ok. there is just too much rat is a society. that. coming up on r t a dark secret barry jones to the coast of new york hard to island is where many have been laid to rest in a mass grave including the poor the homeless and even infamous birth by prison inmates holding up the story ahead. just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you the old saying rings true as a florida school district upsets parents by keeping biometric data out of students this is a group of hackers files a criminal complaint against germany councilor on the merkel and the government for assisting the n.s.a. in its spine more on that coming up and how much did it cost to build the guantanamo bay detention center it's a question that the obama administration refuses to answer now

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 at eight pm in washington d.c. i'm maggie lopez and you are watching our team america well not too far from the bright dazzling lights of times square and the new york city skyline lies one of the america's darkest secrets potter's field on hart 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 ortiz honest also a charkha brings us more from the largest taxpayer funded cemetery in the world. a police kept from the public eye. you likely never heard of it despite its long history of one of the largest cemeteries who new united states with nearly

a million burials almost one million people buried here since the aid. 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 the 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 beurre up to fifteen hundred bodies a year burbles 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 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 old 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 hospital 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. 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 busybody 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 the 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. this it hard island and then not to be able to go to an actual grave site this is work to break it into their own lawyer mark taylor works with the grieving mothers pro bono many of them. did not subsequently have children so they have 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 shoddy 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 aerators drew as 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 ran 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 and if they are new york and joining me now to talk about that story is on a stasia check in on our new york studio on a stansted thank you so much for joining me now first 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. well 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 burials 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 are really journalists allowed to go there are. 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 gravesite of their children. well 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 lock in by accident that they heard of the hard 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 what. might be searching but it 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. while 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 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 they're 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 near future on a stasi as 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 r.t. correspondent on the stasi it from our new york studio. well jury selection for the stand your ground trial of a florida man began 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 boys refused dunn continued yelling 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 a shotgun however no weapon was alternately recovered from the crime scene dunn

fled with his fiance and drove to his house which is over two hours away he never called the police to report the incident officers finally 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 r.t. back in september take a look at this society has turned where when you're angry but whatever reason you get your good and you store with violent toward people that are innocent i want to know people to know their joy and was an innocent bystander you know he was an 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 and he looked at me and with such distain that it was palpable. the case of michael dunn in many ways parallels that of george zimmerman in his

trial for the shooting death of trayvon martin including the age of the boys the color of their skin and the states where the shootings happened but there are also a number of key differences between the two now jury selection could take a week or more to complete before the trial begins the jury of six men and 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 taking place outside. well also in florida state lawmakers working are working on a bill to protect the rights of students but not for too much homework or from the lunch ladies they are trying to protect students from metrics things like fingerprinting or retina scanners the new bill with prohibits school districts from collecting biometric information including the characteristics of fingerprints hands in 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 prohibit 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 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 of scared and without the parents' permission pinay us county schools meanwhile were standing the poems of pupils in lunchrooms in order to access their accounts for money some county schools scanned their 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 the new york post and author of the devlin thriller trilogy that centers around the n.s.a. he 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 are overreacting yes or no i think what we've learned in the last few years and certainly in the last year of show 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. it's 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 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 our rightness and 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 all 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 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 can tutor club teamed

up with the international league for human rights to slam a complaint against german chancellor angela merkel and the german intelligence committee for cooperating with 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 of aiding and abetting those activities a lie elation that 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 us 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 this giant computers and these 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 on the skies lately the u.s. is 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 artie's amir of david reports it's time to get our heads out of the clouts don't just search the skies the u.s. military is bringing its unmanned vehicles closer to the ground when you think about driverless vehicles you most likely think about google the government 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 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 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 system only me. the military closer to its goal of capitalizing on autonomy were fair 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 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 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 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 spent to build a section of guantanamo bay meant to house detainees miami herald reporter carol rosenberg has been reporting on get most since it opened 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 camp seven holds detainees like. the

so-called mastermind of the september eleventh attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon his trial is expected any day now officials say they found only one document related to the foyer request the d.o.j. refuse to release that document because it contains the details of internal deliberations as well as the names of people who worked there and is therefore subject to privacy so rosenburg sued the d.o.j. saying officials didn't search the finals hard enough but now fry a friday filing the justice department asked the federal court to dismiss that lawsuit brought on by rosenberg saying quote there is no requirement that an agency search every record system and also 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 these documents was adequate now the defense department has disclosed construction costs for all other portions of guantanamo bay not only is

are refusing to disclose the amount it's spent on camp seven but also who the government originally paid it to undertake that work this d.o.j. filing comes at 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 get no was built improperly and is suffering from serious structural defects including a cracked foundation now a number of detainees have been transferred out of the camp to countries like sudan in saudi arabia. meanwhile during last tuesday's state of the union address president obama reiterated his commitment to close down the camp for good so right now it is unclear if the southern command will see that money after all but either way chances are that we won't know about it well i've ever heard of something called the ghetto or have you called something ghetto tonight's resident looks at how the meaning of the word get our law has evolved over the years and how the word

is a safe description for the restaurant chain chuck e. cheese. in the nineteen eighties in america it was an insult to call something ghetto it implied something was poor or rundown also in the eighty's in america the restaurant chain chuck e. cheese was born you know the place with blame arcade games for kids weird dusty animatronic singing mice around the restaurant and absolutely horrible people well that same chucky cheese restaurant chain just got bought for about one billion dollars by

a private equity firm named apollo the same one that bought host just last year though saving the stupid twenty from extinction seriously they think they don't but chuckie cheese is worth saving for one billion dollars the restaurant is so gatto that horrible stuff happens there all the time up for instance it has a killer named after it the chuck e. cheese killer because a man killed four employees at one franchise in colorado thirty person brawl broke out at a chuck e. cheese in illinois over arcade prize tickets in a florida chuckie cheese of course eighteen men started fighting at a kid's birthday party which led to a shooting and multiple drug arrests kids are constantly being abandoned at chuck e. cheese across the nation sometimes by accident sometimes on purpose a woman pulled a gun at a connecticut took the cheese a grandmother was assaulted at a michigan chuckie cheese the list goes on and on to the point where gossip blogger

perez. even has a whole section on his website about all the ghetto things that go on at chuck e. cheese restaurants and now that same chain just sold for about one billion dollars is that what american private equity invests in we're not putting a billion dollars toward ending poverty feeding the hungry building clean energy infrastructure or furthering education you know we're using it to revive chucky cheese so it's no surprise that thirty years later in america being ghetto is now cooled to the point where the phrase ghetto fabulous really exists we put all of our resources into making money any way we can regard a list of how crappy the things we're making actually are the result is that our entire country has now become one giant ghetto complete with the world's

worst pizza tonight let's talk about bed by following me on twitter at the resident . while you may have heard of feeding a stray cat before but police officers in florida arrested an eighty one year old woman for get this leaving bowls of dog food outside of her house for yogi bear and his friends now police said they repeatedly warned former middle school gym teacher mary musselman not to feed mayors they cited her for two misdemeanors in december and even showed her an educational video explaining that beating bearers is just plain dangerous but the elderly woman kept leaving at seventeen to eighteen bowls of food claiming that the barrels would stone our way if she didn't feed them also man 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 now no word on whether the bears were angry about being fed dog food rather than jars of honey that's going to do it for now fluid stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website or to dot com slash usa and over to follow me on twitter to find out what i'm doing when i'm not bring you today's top stories at my going underscore lopez have a great night. and

you're the moment. you.