they live in the richest most powerful country in the world but they've lost their stake in it this is the living room dining room reference to tackling unemployment is a solution for an intractable problem that has been building since the seventy's the hollowing out of america's large middle class and the rise of the working poor exacerbated by the global financial crisis estimated forty seven point five million americans now live on the edge of the poverty line by make up more than ten million families classified as the working poor many of them were once a part of the educated middle class living the american dream now struggling in service sector jobs follow a play longer alice and little job security and then there was eyes who have no job at all tonight's documentary producer felipe tells the frightening story of three families who in other times lived the life one describes as quote consumerism at its finest with middle class assets and high aspirations it illustrates graphically how the only thing standing between most people  poverty is their job at night they roam the streets of america looking for a place to sleep tonight they found a cop  no one has counted how many americans are currently living like this but during the months we spent inside the american crisis we met hundreds the majority are from the middle class the costs that for decades have been the embodiment of the american dream and larry the dogs and i work the walt disney world in orlando florida i'm fifty two years old and i live with my wife and two children and i will in the semi florida and i have five children highway to disney world who goes to school send were crowded we don't know each other's nerves and i said it is getting out here we're not sure when that will happen and it all depends on whether we can start getting some extra money coming in so the one of these could give a little more hours and we can start that i started out by seven forty and i've got two i think twenty and two and a half years and no that's not the greatest but that's about the way it is anywhere nine hundred families now live in the cheap motels that surround the florida theme park and one time these motels were filled with tourists but now they launch those who are no longer able to afford their own homes the managers sometimes seem like slum lords exploiting families in poverty we could only find one who was willing to talk to us in this room here they have been here for a global year and a half like a permanent residence this day our home two years hard to now that you can't hide it in this not just families you've got older people that can't go anywhere you've got seniors that's living in there walking up and down that street out there every day i don't have somewhere to go i for example i have one in my room right now she's she has no where to go shirley opened her to this woman who had previously been a paying guest of the motel without anywhere to stay for five days she was sleeping on the side of the road she's sixty seven years old she came back which was hard legs was burned from her sitting at the bus stop all day long i mean i'm walking fields and i became a store clerk i stepped up but it took me a long time to step up i'm fifty three years old i have no retire me i have no been a fears i have nothing it lets me know what i need to fix on my swi salt lake i played it hidden valley country club that i don't know if there are classes anymore in america now when the market burst and people found out that their houses were not worth what they thought they were jobs disappear the illusion of security and stability we're right with  the families spend all of its savings on hotel rooms until six months ago when terry managed to find a part time job in a hotel complex for eight dollars an hour forced to sell his car because he couldn't afford to pay for petrol or insurance  now eight hundred children are currently growing up in the motels that surround disney world the school bus has had to change its route to come and collect the children known in the school system or as the disney motel kids they move from school to school as their parents are forced to find cheaper and cheaper commendation let's not forget about you actually read the book you have been to five different one within the school district i think that they were ashamed because we were living in a hotel but then we found out there's other people living in economically incapable of raising their six children the three eldest were placed in can i do my best to try make sure it's not hard on them i try to keep everything on me because i'm big brother yeah but if it's not hard on me who's it going to be hard on my mom or my sisters i mean being the big brother when my dad to work it feels like i'm the man of the house and so i have to do this get that done  don't want to get separated from my family but again the parents have to accept that for the moment there is no support or help for them during the weeks we spent with these families we only came across one social worker in the county and she was supposed to be monitoring around eight hundred children thirteen terry's wife gave up work so she could take care of their six children but last year she began looking for work again in every restaurant in the area so now every night off to dinner with the children she works in a restaurant opposite the mot last seven families to move out of here one one and one house and they only last in the house three months and they're living out of their vehicle now shelters here are always to capacity and during the summer a lot of them close and there is no safety net for poor like they say there is it doesn't exist without any safety net to catch these people as the situations where some of those that no longer have the means to pay for their motel will go from hans homeless to completely homeless they all from then migrate to the states where the social been in our car for ten days ago her husband found a job on the other side of the united states their father is working in kentucky he just wasn't going to try and jobs here and now we're sending whenever he gets paid and also he'll be saving that money so when we have like a nurse at one point we had a teacher we had a dental hygienist you know and so she was i mean they were used to making good money like they were used to being comfortable so that's why i say we do get some first time homeless and we don't have as many people moving out so is full definitely so we try to kind of work with what we have already going to work stay in the car ok shower maybe your friend's house and you feel kind of obligated you know i mean every day i mean every other day you know it's hard to do it i have a hard time asking if i can get clean and i'm a pretty go getter guy who works as fourteen years old i'm like fifty two now then coming in why the government doesn't attack it or look at get on in there girlfriend hand you have to be good for me i'm trying to get a job you understand me years ago these fields were full of horses three thousand kilometers from california kentucky was the capital of course racing in the united states the economic crisis hit the owners hard and now the fields are practically deserted those who can afford to try to maintain their phones in a decent state that is what ford family is husband daniel so far from his family right well i can't wait to come see they'll be told apart but i mean just my mommy and daddy were struggling and now we moved out to california and we continued to struggle for a little bit about we got our minds right got on the right track and here we are today hopefully hopefully everything will still be great when the when are we telling the investigation into america in crisis and then everything from a part o thirty nine year old bergen county man who police say was brutally attacked by a man with a hatchet last night has died the man police have charged with the brutal attack carter he told our teen he was acting in self defense man daniel it was the only way to save his life two witnesses support his story he's awaiting trial in a detention center in kentucky we were able to meet with the condition that he didn't talk about what had happened in the car was supposed to be the low point but now this this pretty much the low point of him being in jail and away from the kids i have to minder have to remind her of how good of many years because he's not here to show if the jury believes his self defense theory done you'll cause i will be freed immediately otherwise he may spend the rest of his life in prison like in florida larry keeps on waiting for a promotion would allow his family to finally leave the motel terry and his wife will soon have