in the u.s. less than a month into the new year public shootings have dominated headlines leaving dozens dead and many more fearing for their safety the columbia mall became the latest scene of a shooting here in the u.s. the shooting happened on saturday morning at about eleven am the gunman allegedly shot two people and killed them before turning the gun on himself police officers swat and first responders arrived on the scene in two minutes using lessons from previous public massacre earth they immediately enter the mall rather than waiting to secure the surrounding area the gunman darion marcus aguilar a nineteen year old newly graduated high school student his victims twenty one year old brianna benlolo and twenty five year old tyler johnson both victims worked at zumiez skate shop on the upper level of the mall the killing spree was over in seconds but i realized that something was going on people were running by the store

. and there was another one right behind me shot. at the close. dellacqua doors. got all of our customers in the back and we all hit i just ran you know and went where i saw other people going and was just trying to get to safety now police are trying to figure out the shooter's motives and why these tragedies continue to occur we have about one hundred times the rate of gun homicides and violent gun crimes relative to many countries of western europe and we should not be in the business of normalising violence since the beginning of two thousand and fourteen there have been seven school shootings across the country in just fourteen school days resulting in one shooting every other day meanwhile both baltimore and boston have been the scenes of unprecedented gang violence just north of the columbia most shooting in baltimore newspapers

report sixteen to. people were shot and killed within the first twelve days of this year alone the youngest victim sixteen year old lavar crawford he was shot seven times in the back and then on tuesday night yet another gang shooting another nineteen year old killed meanwhile over the weekend in boston three shootings that left three people dead in just twenty four hours bringing the total to nine for this year that's the highest the death toll has been in this city this early in the year in recent history shootings attributed to gang related retaliation so what is being done to curb this alarming trend federal and local lawmakers are coming up with a wide range of responses in the louisiana state representatives are debating proposals to restrict sales forcing gun buyers to complete a safety training course first but oklahoma state senator nathan dom says violence will only decrease if everyone owns a gun regardless of their training or their state of mental health he is pushing to

eliminate gun licensing and background checks on a federal level president obama confronted the issue during last year's state of the union address ideas parents named cleo are in this chamber tonight along with more than two dozen americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. they deserve a vote. that would be good for the world but boy. what would what will. woodward whirlpool but the house never gave a vote to a bill to increase background checks and the senate failed to overcome a filibuster this year president obama is not expected to address gun control in his speech but could take executive action in the near future though not everyone agrees with the legislation the bottom line is that you can't write

a lot. that essentially will apply to someone who is a law breaker and you can assign penalties to lawbreakers but you can't create any law that controls someone's behavior gun violence has gone down in the us over the past two decades however this recent uptick of public shootings has once again made the second amendment right to bear arms a target of debate in the pursuit of public safety in washington meghan lopez r t and the justice department has agreed to relax a longstanding gag order on certain types of data requests made to tech companies allowing them for the first time to publicize how much customer information they must turn over to the government for more on that here's our tease was wall. so here are the states of the next conference happens every year and brings together hundreds of people and attack world and government leaders of course one of the issues that they had to discuss today is this issue of n.s.a.

spying and possible reforms to the program this of course in the wake of the very controversial revelations from former n.s.a. contractor edward snowden one of the speakers today on this very topic was a judge a judge by the name of james carr he was a formerly a judge in the face of court to the court that ultimately approves government surveillance requests he discussed some of the changes he believes should be made to the process the need for this kind of outside import whether you say it's representing the interests of the target representing the interests of the constitution the interest of the public during times of my six years when some of you know i really would like to have somebody in the room talking to me about how we judges make our minds up about something now one of the most recent controversies to come out of the edward snowden revelations is that the n.s.a.

uses i phone applications or smartphone applications to spy on their targets one of the most notable apps that they use is angry birds this game it looks like it's all fun and games but apparently according to these documents these kinds of apps can provide the n.s.a. with huge amounts of information we're talking information from location political affiliation sexual orientation and other personal information and google maps is another tool that is used by the n.s.a. according to these documents the n.s.a. has responded by saying they only collect information for quote counter intelligence purposes but it is unclear the scope of this program and how often they do tap into these applications to get in for. may shed now meanwhile some of the biggest names in tech some of the biggest tech companies like google yahoo facebook microsoft they have all reached a deal with the justice department where they can now disclose the amount of

