to the pacific as this is where those stopped at the push of additional forces. bad lines this hour a russian national media blitz and they sentenced to eighteen months in prison by a us federal court for failing to register as a pouring agent. because if other countries adopt the same. you're going to get a tit for tat situation with countries grabbing civilians of other countries as leverage or for other reasons a. journalist started to be hold in front of french intelligence officials for questioning over their publication of sensitive information about transfers arms sales to saudi arabia. projects of truly apic ambition britain and germany hailed trying to spell it and row its trading network

initiative that the countries take part in a major economic forum and plans. you can find those stories in lots more over on our website our team dot com i'll be here again when they have lines in an hour and the main time as the big picture. on this week's show russia warns that the usa is getting ready for war in venezuela and china says leave cuba alone a war hawks are circling but first the national security agency says make us stop surveilling every phone call made in the usa what's that about and what else are whistleblowers warning about holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our t.v. america. in

one of the jason bourne movies or british reporter is identified after speaking the word black briar and a phone call the film dramatize to uncle sam keyword scanning every phone call everywhere the movie is fiction in fact the national security agency has been collecting bed it data on domestic usa phone calls since the aftermath of nine eleven and now the n.s.a. itself is recommending to the white house that it discontinued the program why now let's ask william bennett was served thirty plus years at the national security agency before retiring in two thousand and one after which he called for a government investigation of mass data collection the n.s.a. was doing and he was publicly critical of stepped up surveillance of american citizens post nine eleven in two thousand and five he was accused of leaking information that surface in

a page one new york times exposé about warrantless and as a eavesdropping despite being cleared of wrongdoing his home was raided at gunpoint by the f.b.i. how'd that go. now to close mr binney welcome thank you in an interview with reason magazine you explained that the n.s.a. took the program you had created to do social network reconstruction of anybody in the world and directed against everybody in the united states that means they were basically putting a pen register on every phone in the us a pen register being a device that records all the numbers call from a phone line how has uncle sam been surveilling our calls and why now to stand down will you see the point that i can see is that the upstream program of collection of all the data content and meditate on the fiber lines has progressed to the state where they don't need any of the supplemental data from the companies listing all the for. phone calls that they had recorded they used at the fill in the gaping

holes they had in missing collection on the upstream program but the upstream program is really the main one it's dundon or executive order one two triple three with no oversight whatsoever this is the one that the f.b.i. and the da in the cia interrogate as well as the five eyes they also interrogate this database for for the for the f.b.i. and the a they look for criminal activity inside the u.s. just common crimes as well as terrorism course they justified for doing this say they're doing it for terrorism but they're not really they're just doing it for everybody well they seem to be crying anchal about the volume of data that's being gathered and mass data gathering risk intel info overload it does if you do the content for the metadata that's not a problem i mean the meditated could be stored in x. just on the stand right here right behind us that would be for the entire world and have multiple copies of it so that's not the issue the issue really is the content

and that's not the program they're talking about they're talking about the basic one under the patriot act section two fifteen where the admitted data the content the calls the date time duration is passed from the companies to n.s.a. to graph and build relationships that's not the the real major program that's in violating our rights the one that is the upstream one that's where they're copying not just the content but also the metadata so that metadata basically was redundant to what they are talking about in this program we think that it was a matter of lingo but essentially it's which number is calling which number and patterns emerge but since nine eleven has anybody actually been listening to my voice when i made a phone call there's a potential for that they may have been using the evidence i've compiled shows they are using translation devices which means they can buy them by the millions and do millions of calls all the time simultaneously and they have access to all this for . on call so they can record them store them for

a certain period of time scan them with these translation devices then scan the translated material using algorithms that score things in terms of phrases and words used and then if something hits a threshold they could pass it to a transcriber in fort gordon georgia a couple thousand of them there and they can do the transcript what about this beehive thing out in utah but that's where the storage is that's role that the content the recordings and things like that are you'll have spoken out suggesting that nine eleven was preventable talking about that yeah it is it was a clear preventable all these terrorist attacks are clearly preventable i mean look at them you hear about these terrorist attacks and then they talk about the perpetrator of the attack and it was a well known person and that that was either declared violence toward the west or something like that and had already been known to be affiliated with different organizations that and they should have been focused on them and watching them but

