down but not out the occupy wall street movement is making headlines across the country once again as demonstrators crossed the six month mark we'll look at how far the movement's come where it's headed. and the patriot act sounds like a law that supports liberty and justice for all or two u.s. senators are on a mission to show you exactly what this bill allows credit be that weird wording gives government agencies an open book to your life. and some call it an obligation others

a blood lust of sorts from afghanistan to iraq to libya american military officials seem happy to send firepower to whichever region comes they gain but given all the trouble still plaguing the middle east and a disagreement about how much has actually been accomplished is the u.s. experiencing intervention over a long. way there it's monday march nineteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for watching r.t. . well across the country at the parks that were once filled with tents and protesters and has been largely quiet for the last few months and winter didn't deter those occupy wall street protesters police raids did and most of the overnight occupations were disbanded with protesters promising this thing is still just getting started and saturday marks six months since the protests did all start

back on september seventeenth to celebrate a couple hundred people gathered at zuccotti park in new york city to remind people that the passion and the anger are over economic and political injustice has not subsided in attendance over the weekend occupy wall street activists sarah mason as well as activist all these and they are joining us in our new york studios goldie let me start with you just give us a sense of what this rally over the weekend was like in terms of protesters is this a beginning of a comeback. definitely yeah we're we're back but it was six month anniversary so we all we've always we've always been here always been having meetings indoors and off campus so it's you know right after the first month of occupation but a six month celebration in the weather was great it was definitely our duty to come out in full force and we had a thousand plus there saturday and it was an amazing time until half as many

n.y.p.d. came about five hundred n.y.p.d. came just wrote us out of the park. let me and let me go to you know let me mention though as there was actually the one painted by shepard fairey for the cover of time the time magazine person of the year the protester sara talk to me there are some critics out there saying you know the momentum of the occupy wall street is gone the movement over what you say to those people i think it really just highlights happen the importance of having a visible space to gather because. the movement never went away the movement never stopped it's just that our access to the public spaces where people could come and sort of see the movement doing were those spaces were brutally attacked in a limited. i know one of the biggest challenges especially in the fall was the difficulty in coming forth with a united message now on one hand this makes perfect sense there are lots of people

there with lots of different gripes about what's wrong and what needs to change but i'm wondering if you guys are talking to people about whether or not there's a plan to deal with this to come forth this spring with you know a more unified front. well i mean the occupy wall street is a very big organization it's a nation. but the people know why we're here we're sick of money running the country and it's so imbedded in so deep that it's hard to articulate in a list of demands i mean the list would be over one hundred long it's it's just our system isn't working for people it isn't working for voting people you can't you can vote on a lot of the issues that really really bother us and we have a dozen wars going on right now who can vote for it to stop one of them so it's it's really a deep deep issue. it's multifaceted and i think the right people the

common sense people know why we're here we're just sick of money running the country i know that one of the main things that a lot of protesters i spoke to would point to during the first few months back i was straight was the citizens united supreme court case but since that time more things that happened including something that just very recently happened and that is the signing by president barack obama of h.r. three forty seven which makes basically makes a protest of any type potentially illegal people could get arrested be put in jail for up to a year if they're protesting at a place where there are people with secret service agents i know that again you know d.c. is a city you know there's protests just about every day here and i know that the occupy movement here. wants to protest specifically against this i'm wondering what you guys think about this as if this is something being discussed at zuccotti park among the new york occupiers. yes it is there is there's actually

a few of us. that were protesting when barack obama was in town and we were penned in on a block for two hours and unable to leave and we are retaining attorneys too to go against the n.y.p.d. the city and the whatever feds were in the area at that time to see if we can roll back h.r. three four seven i mean it seems to be this happened back in november so it was before this law came along so maybe we had a little a little window of opportunity there but between now and the end the. the other law that barack obama signed in and under the law. thank you but he signed in on a new year's eve when the rest of the nation was drunk it's seems like they're just writing another laws to be able to do whatever they want whenever they want without any any respect to the united states constitution i think also something that occupiers should probably highlight to people is that this law

doesn't it doesn't necessarily authorize anything new these are things that the police and the department of homeland security and various other agencies have been doing anyway this is just a way to sort of. secure the lid the legitimacy of what they're doing and i think it's incredibly dangerous and that people all over the country should be outraged about the signing of these are the facts as a lot of people don't even know about them which it which is pretty interesting out there have been some different numbers coming in in terms of this weekend's six month anniversary protest holder you said a thousand we heard a couple hundred but there's no disputing that the occupiers came out in force so did the police talk to me about the police presence and if you felt like anything's changed since you know some of those major events back in the fall with pepper

