coming up on r.t.e. a dark secret very just off of the coast of new york part island is where many have been laid to rest in a mass grave including the homeless the poor and even children birth by prison inmates got the story ahead. just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they are not after you feel saying rings true as a florida school district upsets parents by keeping the bio metric data on the students this is a group of hackers files a criminal complaint against the german government for assisting n.s.a. spying born that coming up and how much to the cost to build the guantanamo bay detention facility it's a question that the obama administration refuses to answer to a federal court is being asked to dismiss

a lawsuit seeking to uncover the truth more on this later in the show. it's monday february third four pm in washington d.c. i'm mega lopez and you are watching our see america well not too far away from the bright dazzling lights of times square and the new york city's skyline one is one of america's darkest secrets potter's field on hard island is a small patch of land in the eastern most part of the bronx for years it was used as a mass grave of sorts artie's honest also brings us more from the largest taxpayer funded cemetery in the world. a place kept from the public eye. you've likely never heard of it despite its long history and size one of the largest cemeteries in the united states with

nearly a million burials almost one million people buried here since the eighteen hundreds the poor homeless stillborn children and bodies not cleaned by anyone on just over one hundred acres hart island a piece of land just off of manhattan this is as close as we can get to the island with a news camera this is a dog where ferries transporting bodies inmates and occasional visitors depart from after a variety of uses from a prison to a psychiatric ward to hospital the place has been ran by the prison system making the cemetery more reminiscent of a jail where inmates bury up to fifteen hundred bodies a year bernal's for those the city takes care of take place in mass graves here inmates dig ten feet deep trenches at fifty cents per hour in dollars that are buried out there are primarily homeless there are people that are generally forgotten and ignored by society. photographer in ferentz was able to get these images by reaching the island in secret on

a handmade boat the most striking thing when we first landed it hit our boat for the morning. was that we almost stumbled into an open area we stepped out and just realized that the plywood covered coffins controlled by the city's department of correction the location is difficult to access and visits if any are strictly regulated i had a a live child and she's gone and i have no. control over going to a cemetery to visit her former navy commander ilene josephs five day old baby girl died thirty six years ago at twenty three all by herself while the grieving mother was trying to figure out funeral arrangements she found out that her child had already been buried by the city people are not properly informed in the hospitals as to what it means to allow the city to take care of it ilene was given a death certificate with no indication of where her daughter and did up the search for her child's grave went on for decades she was five days old i had nursed her

she was my daughter and i was in the just about to throw her away i would like to go to walk to my daughter's grave and be able to have some final. closing but getting closure has been a struggle so far elaine has been able to come to a good zebo on the island following id checks after permission from prison system officials if this were a private cemetery it would be very clear under the law that you had to allow visits to the actual grades because it's a public cemetery specific law that requires access does not does not apply filmmaker author and founder of the hard island project melinda hunt works with women like elaine to have the island be made into a public park it's inappropriate to expect the public or someone who's lost a child to have to contact the department of corrections and to make arrangements

to. visit hard island and then not to be able to go to an actual grave site hi this is work to regular taylor lawyer mark taylor works with the grieving mothers pro bono many of them were did not subsequently have children so they have billboard children who are buried out on the island and for them looking back in their life it's something that has meaning and importance to them access to the graves is is impossible because the graves are not marked lost records lost great they're storing their own records out there under shoddy conditions the department of corrections has not done a great job of maintaining this island is a part of you know the new york culture urges jurors is a viable part of the prison system after a battle that's lasted years eight mothers including elaine have recently been informed that they will be able to visit specific grave sites still under strict regulations but until the island stops being run by those who run prisons this

place holding almost one million people will continue to treat those fighting for closure like inmates people don't throw their families away just as he took in a new york. well jury selection for a stand your ground trial of a florida man begins today forty seven year old michael dunn claims that he felt threatened when he repeatedly opened fire on a car full of teenagers parked next to him back in two thousand and twelve dunn got into a verbal altercation with three boys who were sitting in a car at a gas station after he told them to turn their music down when the voice refused dunn continued to yell eventually who pulled out a nine millimeter handgun and fired a number of rounds into the car two of those bullets hits a seventeen year old jordan davis dunn said he thought that he saw davis pull out a shotgun however no weapon was alternately recovered from the crime scene dunn fled with his fiance and drove to his house two hours away he never called the police to report the incident officers tracked him down using his license plate and

arrested him the next day jordan davis' father ron described his son as an innocent teenager in an interview with our team back in september watch. society is turned when you're angry for whatever reason you get your good and you start with violence to a people that are innocent i want to know people to know their joy and was an innocent bystander you know he was a young man that this guy took out his aggression on and the worst thing about it is that when i stood in front of michael dunn in the courtroom he has no remorse whatsoever he looked at me with such disdain that it was palpable. the case of michael dunn in many ways parallels the george zimmerman trial for the shooting death of trayvon martin including the age of the boy is the color of their skin and the state the shootings happened in well there are also a number of key differences jury selection could take

