on this edition for saturday, october 26th, we'll look at the latest efforts to curb piracy around the world. in our signature segment, the war against computer hackers, enlisting college students in the fight. >> is it ever the case that you actually have a student discover something that nobody knew about in the middle of the semester? >> that's actually a course requirement. and women in saudi arabia fight for the right to drive. >> if my husband's not available then i can't go to work, i can't take my daughter to the hospital, i can't go for an emergency. i'm completely stuck. >> next on "pbs newshour

weekend." >> made possible by lewis b. and louise hirschfeld komen. joyce v. hail. the wallic family in memory of mere ram and ira dean wallic. bernard and irene schwartz. roslyn p. walter. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america. designing customized, individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support is provided by -- the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from vars like you. thank you. from the tish wnet studios at lincoln center in new york. >> good evening. thanks for joining us. during his weekly radio address today president obama accused congressional republicans of root formal the affordable care act to fail.

he also tried to reassure the public that the healthcare.gov website will be fixed soon. >> we've got people working overtime 24/7 to boost capacity and address these problems every single day. but even as we improve the web site, remember that the website isn't the only way to apply for coverage under these new plans. we've updated healthcare.gov to offer more information about enrolling over the phone, by mail or in person with a specially trained navigator who can help answer your questions. >> in the republican response, congressman fred upton said the website glitches could be the beginning of even greater problems. >> this is more than a website problem. we're also concerned about what happens next? will enrollment glitches become provider payment glitches? will patients show up at the doctor's office or hospital only to be told that they are not in the system? and is the personal information

that americans provide as part of the enrollment process really safe from cyber hackers and identity theft? >> there's been an outburst of violence along the border between iran and pakistan. media reports 14 iranian border guards were killed, 6 wounded, 3 captured during an overnight attack by people they described as bandits. iran responded quickly by hanging 16 prisoners it described as terrorists. iranian security forces have battled drug traffickers in the area but there has also been a great deal of unrest in the border region between pack stamp sunni and iran shia muslim populations. a suicide bombing there three years ago killed dozens of people. a u.n. envoy said today iran should have a place at any peace talks aimed at ending the civil war in syria. the united nations is hoping the peace conference takes place in geneva late next month but syrian opposition leaders have not yet agreet to attend.

a prior to charitable fund designed to cover mental health care of survivors at the newton school massacre is running out of money. one officer is still too traumatized to return to work and could be fired. the end of a long-standing business relationship between two very famous brand names. mcdonald's has reportedly decided to stop using heinz ketchup after heinz hired the former ceo of burger king. he still serves as the vice chairman of burger king's board. from peru, word of a remarkable archeological discovery. two well-preserved mummies, one adult and one child, squatting and wrapped in rope, unearthed during a dig outside the capital city of lima. the remains are thought to be more than 1,000 years old. researchers believe the adult died first, then the child was possibly buried alive as an offering to the gods. researchers also discovered

other offerings, including the remains of guinea pigs and jars with designs of cats. the discoveries were made at an ancient religious complex being excavated for more than 30 years now. 70 tombs have been uncovered there. we want to take a closer look at a story that broke a couple of days ago, the capture of two americans off the coast of nigeria by armed pirates. the incident occurred in the gulf of guinea. global business implications because nigeria is africa's leading oil producer and a major supplier of cocoa and metals. we're joined by the founder and head of sea level maritime risk. there's a lot in the air about somalia and piracy partly because of the movie "captain phillips" and somalia's on the east side of africa. what are the parallels and the dissimilarities when it comes to what's happening off the coast of nigeria? >> thank you for having me, first of all. apples and oranges. i think what we're looking at the somali case, piracy, it's

much more maritime based, it originated on the water, and takes advantage of ships, cargos going past somalia. whereas in tears of nigeria, we're looking at a form of criminality which has extended to the water but which is basically land based, based on the illegal black market for oil and attacks ships that actually operate around nigeria, go into and operate close to shore. so it's very different models. nigeria's oil production has made it a haven for a huge fight. there's a political movement there to try to get people out. there is a possibility these two are interconnected, the crime that's happening offshore, what's happening with oil on land? >> yeah, quite so. the group that we're looking at right now is possibly connected to the kidnapping, called the m.e.n.d., movement for the emancipation of the niger delta. it agreed to a truce a few years