spray and police batons and major arrests i mean is there going to be a new relationship between the protesters and police or will it be more of the same . i think i mean this is been a really interesting experience for me because this is my first time in a new york city. in the past ten years and so this is my first experience with the n.y.p.d. and i think what struck me was just the. was just how overtly brutal the police were i mean in l.a. the police are brutal and look at that it seems to be behind closed doors so once you're in central booking or once you're on the bus but the n.y.p.d. it was like they had absolutely no restraint i mean i saw someone literally grabbed and then their head smashed into a glass storage shed and shattered the door. and i think that i think that this is

so i mean these things are available online you can you can watch the videos but the reality is is that the police need to start making a choice because. ultimately if these are if these are the orders that they're being given they need to start considering whether whether or not they can maintain their integrity as individuals carrying out these orders and i think a lot of occupiers are are calling on police to make this decision before we can build any sort of alliance certainly on the other side of that though there is something that a lot of people seem to be talking about today kind of making a big deal about and that is a tweet that was put out put up on the screen this is. one writes if we won't make a difference if we don't kill a cop or two so this was put on twitter i know that the police are trying to get behind who wrote this it's somebody who maybe was protest maybe wasn't certainly

sympathize with the movement what do you think all the way when this kind of stuff comes out i mean certainly the police should have cause to be a little bit concerned. i mean it's supposedly. you can you can say what you want it's it's free speech. i don't think anyone in the movement tweeted that and it's nothing that we can get behind the people that i know and that would probably actually and would be very bad for them something something as horrible as that happened were a nonviolent movement written in our principles of solidarity if the first week of occupation that we you know we wrote these principles so it's nothing. you could possibly get behind i'm sure it was just you know. some random tweeter and i know you guys said that even once the park was cleared there have been people getting

together they've been meeting behind closed doors they've been sort of e-mailing and on the phone together trying to arrange what's next and wondering if there are any lessons that were learned from the first six months of this movement that you want to kind of draw from to make changes and moving ahead now that it's nice out again and people are excited to be outside. i mean we do have certain strategies that are better slightly different but we're definitely doing more stuff behind the scenes to get a more coherent message out and to actually effect change and it's it's it's a hard thing to do but the movement split up into into many groups some of them are reforming from within the system others want to completely scrap the system start over. so there you raise your hand you want to start over. sue's twinkling me ok so i just want to see there's there's no reset button but i

do like the idea i'm drives of the idea of sort of stopping in. taking taking a moment and sort of thinking about how we could reorganize. that was the twinkle. and i am i think a lot of protesters our studios are not far from fierce and square where the d.c. protests is going on and some of them in similar things we do appreciate your perspective that you want to us about this weekend six months on and hope to hear from you guys again occupy wall street activists and occupy wall street actually this sarah mason if you can already here's an interesting story you might remember earlier this year when the founder of the website made to upload was arrested and thrown into jail his website was promptly shut down and all of his property seized that man was kim dot com and he spent a month in jail accused of running a criminal enterprise megaupload that helps millions of people pirate music and movies well guess what

a court has now ruled that the restraining order that allowed authorities to seize his assets in the first place was normal and void essentially that means that new zealand police illegally invaded dotcoms home and also illegally took all his things were talking cars cadillacs jewelry electronics all without a valid court order to back them up so needless to say he might actually be getting most of his stuff back still the u.s. department of justice is trying to have him extradited to stand trial here in this country and they say you know he made nearly two hundred million dollars illegally off of copyrighted materials uploaded by users of his website now this did happen in new zealand was a resident of much of this case it was in court nation with the us department of justice and right now there are quite a few questions being raised about the way business is conducted at the department of justice. a major complaint right now on the constitutionality of the patriot act and how it's been interpreted since it was signed into law more than ten years ago

has gone to the point where two u.s. senators organ senator ron wyden and colorado senator mark udall have written a letter to attorney general eric holder holder asking him to reconsider some of the ways the patriot act has been used throughout the years and also how will be used in the future because senators say there's a pretty significant gap between what most americans think the law allows and what the government secretly plains the law allows now earlier i spoke about this with david seaman a journalist and host of the d.l. show and i got his thoughts on whether the patriot act is changing in america take a listen. as sort of the patriot act those things really are changing there hasn't been all that much oversight into how this is being used by the government we do know that it's being misused originally this was always supposed to go after hardcore terrorists and most of the time it's going through drug cases and tax evasion cases things that have nothing to do with terrorism and in addition

president obama renewed the patriot act and this was a radical piece of legislation signed into law after nine eleven designed supposedly to protect us in a time of crisis and it was supposed to be retired at a later date when we were at peace again and when we didn't need something that infringes upon our rights and instead he quietly renewed it and now many people even know that now many of his many of his supporters know that i know one of the major concerns about the patriot act is one of the sections in it section two fifteen which basically helps officials top officials get access to people's records now basically it is then to give the f.b.i. the power to require people to hand things over like business records and books and papers and other items so i can email it or whatever other items means to whomever the investigation is who's conducting the investigation and says it's to protect as you say against international terrorism but also against planned clandestine