a week or more to complete before the trial begins the jury of six men and women and four alternates will likely be sequestered during the duration of the trial and secluded from the media frenzy that is already happening outside. well also in florida state lawmakers are working on a bill to protect the rights of students but not for too much homework or mean lunch ladies they are trying to protect students from bio metrics things like fingerprinting and retina scanners the new bill would include prohibiting school districts from collecting biometric information including the characteristics of fingerprints hands and eyes and also the voice it would force schools to inform parents about their rights regarding education records being collected on their son or daughter annually it would prohibit school districts from collecting information on a student's political affiliation voting history and religious affiliation and finally the repos it would protect a student's information from being passed along to the federal government unless it was absolutely required by federal law so i know what you're thinking why is

a proposal like this even necessary well polk county parents found out last year that their children were having their eyes scanned without their permission and they asked county schools meanwhile we're standing by. homes of pupils and lunchrooms to access their account for money some will county schools scam students for their fingerprints and the list goes on and on but are these parents justified in their fears or are they just overreacting michael was also a columnist for p.j. media and the new york post and author of the devil and thriller trilogy that centers around the n.s.a. he recently wrote an article in new york post entitled welcome to united states of paranoia and he's here to talk all things surveillance related michael thank you so much for joining me first of all what do you think are these parents in florida over reacting. yes or no i think what we've learned in the last few years and certainly in the last year or so is that as i said in the new york

post yesterday just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you and that we have to be very careful about giving up our privacy to technology that is meant to preemptively prevent crime or problems and it gets really to the issue of whether we can prevent things from happening and we should therefore enslave ourselves to to prevent bad things or whether a certain amount of risk is part of life now i happen to fall into the latter carol category but that is a big discussion going on right now so what danger does a retina scan or upon real real leader realistically pose are we becoming a culture of convenience wanting technology to do everything for us instead of using i.d.'s for instance or carrying money. yes this is exactly what's happening what we've discovered is that the technology is wonderful our our phones our computers every new app that comes out but every time we adopt it we give up

a little bit of privacy so that in facebook for example you're constantly posting your whereabouts you're putting stuff up on pinterest you're posting photographs and in a perfect world the government wouldn't be watching us but in an imperfect world especially post nine eleven the government is watching us so it becomes a political and moral question how much do we want to give up in order to protect ourselves that's the issue and as you mentioned that's a fact of life from the moment you are born information is being collected about you these days is there anything that parents can do to protect their children from technology barring taking pictures of their children not putting them on facebook. well it's really not because we're we're moving again since nine eleven we're moving towards a society in which we have essentially. an internal id card much as

you did for example in the soviet union a country in which i spent quite a bit of time in the eighty's before the collapse of the soviet union we haven't moved to internal passports yet but that may well be coming as well the fact is that the government will take everything that is offered to it and we have to be careful about how much we voluntarily give up and then the political issue of course becomes how much surveillance are we prepared to accept in order to be protected from oftentimes illusory threats or threats that are largely in our imagination and fears and i think that that is a question that congress is still struggling to answer now on a similar topic europe's largest group of hackers the chaos computer club teamed up with the international league for human rights to file a complaint against german chancellor angela merkel and the german intelligence committee for cooperating with the n.s.a. surveillance activities part of that complaint read quote we accuse the u.s. and british and german secret agents their supervisors the german minister of

interior as well as the german chancellor of illegal and prohibited covet to intelligence activities of aiding and abetting those activities a violation of the privacy to the right to privacy and the obstruction of justice in office so that's what they are complaining against interestingly this comes as chancellor angela merkel was sharply criticizing the u.s. for spying on her activities but again she was helping the n.s.a. and the so their surveillance community spy on others so how can we evaluate the criticisms given that she is closely working with the n.s.a. well that's a good point let's let's put it this way. they're watching everything and whether they say they are there or not they are whether the law says they can or they can't they do so this is just the world we live in now they hoover up vast amounts of data they checked the metadata how do you know all the phone calls you've made how many who you calling all that stuff runs through this giant computers and the

intelligence services of the western countries are very closely allied with each other and that's a great deal of information sharing now whether this is prevented further attacks on the scale of nine eleven there's really no way to know the government says yes it has private individual say not based on anything we know the government says trust us and we say can we trust you so we're really falling into in between these two stools of advanced technology fear and our own eagerness to embrace technology to tell the world what we're doing everyone wants to be a movie star these days but that comes with a price and we have to be aware of what that price is going to be absolutely and whether or not it is awesome voluntarily rendering that information putting it out for anyone to see whether it's data mining in the n.s.a. and all the things that are going on with that it always goes into one big web that is the internet that is creating these profiles digitally on us michael walsh