ago, the militants had put down their guns and gotten benefits as well as education. but it seems to come back up again. it's basically organizing people from the niger delta who are upset at the amount of oil that's pumped out of their part of the country and how little money they have from the national government to show for it. >> so is this lucrative enough? is that why this keeps happening? >> in terms of the kidnapping, yes, definitely. and also what's called bunkering which is the stealing of oil or gasoline products from pipelines. we have criminal groups that are operating loosely with political as well as other agendas. and they've been self-financing, doing this sort of kidnapping mulls stealing of petroleum products and reselling them back into the market for years now. >> and what are some of the safety issues or tactical issues

from the u.s. perfespective to y to get these hostages out? >> there are many things that could go wrong. we were worried about identifying the group to find out if they're disciplined. there could be rivalries and fights among the gang members. there could be other gangs that would want to kidnap these two americans because they have high resale value. we could look at a problem this terms of a botched military response if the nigerian or any other government were to move in too quickly. it's very possible that people could get killed in the operation. and kidnappers in that part of the world have been known to kill their hostages when they feel they're going to lose them. >> we couldn't do this without nigeria's governmental support. >> definitely now that it's on the ground operation. this is not a "captain philips" rescue operation hundreds of miles out in international waters. we're talking about two american hot are now on nigerian soil. >> all right, michael froto from washington, thanks so much. >> thank you.

now to our signature segment. original reporting from around the nation and the world. tonight the war against malicious computer hackers. by one estimate, governments and businesses around the world now spend $46 billion a year trying to protect their computer systems. some security experts now believe the best way is to use the very same techniques the bad guys use. and they're enlisting a talented group of students at carnegie mellon university to help in the fight. "newshour" correspondent rick carr reports from pittsburgh. >> reporter: the bad guys stole more than 3 million social security numbers from the state of south carolina. as many as 70 million credit card numbers from sony playstation. they got access to all of the personal details of some customers of a nationwide

mortgage lending firm. but cyber criminals aren't just looking to steal personal information and credit card numbers when they break massachusetts corporate computers. they're looking for other valuable information. >> everything about your business is accessible to an attacker. >> reporter: stewart baker is former general counsel of the nsa, now a computer security consultant. >> they can steal your designs. they can steal your know-how. they can steal your customer list. and your internal analysis of what the biggest problems are in your product. this is pretty scary. >> reporter: the bad guys are mostly working from china and former soviet states. they're well-trained. some of them are protected by or even working for their governments. so they don't care about getting caught. and they might be able to do even more than steal information from businesses. security experts worry they could cripple the banking system or shut down parts of the electric grid. baker says american businesses need a new mindset if they're

going to defend themselves. >> i'm a big believer that the best defense is an offense. and if we're going to have an offense, we've got to have people who are really talented drawn to that field. >> reporter: people like these undergraduates who just might be able to save america's corporations and governments from the bad guy hackers. they're students at carnegie mellon university, one of the nation's top computer science schools, and they're learning to fight off the bad guys by thinking the same way they do. they're learning to be the good guy hackers. >> you have to understand and be able to anticipate how hackers are going to come at you. if you're only doing defense, if you don't look at offense offense, you're always reactioning and you're always one step behind. >> is that different, a change in the way computer science faculties have approached this? >> traditionally, yeah, there hasn't been a lot of expertise in offensive security and hasn't been taught at the university

level. >> reporter: computer security professor david brumley says it's tough to teach because the brand-new, cutting-edge cyber attack of today will be available to anyone with a web browser by next week. >> for example, my courses in computer security, we don't have textbooks. everything's so new we have to look at websites, we have to look at the latest from conferences, and really teach from that. every year it's a significant update. >> is it ever the case that you actually have a student discover something that nobody knew about in the middle of the semester? >> oh, that's actually a course requirement. one of the things we ask students to do is go out and find a vulnerability that no one else has found, figure out if it's exploitable, and then report it ethically. >> which means what? >> they're going and finding something they could use to break into someone's computer and then they go tell the programmer, look, here is a flaw, fix it. >> reporter: all those flaws that carnegie mellon's undergraduates find don't necessarily mean the software on your ppc or behind your bank's website is badly written. almost every piece of software