when they spread their effort over the entire planet you diffuse any energy you have to find a threat in advance and so you lose it and you can't you can't see it coming and so the attacks happen and then afterward they come in and say does basically we have all this data on this person here's this entire social network is all this information about him but if they had been focusing on them in the beginning i mean even the terrorists in nine eleven gave the date of the attack before the attack wow so i mean it was in the n.s.a. data but they couldn't get to it i remember that early ninety's world trade center bombing in ninety three shortly after that sixty minutes did a piece and identified osama bin laden and said this guy's a bad guy keep an eye on him and we didn't. actually we did we just didn't watch him closely enough in that network is entire network was known from ninety six on. is in your opinion. in business it usual at the national security agency breaking

the law and if so how. certain part of it is i mean there's still a lot of a lot of us devoted to doing the charter that there is that they're allowed to do and charted to do that for foreign intelligence but they domestic side of it is totally unconstitutional violent in my view the first fourth fifth and sixth amendment to the constitution the first because it it shows all of your relationships and you so you don't have free association right and you and the and the fourth because they're looking at the content of what you're saying and what you're writing in your emails and so on and you're chatter and short messages and things like that so that's the fourth amendment to use that against you to see if you're going to commit a crime or in the process of criminal activity they'll use that against you in violation of the fifth amendment and then when it comes time to trying you they have they can't use that evidence in a court of law because it wasn't acquired with a warrant so they do a parallel construction ronnie's they they send people out to find data using

standard policing techniques and then they substitute that in a court of law to try you and convict you and i call that a plan program perjury policy run by the department of justice of the united states and it's in total violation of every almost all the rights that we have in the constitution the major ones anyway i think i just learned something because i had the impression cia only operated elsewhere and n.s.a. only operated domestically but n.s.a. does get involved in foreign stuff as well and it's a charter is foreign so it's cia's but they're all doing domestics and nine eleven ouch so and they interrogate the same database without oversight by the way while they're to that point and as if these agencies themselves weren't a concern could cia or n.s.a. contractor is with data access runamuck absolutely i mean that look at edward snowden what the access he had he could he could do the. i mean you could look at

they could look at it for a. for example all that information is there about the industrial trading and all that and probably bidding calculations the bidding being done by other companies is in there somewhere and they can find that use that in their bidding for a contract internationally is snowden traitor or a patriot i think some of the things he took out he shouldn't have but i think that's part of the problem of collecting data you know when you try to find the data that's important to get out the people most of the stuff that i've seen shows that he's a patriot because he's showing the criminal violations of our constitution by our own government. that's i mean those are under executive order one three five two six section one point seven that governs all classification by the u.s. government they must declassify that because of the evidence of a crime if ben bradlee and katharine graham were heroes in the

pentagon papers instance why is julian assange a villain because that they want to get rid of him because they don't want the truth told that's why most recently government whistleblower. protection office itself is under investigation for retaliating against whistleblowers president trumpets out of the twenty seventeen veterans administration accountability and whistle blower act saying this bill protects whistleblowers who do the right thing we want to reward cherish and promote the many dedicated employees at the v.a. yet right now the v.a. inspector general is probing this contact at the senior level employees who disclose for instance concerns about diminished mental capacity of a doctor treating fads in another case malfunctioning the water filtration system they all say they've suffered retaliation. it's the problem with all these safeguards that the foxes guarding the hen house primarily yes i mean for example

in our case the inspector general the department of defense where we made our complaint against and say was the one who gave our names to the f.b.i. and that's why they created this so yeah and it was a while decades later the f.b.i. even at that time they raided us they knew who was the source of the new york times material and they knew we weren't because they had all the material from the stellar wind which is a domestic collection of data on phone calls e-mails and so on they knew we had no contact with anybody in the new york times they already knew that so and they knew who did it that was thomas tamm from the department of justice the lawyer who is writing the request for warrants to the fai's a court for the d.o.j. he could see in there they already had wiretaps and were reading their e-mails and phone calls and everything and they raided you anyway and they raided us anyway william binney thank you for your time tonight and for your service thank you to our country coming off the hawks are circling venezuela is war

imminent this is the big picture on our. mats geysers financial survival guide liquid assets not those that you can convert into this quite easily. to keep in mind no assets into place. for. the trumping ministration is on an offensive around the globe as a candidate trump called out neo cons for supporting american military interests now many of them work for the president and this is in. strace in the very idea of diplomacy is absent it relies upon threats saying.