a columnist at the new york post and p.j. media thank you so much thank you we've been spending a lot of time with our eyes in the skies lately the u.s. has use of drones in its fight against terrorism has sparked a debate over whether the benefit of protecting our troops is worth the risk of civilian casualties but as our tears america david reports it's time to get her head out of the clouds don't just search the schoolings the u.s. military is bringing its unmanned vehicles closer to the crew and. when you think about driverless vehicles you most likely think about google the company has put its stamp on the revolutionary technology that's expected to act both as your car and as your chauffeur but even though google has the most notable driverless car it's certainly not the only driverless vehicle on the market defense industry heavyweight lockheed martin has just wrapped testing on a slightly bigger driverless prototype it looks

a little something like this. yes that's a military truck demonstrations earlier this month at fort hood texas the u.s. army and lockheed martin showed off their new system that allows army convoys to operate independently in foreign urban environments using something called the autonomous mobility appliqué system or the a m a s the vehicles can dodge pedestrians as well as navigate on coming traffic road intersections and stalled vehicles this advance system is all a result of an eleven million dollar contract between the army and lockheed martin wherein the defense contractor is developing low cost sensors that can be attached to existing army machinery without a driver the trucks will be able to enter foreign areas and combat zones without having to worry about the danger of risking american soldiers' lives however if desired the vehicles can still be manned in that case the truck would alert the soldier to any safety threat and then the driver would have the ability to stop

adjust or take full control of the vehicle but the a m a s system only moves the military closer to its goal of capitalizing on autonomy warfare last month at the army aviation symposium and officer announced that the army was looking to slim down its personnel numbers and adopt more robots over the coming years the officer was suggesting that the army move to incorporate the robot mule and autonomy as vehicle that can transport supplies and heavy loads for soldiers but as we've learned in recent months it goes far beyond that take a look at this animation from sandia national laboratories this is the future of automated drones a single unmanned vehicle that can fly swim drive and even jump thirty feet into the air and this is being developed right now the government contractor says it hopes the device will one day carry out missions usually reserved for special

operation forces so for. automated trucks to mules to drones unmanned and autonomy systems are no longer a technology of the future at least not for the u.s. military which is seemingly moving to prepare for war in the robotic age in washington david r t. well the obama administration is refusing to disclose exactly how much the government spent to build a section of the guantanamo bay detention facility meant to house detainees miami herald reporter carol rosenberg has been reporting on demo since it opened in two thousand and two she filed a freedom of information act request back in two thousand and nine for the documents related to the cost of camp seven camp seven holes detainees like khalid shaikh muhammad the so-called mastermind of the september eleventh attacks on the world trade center in the pentagon whose trial is expected any day now officials say that they only found one document related to that for your request the d.o.j. it refused to release the document because it contains the details of internal

deliberations as well as the names of people who work there and is therefore subject to privacy so rosenberg sued the d.o.j. saying officials didn't search hard enough for more files but in a friday filing the justice department asked a federal court to dismiss that lawsuit brought by rosenberg saying quote there is no requirement that an agency search every records system and also they said the issue to be resolved is not whether there might exist any other documents possibly responsive to the request but rather whether the search for those documents was adequate the defense department has disclosed construction costs for all other portions of guantanamo bay not only is it refusing to disclose the amount spent on camp seven but also coud the government originally paid to undertake that work the d.o.j. filing comes at an interesting time for the guantanamo bay detention facility the southern command which precedes over one tunnel bay is asking for forty nine

million dollars to replace the facility entirely the agency claims that get well was built improperly and is suffering from serious structural defects including a cracked foundation now a number of detainees have been transferred out to countries like sudan and saudi arabia be. while during last tuesday's state of the union address president obama reiterated his commitment to close the camp for good. well to ukraine now where protesters are battling weather and police forces over their right to demonstrate as many as thirty thousand people gathered in independence square in kiev on sunday this is now the third month of protests after the government decided to regroup a trade act a trade pact from the european union and then a later signed legislation refusing the rights of protesters ukrainian president viktor are. returned from a four day sick leave today he was greeted by a new slew of demonstrations calling for him to step down not to for debate over

trade negotiations isn't the only battle that is happening in that country at the moment american oil giants are wrangling their way into ukraine they're trying to get their hands in their drills on the precious natural gas buried deep underground . with four pts. western ukraine a big get a battleground for american oil giants two months ago kiev signed we went with chevron to use this area for fracking six. of. them adults have water toxic chemicals pumped into the earth contaminated environments just some of the risks that have sparked protests against fracking in the united states and europe yes thank you. thank. now it's ukrainian farmers not only will buy milk to the cold surplus it will time our lakes and rivers will get dirty sporadic protests have

