the more defenseless the. deer that. is on r t. coming up on r t a dark secret buried just off the coast of new york part island is where many have been laid to rest in mass graves including the homeless before and even infants birth by prison inmates will dig up the history that. just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not after you the old saying rings true as a florida school district upsets parents by keeping biometric data on students this is a group of hackers files a permanent complaint against the german government for assisting the n.s.a. more on that coming up and how much did it cost to build a guantanamo bay detention facility well it's a question that the obama administration refuses to answer now a federal court is being asked to dismiss a lawsuit seeking that's true more on this later in the show.

it's monday february third five pm in washington d.c. i'm going lopez and you are watching r t america well not too far away from the bright and dazzling lights of times square and the new york city skyline was one of america's darkest secrets potter's field on hard island is a small patch of land in the eastern most parts of the bronx for years it was used as a mass grave of sorts. for exhaust war 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 claimed by anyone on just over one hundred acres heart 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 a 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 burrows for those the city takes care of take place in mass graves here inmates dig ten feet deep trenches at fifty cents per hour dollars that are buried out there are primarily homeless there are people that are generally forgotten and ignored by society. photographer even 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 was 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 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 childhood 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 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 dizzy ball 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 be 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

this is mark to break it into their own lawyer mark taylor works with the grieving mothers pro bono many of them were did not subsequently have children so they have still born 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 story in their own records out there under sharpie conditions the department of corrections has not done a great job of maintaining this island as a part of you know the new york culture it is durham 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 into our new york. and joining me now to talk about that story is on a star see a church in our new york studio on a stone thank you so much for joining me now first to how is it possible that this mass grave for almost one million people are buried exists so close to manhattan and yet people don't know about it will make you know that was really one of the most shocking questions for us when when i started researching story the story is realizing that people have never heard of it there are kind of a few articles here and there but you know the public people who have lived in new york their entire lives never heard of this place until. i mean hopefully until now so how these burial stopped know the burials are actually ongoing as we speak i mean they have been going on for decades and centuries and this is still the number one place where any bodies that are unclaimed bodies of homeless people

bodies of people whose families can't afford to bury them or bodies of stillborn or dead babies this is where automatically the city takes these bodies to bury them so this is still the number one spot for these mass burials taking place before anybody who dies in new york city is and is unclaimed and their families don't get involved it's unbelievable now you mentioned that visits to the island are extremely restricted or any journalists allowed to go there. journalists are allowed to go there with a notepad and a pencil essentially that's all you can take there are no cameras no cell phones no any kind of we did see some video in this report which we were able to get through the hard island project but it's really impossible at this stage to go to the island and film anything on the premises so journalists are allowed to visit through numerous phone calls to the new york city department of correction which is

obviously somewhat complicated and the ferry service there is not exactly regular you can just jump on the boat and go so it's it's really a complicated process to go there and even though they are permitted there is really getting video or photos is really hard so why do women be allowed to come closer to the grave site of their children while it's only eight women because first of all as we were working on the story we realized that a lot of people like the hero in our story alina for decades they did not know where it is where their family members children in this particular case are buried and it's only by kind of chance locked in by accident that they heard of the island project which linda hunt runs whom you saw in our report and through her they were able to after fighting for years to get finally this permission so certainly there are many more people out there who might be wondering where their relatives are who might be searching but in this particular case it's these eight women who have been kind of plowing through for years to get this permission and even though now they

will be able to visit the grave sites first of all for some of them they don't know exactly where the grave site of their particular baby is because it's mass graves with thousands of babies kind of. in mass which is horrifying in itself but also they can't you know bring anything they can just take one person with no flowers no no nothing so it's really still like visiting a prison very much as opposed to visiting a grave site and an associate we have less than a minute left but how likely is it that hard island would be turned into a public square. well i people who are fighting for this are saying it is in fact likely because there are places like washington square park even in new york city that we were told world was also used as something like this a very very long time ago and it is now obviously a public space so people like a melinda hunt who we interviewed in this story are continuing fighting very saying it's likely but certainly it has to the system has to change the way this place is run first of all because until we have the department of corrections overseeing