intelligence activities so the key here seems to be you know to use language that is specific but also leaves room for interpretation i want your thoughts on. well i think the average person out there thinks that this is only being used to pursue radical islam and these terrorist groups but they don't need a law like this to go after one hundred fifty or two hundred people this is being used on tens of thousands maybe even hundreds of thousands of americans where they just go on these fishing expeditions looking for stuff and you know your viewers out there can say if i'm not doing anything wrong i don't have anything to worry about but we've always been told from a young age in school onward there if you're not doing anything wrong the government in america does not look through your e-mails the government does not look through what you're doing and they're setting up these national security letters at a level and at the pace that is really quite stunning and even congress is looking into this now because they're disturbed by the rampant abuse of these sections i

think that's a really good point that is the common argument that you often hear well if you're not breaking the law for not doing anything wrong then you shouldn't worry what the government is doing but in fact. there are a lot of people who do worry what the government is doing even though their outstanding set is then i'm wondering i mean that we showed you that the letter at the beginning of this segment that the two senators are sending out and i'm wondering if you think it's going to make much of a difference obviously these senators are very disturbed by the way this law is being interpreted i think they probably know a lot of things that aren't there i think i think they're not public knowledge do you think that's going to change public opinion. well there are only two options either the public doesn't know or the public doesn't care and i'm not a cynic so i'd like to think that the reason why there has been more outcry is that the public just doesn't know about this we have a cheap billion dollar data center being built out in the utah desert to spy on

american citizens this isn't wired magazine which is one of our most reputable technology magazines in america this is really happening to spy on thousands maybe even millions of us citizens the a.c.l.u. use most recent info sheet says that one point seven billion with the be e-mails phone calls and text messages are being intercepted and stored by the u.s. government and some of this is happening under the patriot act and that's enough information according to the a.c.l.u. about our own citizens to fill a hundred thirty eight million books every twenty four hours and i think that if the average person knew about this they would be quite upset that this is where our taxpayer dollars are going at a time when thirty million or more people are unemployed or underemployed i think the average person just doesn't know to be honest i hope that they do find out about these grotesque abuses of government power and just massive waste of money recently the department of homeland security they bought their place in order to

buy four hundred fifty million rounds of ammunition and this is a domestic law enforcement agency operating on u.s. soil they are not the u.s. military so even if you're not paranoid the question becomes why are responding so much money on these ridiculous things like spying on our own people and buying ammunition to protect the government against their own people it doesn't make sense i think the patriot act should have been allowed to expire and it's a huge mistake that obama renewed it it seems to i mean if you think about two thousand and one certainly the internet was a major part of our lives back then but it has become so much marcel in the last ten years and so i'm wondering if you think that you know because it was extended by president obama that the internet is going to play bigger factor in terms of the accessibility of the government to spy on its citizens the availability and how you think that's going to factor into. oh absolutely i mean the fact is they're already

reading storing and intercepting whatever that means billions of our e-mails you know it's just going to get bigger they're just going to use these resources in new ways they're not building a two billion dollar data center twenty five thousand square feet stilled with servers the most state of the art servers out there they're not doing that so they can't so they won't use it they're doing it because they do plan on using it they do plan on analyzing our internet behaviors our online messages and they plan on doing these things without a warrant and you know we're more than a decade out from nine eleven we've killed osama bin laden we have killed or detained most of his deputies so the real question becomes who are we fighting against and if we're using taxpayer dollars to investigate and to fight against american citizens within our our own shores that is a huge issue and it's that it needs to be talked about not only in congressional investigations like the one you were talking about but on the street every day this should be a dinner table a dinner table conversation every american should be asking should we be spending

billions of dollars on these things when people are out of work when our infrastructure is failing and when other economies like china are you know steaming ahead and we're falling behind is this really what we should be spending our money on spying on our own people and i know something that was a dinner conversation table conversation for a little while there was so people stop by line on line piracy action to protect ip act on it so there's this other side of of the internet and from the things that happened illegally on the negative case certainly a big event that results in a line forming here in terms of what you expect to see in the coming months regarding you know online piracy and how you think that aspect of this will be dealt with. well i think that online piracy is a red herrings these transnational content companies make more money than ever look at how much money was made from avatar look at how much money has been made from the lord of the rings franchise from harry potter from any of these things look at how much money is made from legitimate music downloads via i tunes they're making

a fortune literally billions of dollars every year in legal download revenue and they're saying that they need to crack down on pirates but really they want to crack down on internet communication itself because they're able to keep these issues off the evening news for the most part but they can't keep them off the internet people on reddit people on dig people on twitter they're talking about this stuff a lot they don't know about that two billion dollar data center and they know the patriot act has been reduced and so so called luckily sopa never happened it was not signed into law because google put a notice on their home page warning their hundreds of millions of users about it and doing a petition which i believe more than seven million american scientists read it shut down their site for a full twelve hour span we could he had a blackout to raise awareness all right dana we are out of time here but a lot of important points raised and that's why we had you wanted to dig a little deeper into all these issues david seaman a journalist and house after d.l.