american politics. and intensity and the notion that somebody playing games at the margins of those election. believe it influenced the outcome is frankly frankly absurd to food. russia was the states the united states has been following. in influencing the domestic politics of other countries. than russia. venezuela has elected president nicolas maduro copes with runaway inflation power

outages and crushing economic sanctions legislative leader one quite go back by the usa declares himself interim president is u.s. military action there and evitable is it imminent let's ask the author of drones and targeted killing legal moral and geo political issues and the united states and torture interrogation incarceration and abuse marjorie conus professor emeritus at thomas jefferson school of law welcome back. thank you holland had thanks for having me the stated mission of the united states agency for international development is at dancing u.s. national security and economic prosperity demonstrating american generosity and promoting a pass. two recipient self-reliance and resilience among those deliverables

a seventy five page loser change manual which advocates the creation of rapid expeditionary development teams to partner with the cia and u.s. special forces to conduct a mix of often served defensive and stability operations in stream as conditions does military intervention now seem inevitable to you. i think that's the direction the u.s. government is moving and it's very disturbing forcible regime change is illegal it violates the united nations charter the charter of the organization of american states and the international covenant on civil and political rights and this regime change manual which is really a counterinsurgency doctrine for the trumpet ministration. is it contemplates the use of force offensive defensive combat operations it's very very

disturbing there are basically four different stages of regime change first sanctions and economic warfare and that's what the united states has been in gauging in against venezuela beginning with the george w. bush administration stepped up during the obama administration and taken to a new high under the trumpet ministration and then information information warfare basically propaganda and that is what the u.s. government has been doing with wydow who was unknown a short time ago installing him as the so-called interim president and then really blanketing the corporate media in the united states with anti my daughter oh. news and and then so those are the first two stages at the you know. it states has been and is engaging in the third stage of regime change is covert and proxy

war and that is something that i think is happening will happen more and eventually aerial bombardment or military force now mcclatchy has reported that there have been covert arms shipments from miami to venezuela and trump has talked many times about using military force in venezuela he has john bolton and mike pompei oh who are hawks on venezuela who would love to get rid of them i do it a regime to make venezuela safe for u.s. corporations and then of course there's elliott abrams that old war criminal who was convicted of lying to congress about iran contra and then eventually pardoned by gerald ford he supported the guatemalan dictator who engaged in genocide torture mass killing he's an expert on so-called dirty wars and he is the new u.s.

envoy to venezuelan affairs so go figure that's where we're headed and i think this is holland the time for people to contact their representatives and tell them there is a bill pending in the house of representatives it's called h.r. one zero zero four and it basically says use the war powers resolution the which says that the president cannot introduce u.s. troops into hostilities or imminent hostilities unless congress has declared war which has not happened unless there is statutory authorization which there is not or the united states or its allies have been attacked none of those three things have occurred the war powers resolution was used by congress to pass the yemen resolution to stop the u.s. from supporting that horrible war saudi war in yemen and it should happen again. on venezuela we can't just let them do this regime changes not only are they illegal

they're disastrous we saw what happened in afghanistan jordan iraq in libya and that list goes on and on well about elliott abrams who's resume includes iran contra and the iraq war he is now the united states special representative for venezuela a position president trump established listen to some comments abrams delivered just this week. the current state of affairs is not normal for venezuela it is not acceptable for venezuelans and i'm absolutely convinced it is not then his will his destiny. so what is standing between the people of venezuela and that future what is stopping the beginning of rebuilding and reconciliation. some questions are hard that one is easy the short answer is nicolas maduro. marjorie what if the united states just

left venezuela alone what's the worst that could happen. why it's exactly what the united states should do leave all the countries alone we have eight hundred military bases all around the world where we have our sticky fingers. the there has been problems in venezuela because of inflation because of mismanagement and because of u.s. u.s. sanctions under george w. bush he refused to send spare parts to venezuela for their military venezuela then turned to russia for those spare parts under the obama administration obama declared venezuela a threat to national security and many corporations started pulling out of venezuela and the trump administration has imposed punishing economic sanctions making it much harder to buy food and medicine and medicine there have been

documented over forty thousand deaths as a result of trump sanctions from twenty seventeen to twenty eighteen and since january of this year or oil production fell by thirty six percent and will continue to fall if it keeps going at this rate so yes there is there are problems within venezuela but what the u.s. government is doing with the saying sions and with the threats of military force are exacerbating the situation killing tens of thousands of people and making the situation much much worse well battle lines are being drawn russia sent one hundred troops to venezuela a national security adviser john bolton cold. a direct threat to international peace and security in the region and vice president pence said the usa is also looking at strong action against cuba another venezuelan ally this flawed approach was used by the eisenhower administration after that thousand nine hundred