requests and when exactly personal information is requested from them all of this is an attempt to be more transparent as this debate rages on about privacy and government spying here in washington r.t. . and federal prosecutors have officially charged two bitcoin entrepreneurs with using the virtual currency to launder one million dollars for drug trafficking on the underground website silk road so crowed was a black market website that allowed users to buy everything from cocaine to guns all by anonymously using bitcoins robert fellow who went by the name of beatty sea king and ran additional money exchanged for the site was arrested in his florida home additionally charlie shrem an overnight celebrity was arrested at new york's kennedy airport is a form of digital cash that allows users to bypass banks and credit card companies

but when the f.b.i. shut down the silk road site in october and seize millions of dollars in bitcoins that they said the digital currency was being used to cloak illegal trades i was joined earlier by artie's on a stasi a churkin off from our new york bureau to talk a little bit more about this latest development i first asked her about the details of the arrest of charlie shrem in connection to silk road. well i mean twenty four year old charlie shrem was arrested upon landing this weekend on sunday at new york's j.f.k. airport upon returning from amsterdam where he was giving a speech he was taken to a manhattan federal courthouse where he has now been released on bond of one million dollars and is currently under home arrest in his parents' home in brooklyn and he was charged with conspiring to commit money laundering with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business as well as failing to report to a for authorities any suspicious activities he has importantly pled not guilty and

is facing as much as thirty years behind bars because the prosecution is saying that the c.e.o. of the bitcoin exchange company instance had been helping users by over one million dollars worth of because it's too late or be able to use this money on silk road this super notorious websites dubbed by officials to be the black markets bazaar of illegal drug purchases and the most dangerous site on the internet and the second man robber known as the v.t.c. king how is he allegedly involved in this whole ordeal. well love fifty two year old frailer was also arrested this weekend at his home in florida and charged with two of these charges conspiring to commit money laundering as well as operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and basically what the prosecution accuses of all of doing is operating on the silk road websites by. buying up

get bitcoins with cash then at a marked up price these bitcoins to users kind of buying them off of trends websites and that's their connection there and because he was buying the big points off of their websites selling them on marked up prices and getting kind of some kind of deals with sram because he would buy the big quins and much larger stock and so the officials are saying they could cooperate together from twenty eleven to twenty thirteen making or exchanging over one million dollars worth of bitcoin. which silk road users again because bitcoin is the only currency that was allowed to be used on this website that's now shut down to be able to buy drugs online so the question is where do the cases go from here or is this expected to have a larger impact on the big coin community as a whole. well i mean that's probably one of the most important questions in this

case because the bitcoin community and the big trend was only beginning to really take off and this is one of the questions whether or not these particular arrests and what's going to happen to these two men in particular because he was really a celebrity like you mentioned in the bitcoin world and some of the. analysts and supporters are saying that the only reason that bitcoins have been is being attacked is because it's a virtual currency that is not connected to banks or corporations but it's much harder to track online obviously than you know using a credit card and these are some of the concerns and some have been saying that this is possibly an attempt to scare the big community but you know we'll wait and see obviously how this part these particular cases end up impacting what happens to be should be really interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming months artie's. from our new york studio. and the concern about the impact of silk road on big coin hasn't stopped thousands of others from celebrating its future as

an alternative currency pairing and boring was at the north american bitcoin conference in miami this weekend and brings us more. they claim believers think this e.p. payment network is going to take over the world's banking system as we know it but its reputation for facilitating illicit behavior makes it risky and there's a significant amount of people who still don't know what big corn is or how to use them as skeptics doubt this will ever catch on but here at the north american conference in miami beach florida the big going community is reveling in the extraordinary growth the cryptocurrency has seen in the past year there's an unbelievable migration of human talent and capital moving in a big climb last year at this time we had seventy thousand users of law change out info and just a week ago we got one point one million which is a major milestone for any company but especially for a big point based business and there's plenty of room for more big claim this says there are so many opportunities for innovation on top of bitcoin we haven't even

scratched the surface yet people are going to use it for escrow and smart contracts and you'll be able to buy a car and have the title transferred on the block block chain dot info and bit pay are among some of the first big queen businesses to lay the groundwork for the fledgling currency the next step is to make it more user friendly people every day in their lives use email they probably have mail idea how it works under the covers but they use it because it's simple free and easy allows them to send messages anywhere in the world for free well you can do the same thing with decline send money anywhere in the world basically for free so we have to make it that simple and we're working on things like that so you know user interface design and education systems to help people understand how to use it is really a focus for two thousand and fourteen and part of that cause is see provide financial services to people who don't have access to bases jeffrey tucker is using decoding to help launch a liberty i mean that merging markets where people are under bank are don't have banks at all how can they accept that point and every deal to start their own business using this new technology the kind of as