has vulnerabilities that can be exploited from outside. and when a machine's connected to the internet it's almost impossible to make it perfectly secure. what's more, compared to 10 or 20 years ago, there are just so many more computers and tablets and smartphones, all of them connected, all of them vulnerable. which means we're vulnerable too. carnegie mellon's students are so good at exploiting those eventuvulnerabilities the nsa h them to create a game teaching hacking skills to high school students. cylab, cyber security institute, is home to the top-ranked competitive hacking team in the world, the plaid parliament of poning. pone is hacker speak for own, as in the hacker takes over the computer and owns it. for the third straight year the team won top honors at international cop tests that pit

teams of hackers against one another and utterly demolished the competition at a prestigious contest in las vegas. >> a little bit like a mini cyber war that's going on. you get points by how well you find exploits in your adversaries and how well you can defend against their attack. they're secure from the normal internet and set out specifically for this purpose. >> how stiff is the competition? who's on your heels in terms of the top ten rankings? >> who's not? there's all sorts of government contractors who have teams that we compete with. and they do this professionally. >> reporter: hacker is a label the students embrace. the word has a long history in computer science circles where it was originally meant as praise. the students say it still can be. >> we don't think of it as a bad thing, we think of it as getting a deeper understanding for how something works. in order to make it do something that maybe it wasn't intended to do, but it's capable of doing. >> it's often the people who, as young high school students, they

started fo ed goofing around wi electronics and computers, how to do simple attacks, how to get inside a machine. >> reporter: andrew conti is an investigative reporter who's written dozens of articles about hackers and cyber security. >> at some point they make the decision, am i going to be a good hacker or a bad hacker? there's not that much difference between them in terms of their abilities. huge difference in terms of motivations. >> reporter: that raises the question of how wise it is to teach these abilities to students barely out of their teens with unknown motivations. cylab graduate student peter chapman says not to worry. >> if you're figuring out how to attack things, isn't it possible that somebody who comes out of here isn't going to do it for the right reasons? >> that person's motivated, they can certainly find it out on their own. this isn't hidden information. someone determined to break into a system, they can take normal courses and add this how am i

going to ruin the world mindset to it. it's the same way a locksmith who knows how to fix locks can also break into them. >> reporter: cyber security consultant stewart baker says sometimes it makes sense for a company that's been the target of bad guy hackers to engage in the little digital breaking and entering of its own, to hack back, in other words. he thinks it could be an important weapon in the cyber security arsenal. but it isn't so clear-cut ethically or legally, because it can violate federal computer security laws. >> i have been making a very public argument that we should allow this. and we should read the computer fraud and abuse act to permit it. >> what if the machine question is outside the u.s.? is it still a violation of the act? >> unfortunately, it is. >> reporter: baker says good guy hackers who have hacked back have learned that cyber criminals aren't always as clever as they seem to be. take the example of a hacker who broke into law enforcement

computers, copied personal information about officers, and posted it online. he also left a provocative picture of his girlfriend as a calling card. which turned out to be a mistake. >> they took the picture with an iphone. and that meant that somebody had helpfully included the geographic coordinates where the picture was taken. so the fbi finds the girlfriend of the hacker and went and busted the guy in texas. so these digital clues are everywhere. >> reporter: the hacker pleaded guilty to accessing a protected computer without authorization and received a sentence of 27 months in prison. stewart baker says that's the kind of outcome he'd like to see from good guy hackers like the students at carnegie mellon. hear more from the student hackers to make up the plaid

partner at of poning. newshour.pbs.org. there were acts of defiance against authorities in saudi arabia today. women pushed back against a long-standing ban on driving. and then posted videos of it online. it's the latest challenge to religious leaders by women seeking greater freedoms at home. and at work. seeking new ways to express themselves. there's currently a movie in u.s. theet there's shows how times are changing in saudi arabia. this is the first feature film made in saudi arabia and the first directed by a woman. the movie is about a young teen who wants nothing more than to ride a bike. but isn't allowed to because of religious norms. though it's fiction, the film also shows the second-class status of saudi women in real life. the need for approval from their husbands or male guardians before working. and a man's right to more than

one wife. and then there's the ban on women driving. just as the movie rebels against tra digs limiting what the main character can do, saudi women are challenging the old ways. dr. madea who studied in the united states for several years spoke to "newshour" via skype. she recently posted her own driving video and she's been fighting for the right to drive for more than 20 years. >> i actually drove three times. first time is 1990. and the second time is 2011. the first two times i got -- losing my job. >> in the first campaign in the 1990s, 47 women's were arrested, denounced in hundreds of mosques, labeled women out to destroy saudi society. >> 1990, i was very scared. we had to drive within a group.