sound. well it's an historic day today march nineteenth one year ago u.s. the nato forces launched air strikes in libya a necessity according to high ranking officials to save the libyan rebels those who fear for their lives under the iron fist of colonel moammar gadhafi it was nato's responsibility to protect and within a few months the gadhafi regime and gadhafi himself are gone those strikes were launched on the same day today marks nine years as the u.s. led invasion into iraq under the guise of spreading democracy destroying al qaeda and removing saddam hussein from power so don too is gone for good and as of a few months ago so are u.s. troops but how is iraq really doing in afghanistan ten years ago the first large scale non special operations mission operation anaconda ended saladin line is now dead but that war lives on through want to talk about a few of these historic events and how they've impacted the world today robert naiman is the policy director of just foreign policy he's in

a van in illinois to help us to feed her into this there robert it's interesting how differently the mission is in libya is viewed some say things are just as bad today and others saying you know this was a success and one use of force is authorized under the arch u.p.a. doctrine and lives can be saved there should be more american action like libya in the future what's your take on these two very different interpretations one year later look to. examine whether. you have to have clarity and what you think all if the goal was to remove. who can contest there was a success if the goal is to protect civilians the question is a lot more murky it's certainly the intervention to begin to. protect the civilians that were killed by media or strays just the un report and last few days.

and. it didn't protect the people who were killed when the civil war was exacerbated so the people who are most gung ho i think seeing those people whose moral balwant were still overthrew the libyan government we start the. war from what was described before the united nations security council resolution which was protecting civilians to once the nato started to intervene and then the goal was to overthrow gadhafi so i think this is the most important or is clearly a workable as we've seen in each of these conflicts and you mentioned the justifications the time and we look back leader in the words that evolved were very different from what was promised the time you imagine somebody to me going back in a time machine. to someone in the united states or britain in the fall of two

thousand you know. who were saying this is how we turn i think people would evaluate it differently seems to for afghanistan let me start to talk about this kind of this notion out there about responsibility to protect because there are some people who sort of fall not in in either category but sort of in the middle they think that if there is a responsibility to protect if the valiant the protection of civilians is in fact the reason for going in then that's good but they also say that that's not what happened in libya and they feel that what happened in libya is actually going to be me. more harmful for thurston's and other countries who need to be protected because guess what when a lot of other countries russia and china for example you know remember they didn't vote for that mission to go into libya and now they've vetoed any action in syria what about present there's notion that the article p.

doctrine is ruined because nobody will be nobody will believe the u.s. and nato forces in the future i think it's a very point you know i think fair minded people would say many would say that the enemy originally had a meeting a year of responsibility to protect is a reasonable one that you know trust is really taking place somewhere in. the world community should try you know nations security council try to take responsibility for that but unfortunately has practiced it seems to have been evolved into a license for military intervention really unchecked military intervention you know the one who is sort of moving quickly military intervention haven't you be solution when the original idea was that you know to be a last resort first we tried to pull mostly in negotiations another measure none of

this was really tried in libya none of this was we wasn't tried but if you look at the revolution in syria i think the west moved far too quickly from initial talk about diplomacy to talk about military force which of course only even the talk about military force undermines the prospects for diplomacy rather than it would be a start a terrible precedent for this question we're now having about syria as you suggested people became cynical and said oh you just won intervene militarily it's not about human rights i think that's a very bad precedent and let me ask you something really quick. because a lot of people are talking about this today this is an executive order issued by president obama this past friday evening basically giving the white house absolute control over all of the country's natural resources in case of a natural disaster or during a time of war the president used the defense production act of one nine hundred fifty and there's

a wide variety of items or potations of what this means some people calling this martial law other people saying this is just what every president does i just want to really quickly get your thoughts well. particularly concerned about that. there's a certain amount of panic that. anything can you describe is emerging as the martial law you know emergency government takes emerges you know other measures after nine eleven the government shut down the airports on less concerned. and the violations of civil liberties that are happening every day in the united states particularly since nine eleven when we're obviously not in a state of emergency there's not a national disaster and we're there's not there's not a war in the united states and here we see a steady erosion of civil liberties by the national security state so the concerns me far more all right there is theoretical scenario robert naiman policy director for it just.