fifty nine cuban revolution as you've recently written in an op ed the u.s. economic blockade against cuba continues to hurt the people but they have not overthrown their government so apropos cuba in your op ed clearly the consequence has been that the make them suffer approach just doesn't produce the results is venezuela a proxy for a familiar cold war. it is and it's it's absolutely unnecessary and it is making conflict with russia much much more likely which is very very dangerous what you're referring to about cuba you're absolutely right in one nine hundred sixty there was a secret state department memo saying that if we make life miserable for the cuban people and they suffer economically then they will overthrow castro's government of

course we know that didn't work the same sions the blockade against cuba continues cuba is no threat to the united states and in fact what the trump administration has done even before linking cuba to venezuela and cuba venezuela our allies there's nothing wrong with that is to impose additional sanctions on cuba and to to destroy a lot of the progress that obama had made toward normalization and these sanctions against cuba are getting more worse and worse there are limits on how much money can be sent over there on travel to cuba they're encouraging. the lawsuits which will will paralyze the cuban government and also. forces within cuba and also make it much less attractive for u.s. investment in cuba and for people to travel to cuba and so that's the same tack they're taking with venezuela if they make if the u.s.

government makes life so miserable for the the venezuelan people and they certainly are exacerbating that misery by by leading to the deaths there the sanctions that have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of minutes whalen's the they're they're banking on that same failed strategy they used in cuba to tour and make things miserable enough then they'll overthrow them i do it all government and that's just not going to happen sure would have by now i guess i've only got about a minute left but the elephant in the room is donald trump because nobody commands media attention like this president and moments like now as congress is issuing subpoenas pertinent to the moeller report these are the moments when the president is prone to de flexion watch this not that and americans do tend to rally around boots on the ground just about a minute left is it cynical to suspect a way the dog moment in venezuela. i it may be cynical but

unfortunately it may also be true trump is feeling the heat nothing would would distract more from that than starting a war if not boots on the ground and certainly aerial bombardment and i want to say that their code pink and other the embassy protection collective is has spent two weeks inside the venezuelan embassy in washington d.c. with the permit permission of the lawful venezuelan government to keep it from being taken over by illegally by the the forces of right and in fact under the vienna convention on diplomatic relations. without the consent of the venezuelan government it is illegal to enter search or damage anything within that embassy or out the consent of the lawful venezuelan government professor marjorie cohn thank you for your context and perspective on this important story.

and thank you for watching the big picture if you see us somewhere else you can also watch our team america live at youtube dot com slash r t america we're also live on directv three two one and the super cool pluto t.v. one three two and dish to eight zero and all of our shows are available anytime anywhere on any device at youtube dot com slash the big picture our to holland cook in washington back here same time next week and in the meantime i am at holland cook on twitter where i'd like to hear your suggestions for stories and topics you'd like to see in the big picture and remember if you follow me i'll follow you questioned more.

than. thirty three.

kaiser this is the kaiser report yeah you know wall street always got the latest was bank she was saying happen like the left i.p.o. controversy there a little stacy you know you were a participant and dot com one point zero first bubble and pop well there's dot com two point zero bubble. and perhaps pop snapp i.p.o. honeymoon in twenty seventeen gave way to investor lawsuits within ten weeks with blue apron it was just seven weeks for a lift to stock has tumbled sharply sensis march twenty eighth launch it took less than three weeks for disillusioned shareholders to sue the company so apparently investors the left are unhappy to be down like twenty something percent and they

have already lodged a lawsuit because they're claiming that the they overhyped the i.p.o. before the dot com experience i had in los angeles in the mid one nine hundred ninety s. i was a stock broker on wall street during the one nine hundred eighty s. when we had many i.p.o.'s and i.p.o.'s the ones that they're priced are priced in a way to get them out the door you've got to get them sold you got to get them out of the marketplace so there's a lot of hype but you know when i started on the last three when you had a prospectus for an i.p.o. you could not even have color photographs that was considered to be a deuce meant to just sell these days like in the case of facebook they made a major motion picture. about facebook during the i.p.o. phase right so it's become entertainment and so people who don't like the i.p.o. for lift are like people who don't like game of thrones you know they expected a certain amount of entertainment they weren't delivered that entertainment it's about.