we didn't know it was going to happen to us. felt much more vulnerable, 1990. 2013, yeah, a little fear. but i know that the support system is really very large. saudi arabia has to change. and i don't think it's a matter of choice. it isn't. we are part of this global world. we're part of this global economy. and we no longer could keep our 50% of society handicapped. >> this video shot by another woman says the current campaign is not just a fight for equal rights. the right to drive, she says, is a matter of practicality. >> you're completely depend dent 24/7. if an emergency happens in the house, you can't pick up and leave. if my husband's not available, he's got his own stuff to do,

then i can't go to work. i can't take my daughter to the hospital. i can't go for an emergency. i'm completely stuck. >> there's been a backlash. one cleric argued on saudi television last month that driving actually poses health risks to women. >> as the movement was gaining momentum, the driving campaign's website was blocked. many suspected that it was the work of a special religious police force that tries to enforce the country's conservative customs. all this has sparked headlines around the world. an online petition calling for a repeal of the driving ban has been signed by more than 16,000 people. and the cause is gaining support in the streets of riyadh. this video shot by another saudi woman captures men giving women drive areas thumbs-up. others like aziza al youssef

have gotten involved in the driving campaign more recently and say that's putting more pressure on saudi leaders to change. >> i think this time people -- there is more acceptance from the society. and i think there is more people in this campaign than ever. and i think it's going to happen very soon. >> but al youssef isn't waiting for permission. >> it's not like it's a one-day thing. for me in my mind there is no ban. i do it two or three times a week. >> madea says she's not stopping any time soon. >> nothing is given to you. you really have to find it. and we know in united states, we know in europe, women had to really struggle, women had to be imprisoned. no reason i think it should be any easier in saudi arabia. it isn't. it's just a matter of being resistant and just continuing one after the other.

one request after the other. right now our main request is driving. >> this is pbs "newshour weekend saturday." finally, a disturbing account about conditions in north korea's prison system. this from an escapee who jumped off a train, swam across a river to china, and would eventually make his way to england. he spoke at a united nations human rights committee hearing. itn's foreign affairs correspondent jonathan rugman reports. >> reporter: he wasn't always from surrey. before he tasted cappuccinos, he survived on cups of gruel. kim is an escaped prisoner from north korea, the world's most repressive state. mr. kim said he had been held in a single prison cell with 40 people who had no room to stand or move. the door of that cell was 50 centimeters high. >> the north korean prison

guards were telling us that, once you get to this prison, it's because you're not human. you're just like animals. and as soon as you get to this prison, you have to crawl just like animals. >> reporter: he showed the u.n. panel how he hid money from his prison guards by swallowing it. and though he eventually jumped from a moving prison train, his mother died, handcuffed to her bed. the australian high court judge heading this inquiry says he's interviewing 150 witnesses and unearthing appalling evidence. >> evidence of bodies in large cartloads being taken away to be burned in a pot. and other evidence of humiliating circumstances. sadly, there's a lot of evidence. there's no end to the testimony that can be secured. >> reporter: his inquiry is visiting five countries in the search for that testimony and

hoping to shine a spotlight on the regime's human rights abuses like never before. join us tomorrow on-air and online. risk and reward. the new government rules that will allow more persons to invest in startup businesses. >> i think it's going to leash another wave of entrepreneurship all across the nation. >> that's it for this edition of "newshour weekend." thanks for watching.

>> pbs "newshour weekend" is made possible by -- lewis b. and louise hirschfeld komen. judy and josh westin. the wallic family in memory of miriam and ira dean wallic. the cheryl and philip willstein family. bernard and irene schwartz. roslyn p. walter. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america. designing customized, individual and group retirement products. we're your retirement company. additional support is provided by -- the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.