a global currency so they can go anywhere and regardless of geography so that you could sell your stuff or your services anywhere in the world for pickling for violence that. you have access to a bank or not i have to have all you have to have the cell phone it turns out there's a lot more fuel cell phones of them that they could go through all over the world i've lectured and african nations. right so we have a lot of people in these emerging markets especially in africa who use their cell phones for their bank the police because it's an regulated cyber criminals had to use it as a tool for tax evasion and money laundering but it's the decent realisation of that coin that keeps it out of the hands of governments and central banks it's a technology that can really wipe us all of the elites in the world it's amazing in december when china restricted banks from using pick when the price dropped ten percent and one day the government regulation could only go so far for this untraceable digital point and more regulations that govern the coming and going to

national level with the more you and some of us do with just this bailout of national monies charlie so these regulations are definitely going to cut of the threat of hope business but they're going to be counterproductive even for the one of the couple but we haven't seen a widespread abandonment of national currency get supporters say these challenges will be overcome in the long run because it will transform digital commerce mid-point is still in its earliest phases of industry development and faces a lot of challenges going forward including price volatility government regulation as well as legal aid for the issues over come despite this there have been a flood of new recording and best years in entrepreneur i think this is a disruptive technology that's here to stay in miami beach florida kerry and boring archie. and now to the latest regarding whistle blower john kiriakou we're now learning that the bureau of prisons is making a concerted effort to stop. from sending letters from the prison you may remember

that was the first member of the cia to publicly acknowledge that torture was an official u.s. policy under the bush administration in two thousand and twelve he was can. for providing the name of an officer involved in the cia's rendition program to a reporter and he began serving a thirty month prison sentence in february of last year soon after began writing what's been going letters from loreto in which he communicates with his supporters and talks about his prison experiences the letters published on firedoglake were very descriptive and often revealed the corruption and illegalities taking place behind prison walls but in august of two thousand and thirteen kiriakou abruptly stopped writing after the prison a ministration informed him that they would be able to serve he would be able to serve the final part of his sentence in a halfway house but this was only if he agreed to stop sending the letters however the prison later broke its promise and curiosity decided to resume his letter

writing in his most recent letter he wrote i have learned firsthand that the prison a ministrations greatest perceived threat is my freedom of speech earlier i spoke with kevin to stall a blogger at firedoglake i first asked him why the bureau of prisons classified kiriakou his letters as dangerous. they've classified them as dangerous letters that firedoglake dot com has been publishing in the middle of last year they've been classified as a dangerous to the prison facility in laredo pennsylvania because of his access to the press i guess they would market publicize he obtained documents showing classified or central inmate monitoring and this means that they scrutinize him more heavily than other prisoners inside of the facility writes and in his latest letter about right he said quote the v.o.p.

is afraid of you knowing what the prison system is really like they're afraid of the public disclosure and that they don't bother to follow their own rules they're afraid that you'll learn that they can violate the law with impunity can you get some examples of how turiaf those letters illustrate this what are some of the regulations that were being violated. or what he was talking about was specifically how supporters of kiriakou have been mailing him letters of support trying to correspond with them and what they've been having happen is their letters are opened and then those letters are sent back to them it appears that the one person had his tapes back together shot and then the letter came back to them and he has no idea that. he's having his letters denied to them with curiosity even being notified of the fact that the warden of the facility is rejecting these letters we've also got instances where the legal mail is being opened and i guess he

actually doesn't get a chance to appropriately challenge this if it's legal or special mail you supposed to be able to watch the war and open it look at it inspect it and make sure that it's not threatening to the facility and that hasn't happened i don't think and then the other thing is the e-mail e-mail service and it takes a while. well to send e-mails out and receive them but apparently he doesn't use it anymore because when you send e-mails he finds his conversations are being read by the officers staffers inside a prison and then they talk about it will come up to you in the know say something to him about something as wife said or they'll say something to him about plans that he might have one example as he was considering maybe going to do business or or do some work in south africa and he says well. someone came up to me and said i would be a great person and i could talk to you about doing business in south africa and he thought that was kind of freaky and so he decided to refrain from talking about anything on email also something peculiar is that his mail was only delivered on

mondays which i find very interesting what was the rationale and then relegating all of his mail to just one day of the week. the rational that would probably be the same for all the other violations of his rights the fact that he has brought access to the press and i think they just want to take their time getting him letters and correspondence he has been coming out and they don't want to be inconvenienced by the fact that he is someone who is very popular a high profile prisoner and he doesn't want they don't want to say that he has more rights than anybody else in the us and in the process they're actually denying his rights right now have been in his august thirtieth letter before all of this went down before he stopped communicating kiriakou explained that he was forced to sign a memo from the u.s. justice department that stated he was legally obligated to clear everything he wrote with the cia's publication review board but as it turned out he wasn't