this place certainly it's not going to be any public place in the in the nearest future on a stasi is this story is just shocking and it's shocking that it's so close to so many people and yet so few people actually know about it great reporting thank you so much artie correspondent on a saucy it from our new york studio well jury selection for the stand your ground trial of a florida man begins today forty seven year old michael dunn who 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 boys were fuz done continue to yell eventually he pulled out a nine millimeter handgun and fired a number of rounds into the car now two of those bullets hit seventeen year old jordan davis dunn said that he thought he saw davis pull out of shotgun however no weapon was ultimately recovered from the crime scene dunn fled with his fiance and

drove to his house which is about two hours away he never called the police to report the incident officers and finally tracked him down using his license plate and arrested him the next day now jordan davis his father on this crime his son as an innocent teenager in an interview with our team back in september watch this. society has turned where when you're angry for whatever reason you get your girl and you start with violence to a people that are innocent i want to know people to know their joy with the innocent bystander you know he was the innocent 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 and with such distain that it was palpable. now the case of michael dunn in many ways parallel parallels the george zimmerman trial in the shooting death of trayvon martin including the age of the boys the color of their skin and the states that

the shootings happened in but 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 beginning to take place outside. but also in florida state lawmakers are working on a bill to protect the rights of students but not from too much homework or mean lunch ladies they're trying to protect students from bio metrics things like fingerprinting or retina standers scanners the new bill would prohibit school districts from collecting biometric information including the characteristics of fingerprints hands eyes and the voice it would force schools to inform parents about their rights regarding educational records being collected on their son or daughter annually it would perhaps at school districts from collecting information on a student's political affiliation their voting history or their religious affiliation

and finally the proposal would protect a student's information from being passed along to the federal government unless it was absolutely required under 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 pinellas county schools meanwhile were scanning the poems of pupils in lunch rooms in order to access their accounts for money to pay for those lunches some of the county schools scanned 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 walsh is a columnist for p.j. media and at the new york post and he's also the author of the devil and thriller trilogy that centers around the n.s.a. . i recently wrote an article in the new york post entitled welcome to the united states of paranoia earlier i spoke with walsh and i first asked him if he thought

these parents were really overreacting yes and 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 a 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 prevent bad things 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 right now stan or upon real real reader realistically pose are we doing 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 your these days is there anything that parents can do to first take their children from technology barring taking pictures of their children and 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 is a question that congress is still struggling to answer now on a similar topic europe's largest group of hackers the chaos can tutor 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 the legal and prohibited covered act intelligence activities aiding and abetting those activities a lie elation that the privacy of 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 method data how do you know all the phone calls you made how many who you calling all that stuff runs through these giant computers and the intelligence services of the western countries are very closely allied with each other in this 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 individuals say nut 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 off voluntarily rendering that information putting it out for

anyone to see whether it's the data mining the n.s.a. and all the things that are going on with that it almost goes into one big web that is the internet that is creating these profiles and this is only on us like a waltz a columnist at the new york post and p.j. media thank you so much. well we've been spending a lot of time with our eyes in the skies lately the u.s. says 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 david reports it's time to get our heads out of the clouds don't just search the sky is the u.s. military is bringing its unmanned vehicles closer to is around when you think about driverless vehicles you most likely think about google the god but he 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 autonomy is 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 those advances them 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 threats and then the driver would have the ability to stop adjust or take full control of the vehicle but the am a as system only moves the. military closer to its goal of capitalizing on autonomy workfare last month at the army aviation symposium an 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 a 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 this is being developed right now the government contractors as it hopes the device will one day carry out missions usually reserved for special operation forces so from 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's bills spent to build part of section of a section of one ton of a that's meant house detainees miami herald reporter carol rosenberg has been flirting on get most sense it opened back in two thousand and two she filed a freedom of information act request back in two thousand and nine for documents related to the cost of camp seven now keep seven holes detainees like comet who was the so-called mastermind of september eleventh and those attacks on the world trade