fallen on deaf ears unable to match the might of the fuel lobby if america comes to ukraine we can lose our position and america will control ukrainian money and business meanwhile countries like france switzerland and the netherlands a while leading up to that the technology the ten billion dollar deal level chiffon to operate in the country for fifty years it has the right to sell the gas it up tains with quotas to other countries so all claims that ukraine will make a lot of money are in fact nonsense and in a place where unemployment is white kids promise of thousands of new jobs is enough pay for people next ingenue forty four years old unemployed and trying to care for his sick mother just covered all day over the hope olga's a job people in ukraine are not scared of work or we must just learn what to do the carriage for kids is energy independence and cheap fuel for a country struggling to pay the bills even though russia dropped the cost of its

gas by almost as good to calculate the shale spoils industry experts look at precedents in neighboring poland with companies promise the earth only to significantly scale back to just what is a risk exposure because after the five years of exposure. which is good place we decided to stick. did david just because they did find some places where it would be distributed to treat. gas pressure on people to keep peace for two screwy but not fast enough seeds to grow the government's desire to have its own gas what ever the cost will consume of the people. i believe the village which to ukraine well the department of justice is asking defense lawyers across the country to help them track down inmates who are serving time for nonviolent drug charges and who might have been prosecuted too harshly in an unexpected move on thursday deputy

attorney general james cole asked lawyers to help these men and women who are in mates to apply for clemency nonviolent drug offenders flooded prisons across the country of recently and there are a major contributing factor to overpopulation the justice department also pointed to the wind disparity between races when it comes to convictions white americans are more likely to abuse cocaine the black community was more likely to use crack which brings a more harsh minimum sentencing penalty the disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing is one hundred to one it wasn't until two thousand and ten that congress worked to fix that disparity many thousands of people are still locked up due to these disproportionate laws at a recent event in new york cole said quote there are more low level nonviolent drug offenders who remain in prison and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today

this is not fair and it harms our criminal justice system now this comes of just a month after president obama commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates were prosecuted for drug violations congress is now considering a bill that would make the two thousand and ten law more proportionate sentencing guidelines red. active opening the door for some twenty five thousand current inmates to receive reduced sentences so this latest d.o.j. movement might just mean the beginning of the end of the drug war declared by president nixon back in one nine hundred seventy one. well you've heard the saying don't poke the bear but authorities in florida are cracking down on residents who are feeding the bears police officers arrested an eighty year old one eighty one year old woman for leaving bowls of dog food outside her house for yogi bear and his friends police said they repeatedly warned a former middle school gym teacher mary musselman to not feed the bears they said to her for two misdemeanors in december and even showed her an educational video

explaining that feeding bears causes them to become a little too comfortable with humans which is dangerous for both species before a fish and wildlife commission says one bear had even one was forced to be euthanized as a result of musselman feeding but the elderly woman kept it kept leaving out seventeen to eighteen bowls of food claiming that the bears would starve if she didn't feed them well someone was arrested last wednesday and is also being charged with resisting arrest jail time will certainly be no picnic for the eighty one year old she's being held without bond until her court hearing in march when boom bust is up next on r.t.e. aaron age joins me now for a quick preview and what have you got for us thanks maggie now coming up on boom bust financial trends forecaster gerald celente joins me live on today's show plus ed harris and i discussed a dubious deal for canada to buy u.s. land in order to build a cross border bridge is the deal even legal we'll tell you coming up stay tuned so

a different type of ball and bear thanks aaron. and that's going to do it for now for on the story as we cover go to youtube dot com slash r t america and check out our website r.t. dot com slash usa don't forget to follow me on twitter at make an underscore lopez and stay tuned boom bust is next. missions are forced. to. live. in and the finish line of the marathon. come up. again.

it. will be. technology innovation all the lives developments around russia we've got the future covered. of the one nine hundred fourteen the scenario is a political today because the united states is insistent on becoming the dominant force on every continent but brian when it when we look at about the calculations and strategy i have to go back to iraq afghanistan libya and you came in that's all recklessness in my opinion you know the the u.s. policy resembles those what the caricature of those western movies where they put the drunken cowboys coming to town and shoot the place up just because they kind.

of got a quote for you. it's pretty tough. because they were it's not story. it's just described like you would smear about guys that are working for the people most issues in the mainstream media were pretty much on the bridegroom's didn't find. the dead rather it was.

there i marinate this is boom bust and these are the stories that we're tracking for you today. coming out the general author blogger and publisher of the trends journal is live on today's show you won't want to miss what yes to say about the u.s. economy plus the latest on the herbalife ackman pyramid drama this week the f.t.c. is being forced to look at allegations that the company is one big old pyramid scheme but tell you all about it coming right up and harrison joins me in today's big deal to talk about canada finally and from the u.s. to build a bridge to detroit her story you will want to miss it and it all starts right now .