actually legally obligated to do anything he talked about how they intimidated hand essentially into signing that memo. yes according to a lawyer. this is a legal and constitutional duty who would have to submit your prison letters to the cia's pre-publication review board has nothing to do. this time as an intelligence officer so they also wouldn't have any material clear and sensually he was sat down and he was ordered to sign a memorandum or. letter that said he wouldn't send any letters out giving them to the cia's board to approve them or publishing and actually it seems he has been doing this even though he shouldn't be required to do show he has been sending letters to the cia sent one in december we published copy of this notice that came back to them that they have received this letter and then in about a span of a month they approved it and i think that i haven't gone back to look at the

posting firedoglake dot com i think it checks out that that december letter we did not put up at firedoglake dot com until the middle or the early part of january about the time i'm sure would have approved it now has been as and or standeth kiriakou submitted a freedom of information act request for himself i was last here what was revealed in that boy request. the revelation was that in fact he was designated with a central intimate monitor at which i have to tell you you're supposed to be notified as a prisoner if you are given this designation and according to the letter if i read it correctly kiriakou was not informed. that was kinda stole a blog or at firedoglake. in the pharmaceutical world there's something called off label use this is when the f.d.a. approved drugs for specific reasons that the drug manufacturers market the drugs towards more than what the f.d.a.

approved them for tonight's resident takes a look at that concept. in the wonderful world of american pharmaceuticals there exists something known as off label use basically the f.d.a. approved drugs to specific reasons but then the drug makers get it into their heads by god they could be making so much more money from the drug that they told people they could cure more problems than the ones that the approved them for and that's off label or not f.d.a. approved. now companies aren't allowed to just make up claims and then make t.v. commercials about them but that doesn't stop them from encouraging doctors and

pharmacists to suggest their drugs which are approved for one thing because patients who suffer from other things entirely taken point risk for all made by johnson and johnson it's an anti-psychotic used to treat to get so friendly and bipolar disorder but johnson and johnson felt like it just wasn't making enough money from the drug so they decided to start marketing it to the elderly as an anti dimension drug they pay to doctors and pharmacists take backs to boost sales they compensated their employees for trying to sell the drug as a dimension medication johnson and johnson executives very clearly encouraged everyone in the medical community to push risk berdahl for the off label didn't mention you to the point where sales for the medication accounted first seventy percent of their employee's bonuses respirator for everyone except that of course it's illegal to market a drug for something other than what the f.d.a.

has approved it for and. john johnson knows dad very well which is why they did it through quieter channels like doctors' offices and pharmacies and powerpoint presentations internally but they clearly stepped out of the bounds of the law. some of the johnson and johnson employees felt a little crappy about telling the end i think caddick to the elderly who were just afraid of losing their mind so they blew the whistle a government probe ensued and johnson and johnson settled for a whopping two point two billion dollars. our pharmaceutical companies have no morals whatsoever so i'm very glad that johnson and johnson had to pay two point two billion for this off label. however considering that they have a net worth of fifty billion dollars they'll be able to forget that two point two billion dollars settlement like it was no big deal almost as if they had conventions themselves tonight let's talk about that five following me on twitter

at the resident. starting this fall the pentagon will commission two blimps to float at ten thousand feet over the army's aberdeen proving ground in maryland that helium filled arrows stats each two hundred forty three feet long is more than three quarters of the length of a football field they are to be stitched into existing defenses as part of a test of new technology ordered by the defense department now the three year test which is slated to start in october will cast a vast radar net from raleigh north carolina to boston and now to lake erie with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft that could be intercepted before reaching the capital these arrows stats have been deployed by the military at u.s. bases in iraq and afghanistan in the past and are known to carry powerful surveillance

cameras that can track the movements of suspected. surgeons and even u.s. soldiers and when army staff sergeant robert bales murdered sixteen civilians in afghanistan in march of two thousand and twelve and aerostat above his base captured video of him returning from the slaughter in the early morning darkness with a rifle in his hand and a shawl over his shoulders limbs are an old fashioned technology but some privacy experts have pointed out that this would only increase the united states surveillance apparatus and therefore have called for strict regulation on the exercise and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered go to you tube dot com slash r t america check out our web site r t dot com slash usa have a great night.

got a quote for you. that's pretty tough. stay with substory. get this guy like me you're about done started working for the people motivations the mainstream media reach out bridegrooms data. of the dead rather.