center and the pentagon his trial is expected any day now but officials say they found only one in a document related to that request the d.o.j. refused to release the document because it contains the details of internal deliberations as well as the names of people who worked there and is therefore some . to privacy so rosenberg sued the d.o.j. saying officials didn't search hard enough for more finals but in a friday filing the justice department asked a federal court to dismiss that lewd lawsuit brought on by rosenberg saying quote there is no requirement that an agency search every record system and went on to say that 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 they just say that it is the defense department has disclosed construction costs for all of their portions of kuantan of obey not only is refusing to disclose the amount spent on count seven but also that the who the

people who the government originally paid to undertake that work this d.o.j. filing comes out an interesting time for the guantanamo bay detention facility the southern command which presides over get mo is asking for forty nine million dollars to replace the facility the agency claims that good will was built improperly and is suffering from serious structural defects including a cracked foundation a number of detainees have been transferred out of the camp to come to countries like sudan in saudi arabia meanwhile during last tuesday's state of the union address president obama reiterated his commitment to close the camp for good so it's unclear if the southern command will see any of that money at all but either way the chances are that we won't know about it. meanwhile the department of justice is asking defense lawyers across the country to help them track down in mates 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 apply for clemency nonviolent drug offenders flooded prisons across the country and 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 were more likely to abuse cocaine the black community was more likely to use crack which brings more harsh minimum sentencing penalties with it the disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing is one hundred to one it wasn't until two thousand and ten that congress work to fix that disparity meaning thousands of people are still locked up at a recent new york event 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 permanent justice system now this comes just

a month after president obama commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were prosecuted for drug violations congress is now considering a bill that would make the two thousand and ten sentencing guidelines retroactive opening the door for some twelve thousand current inmates to receive reduced sentences so this latest d.o.j. move might just mean the beginning of the end of the war on drugs declared by president nixon back in one nine hundred seventy one. all right well we are team minus four days until the twenty fourteen olympic games that begin in sochi russia party is already there for the games to begin and here's a look at what we've got to cover.

well for a closer look at the state of the art facilities that were completely that were completed just in time for the events as well some of the paralympic events taking place here is r t is to say. behind me is of the cyber a readout this is where the paralympics will hold their eyes a sledge hockey tournament now the women's olympic hockey teams will also be playing raiatea in this arena this is a seven thousand multi-polar posa see to a read out don't be surprised to hear the crowd chanting ciba the name means proud in question the only question left to be on stood which teams winning would receive

the olympic gold medal now here's some of these postman shipped to expect it went to the c.s. intense and fast just the way i stock he should be. and for the first time since the introduction of the school cd lympics the russian team moved to the un from ground something that the russian coach believes will change perceptions of the unity and of the missouri works but of him in the southern ukraine was more of these guys managed to prove to themselves their relatives and the entire society and that they are not people with disabilities people with unlimited ability these men and women would be showcasing the skills at the side of the stage and come this february and mock insult. to mum was a. lengthy stadiums are too. small right that doesn't for now but for the stories

we covered go to youtube dot com slash our to america and check out our website our to dot com slash usa and don't forget to follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez all say right back here at pm eastern. the chances are that. they're. going to finish line of the marathon. that. might have been hearing.

a century ago this year the first world war started it fundamentally changed the global political order later and even it weakened international system set the stage for the second world war since the end of the cold war the global order has been in limbo under american domination in the twenty first century just how stable our world politics we welcome their innate and abby martin to be terrific hosts on the r t network. it's going to give you a different perspective give me one stock never i'll give you the information you make the decision. about how breaking the said works on the mind it's a revolution of ideas and consciousness. with the system extremely public use would be described as angry i think in a strong enough.