enough savings to rent a studio in orlando where they plan to move into firmly believe that they will be able to walk their way up again one day the american dream live again who was in jail facing murder charges has now been released with help from an eye witness the judge found he acted in self defense and allowed him to go home to his family in san diego snowden i'm twenty nine years old i work for booze allen hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for and in hawaii what are some of the positions that you held previously he within the intelligence community i've been a systems engineer systems administrator senior advisor for the central intelligence agency solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer one of the things people are going to be most interested in in trying to understand what who you are and what you're thinking is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower and walk you through that decision making process when you're in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing  but over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances when you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses and when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and you know move on from them but over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it and the more you talk about it the more you're ignored the more you're told it's not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public not by somebody who is simply hired by the government talk a little bit about how the american surveillance state actually functions that are does it target the actions of americans n s a and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible believes on the grounds of sort of a self sort of cation that they serve the national interest originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they the n s a specifically targets the communications of everyone it ingests them by default it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes the it measures the minute stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends so while they may be intending to  target someone associated with a foreign government or someone that they suspect of terrorism they're collecting your communications to do so any analyst at any time can target anyone any selector anywhere where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with not all analysts have the ability to target everything but i sitting my desk certainly had the authorities to to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if i had a personal e mail one of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually was a blowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can which they hope often is forever you on the other hand have decided to do the opposite which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures why did you choose to do that i think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model when you are subverting the power of government that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret consistently you know as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took it'll kind of give its officials a mandate to go hey you know tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side but they rarely if occurs that falls to individual citizens but they're typically maligned you know it becomes a thing of these people are against the country they're against the government but i'm not i'm no different from anybody else i don't have special skills i'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office watches what happening what's happening and goes this is something that's not our place to the side the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong and i'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say i didn't change these i didn't modify the story this is the truth this is what's happening you should decide whether we need to be doing this have you given thought to what it is that the u s government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you how they might try to depict you what they might try to do yeah i could be you know rendered by the cia i could have a people come after me or any of their third party partners you know they would they work closely with a number of other nations or you know they could pay off the try had served any any if their agents or assets we've we've got a cia station just up the road in the consulate here in hong kong i'm sure they're going to be very busy for the next week and that's that's a fear i'll live under for the rest of my life however long that happens to be you can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because they're such powerful adversaries the no one can meaningfully oppose them if they want to get you they'll get you in time but at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you and if living living on freely but comfortably something you're willing to accept and i think many of us are it's the human nature  you can get up every day you can go to work you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching the shows but if you realize that that's the world the you helped create and it's going to get worse with the next generation of the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied why should people care about surveillance because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded and the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made every friend you've ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrong door we are currently sitting in a room in hong kong which is where we are because you travel here talk of the bit about why it is that you came here and specifically there going to be people who will speculate that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the united states which is china and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking questioning of the choice of hong kong the first is that china is an enemy of the united states that it's not i mean there there are conflicts between the united states government and the chinese p r c government but the  people's inherent way you know we don't care we trade with each other freely you know we're not at war we're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be were we're the largest trading partners out there for each other additionally hong kong  has a strong tradition of free speech people think oh china great farmall mainland china does have significant restrictions on free speech but the hong kong the people of hong kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets of making their views known the internet is not filtered here no more so than any other western government and i believe that the hong kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading western governments if you're motivated in the heart of united states and help its enemies or if your mother had been personal material gain were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing well absolutely i mean and anybody in the positions of access with the tape technical capabilities that i had you know suck out secrets pass on the open market to russia you know they always have an open door as we do  i had access to you know the four oscars of everyone working at the n s a the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world the locations of every station we have what their missions are and so forth if i had just wanted to harm the u s you know that you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon but that's not my intention and i think for anyone making that argument they need to think if they were in my position and you know you live a privileged life you you're living in hawaii in paradise and making a ton of money what would it take to make you leave everything behind the greatest fear that i have regarding the outcome for america of these disclosures is that nothing will change people will see in the media all these disclosures they'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over american society and global society but they they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests and the months ahead the years ahead it's only going to get worse until of eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance they are policy  even our agreements with with other sovereign governments we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law and because of that a new leader will be elected they'll flip the switch say  that because of the crisis because of the dangers that we face in the world you know some some new and unpredicted threat we need more authority we need more power and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose