down but not out the occupy wall street movement is making headlines across the country once again as demonstrators crossed the six month mark look at how far the movement has come and where it will head now. in the patriot act sounds like a law that supports liberty and justice for all but two u.s. senators are on a mission to show you exactly what this bill put it be that really working gives government agencies an open book to your life.

some call it an obligation to others a blood lust of sorts from afghanistan to iraq to libya american military officials seem happy to send firepower to whichever region comes hauling but given all the trouble still plaguing the middle east and a disagreement about how much has actually been accomplished has the u.s. experiencing intervention overload. good evening it's monday march nineteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine and watching r t o across the country at parks that were once filled with tents and protesters has been largely quiet for the last few months. even though winter didn't deter the occupy wall street protesters police raids did and most of the overnight occupations were disbanded with protesters returning to sleep indoors so they promised to return the occupy wall street wasn't over and instead

was still just getting started and saturday marks six months since a did all start back on september seventeenth so to celebrate subdural hundred people gathered in zuccotti park in new york city to remind people of that passion and the anger at the economic and political systems has not subsided and doesn't slaughter as a photojournalist in philadelphia pennsylvania but he was out to protest over the weekend hey there doesn't tell us what you saw over the weekend at the high park well oh thanks for having me on the rally on saturday was reminiscent of the of the first in september lots of energy and lots of excitement what about i know that one of the things that at the first few weeks and months of occupy wall street that really stood out that made people remember it and take notice of it was the sort of relationship between the protesters and the police did you see people being arrested i heard that. the police came into zuccotti park late night and kicked

a bunch of people out. you know well the rest were frankly typical of the n.y.p.d. track record when it comes to this movement. the n.y.p.d. doesn't really in my view seem to care much about the first amendment. or pretty much the press anything like that so i i really would like to hear michael bloomberg and commissioner ray kelly us explanation for how they treated the protesters on saturday so you did see more and more of the same action in terms of. peaceful protesters being arrested absolutely absolutely. they were technically as far as i could tell weren't breaking any of the rules or restrictions that were and place of the park at the time and yet the very case came up so the police went in. you know numerous protesters were brutalized it was it was not

a pretty sight so what were the police saying what was their reasoning that they gave this time around. i don't entirely clear to be honest. and you know i'm not exactly sure actually that's ok i know though i'm not sure exactly how many people set up over the weekend i know it was a few hundred but some saw that this six month mark they expected it to really draw thousands of people and you know some saw this as a comeback but others say you know what this comeback was a little bit in the mix there still lack of momentum here and what was your take on all of us well to be sure it certainly wasn't as big as it is under september two thousand and eleven. but you have to keep in mind a couple of factors and i think in a way first of all you know we just got through the winter. people are tired. it's been a long you know few months and you also have to keep in mind especially in new york

with the police surveillance that's going on inside edition that we've seen since september i think that that has depressed her now to an extent but if you look at the spring is going to bring a new kind of energy to. your photojournalist talk to me about some of the things that you've seen over the last several months in occupy wall street things there that have made the most of the pictures that have told the best stories i guess in your mind were pushing them to leave us there is i mean it's. just seen people out en masse unafraid seen the expressions on their faces. it's a it's it's actually pretty inspiring just to see everyone out there and soon to be able to shoot there's this kind of moment in history so just the just the large

groups of people i mean you're right that isn't something that we often see and haven't seen for such a long time other than perhaps you know an antiwar press the protests the immigration protests once a year this really was remarkable in that it lasted so long and continue to draw more and more people let me ask you something that the death i don't know if you've been watching any of the cable news networks today a lot of people talking about making a big deal about a tweet sent by someone in occupy wall street sympathizer or a protester someone who actually made their own online threat against police the twitter user snack ahmed one writes quote we won't make a difference if we don't kill a cop or two. what do you think about this i mean obviously this is not somebody that speaks for the majority of the protestors but are you concerned that things like this will make police the police crackdown even more. it's entirely possible sure but i also remind you standing there because you are rich we was

published first in the new york daily news which doesn't exactly have. the best journalists the journalist a track record so i don't even. from my understanding from my from my view of a particular age we i don't even i'm not entirely sure there was even a protester there's no way to verify something like that so. but i do feel that this methods is most certainly not a violent movement and i think. that we're going to experience or. let me ask you this just in your conversations with other occupy wall street protesters has there been a discussion about you know some of the lessons learned in the first six months certainly a lot of the mainstream media was very quick to judge. you guys went from you know being dirty hippies to people who didn't know what they wanted here in r t we've

certainly talked to some of the most active protesters and we've got you know the desires and the hopes of this movement and what it sheaves but i'm wondering if there are some lessons that you think will change sort of the movement going forward. lessons that's you know that's a that's a really tough question i think that's. they're learning as they go along you know it's every movement every every significant people's movement has growing pains and i feel that you know from police brutality. to just total considerations as far as keeping cannons and things like that. i feel that there is probably going to be. i diversification when it comes to tactics in the spring. as far as you know maybe you know even having twenty four hour game is anymore but staking warrants for its. things such as like flashing ten

minutes or. i keep buying homes foreclosed homes that kind of thing so the movement is evolving and i think they have learned lessons in the past and they will continue to do so certainly we just saw the other day some people bring in their living room furniture and set it up in one of the bank of america has said you know you take my arms i'm going to bring my stuff here it is creative and the things that some of the members of the movement are doing photojournalist just i'm stuffed and slighter thanks for being on the show tonight. thank you. all still have our sea caught in the patriot act two u.s. senators are trying to show the world what is actually a louse and the truth can be downright terrifying that story next. r t is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who make decisions to break through and it may who can you trust no one will. see where we had a state controlled capitalism in school fashions when nobody dares to ask we do r t question more.

people calling like you said for free and fair elections. can be are still reporting from the press you can hear behind me loud explosions. all right so here's an interesting story if you remember earlier this year when the founder of the website meg 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 he spent actually a month in jail accused of running a criminal enterprise upload that helped 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 is normal and void essentially that means that the new zealand police illegally invaded dotcoms home and also illegally took away his things we're talking cars and jewelry electronics all without a valid court order to back them up it was to say he may be getting some of that stuff back so soon still the u.s. department of justice is trying to have him to stand trial here they say he made nearly two hundred million dollars illegally after copyrighted materials uploaded by users of his website now this all happened in new zealand but much of the case was in court nation with the u.s. department of justice and right now there are actually quite a few questions being raised about the way business is conducted there a major complaint right now the constitutionality of the patriot act and how it's

been interpreted since it was signed into law more than ten years ago it's gone to the point where even two u.s. senators oregon senator ron wyden and colorado senator mark udall have written a letter to attorney general eric holder asking him to reconsider some of the ways that the patriot act has been used throughout the years and how it will be used and interpreted in the future they say there is a significant gap between what most americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. i spoke earlier with trevor tim an activist for the electronic frontier foundation he's been fighting to gain a better understanding of this court orders and freedom of information request to the department of justice take a listen. to the subject here for a second look at the actual part of the law that we're trying to challenge of hope section two fifteen and what it does this actually allows the d.o.j. to go to a. foreign intelligence surveillance court it's called which will help fog issues

through court orders but allows them to obtain basically any business records so it can be criminalized could be your internet history or could be your cell phone records let me just obviously have a we have something that we can show our viewers with this language on it that we want to put up on the screen the part of patriot act you're speaking of section two fifteen again helps officials get access to people's records. especially the f.b.i. giving them the power to require people to hand over papers and books and other items so we could be talking about e-mails. you know and this is under the guise of finding international terrorists but also clandestine intelligence activities all that you can see there ever started in iraq we wanted to show it show it for our viewers this section two fifteen what's the biggest issue with it. so what you said is supposed to be used for terrorism and just in case there's and you know it's already an expensive law as it is but the justice department seems to believe that

because of secret orders made by these courts that they now have even more expensive introduction of this law that doesn't involve terrorism or espionage act the act that all the new york times reported about six months ago they could be getting personal information of ordinary americans and as you mentioned in the intro there to senators mark udall and gone who warned on the senate floor that americans would be shocked to learn what the justice department's interpretation of this was unfortunately they're not allowed to say anything more because it's classified so we have staff along with in separate lawsuits a.c.l.u. in the york times have sued the government to ask them to release the secret interpretation of what is a public law and which every american shows a right to know how it's being used it seems to me to have or one of the keys here really is the use of language because on one hand it's pathetic but on the other hand it leaves room for interpretation and from what i understand you guys are you

know the records that you have gotten access to are a little bit different than you think the other set of records are going to a little bit of detail about this. yeah sure so after they didn't respond to our freedom it's your metric request to sue them and they were ordered to release some documents to us we just got those documents last week ironically during contract week which is a celebration of open government in the us. but unfortunately the three hundred pages they gave us not pertain to anything involving the secret probation all it just gave us was interpretations of the law we already know this and you know obviously that's not what we want we want them to release what they are actually using this law for which as the senators have warned could be on better access to instant americans private data for example they could be taking cell pro-competition records in bulk form and it could be affecting the countless

americans so it's really important that they release this information so we can better understand how they're using this law without this information it's impossible to challenge the law on constitutional grounds and americans could be being affected and they would have no idea now you say the government could be getting these cell phone records they could be getting things that other then the you know concern the raised eyebrows from these two senators is there other evidence out there however are there other things that are more tangible for people saying hey there's definitely something wrong here. well we know that the use of this section is increasing and we also know that over eighty percent of the requests are internet records requests and we just don't understand the extent to which they are going how many people these requests are affecting because these they may be sending out one request but it may be affecting who knows how many

people when they get these requests and as i said for it may not be involving terrorism or espionage cases at all it may be ordinary americans who are being affected like that we've seen this problem a bunch of times in the patriot act with other sections to us national security letters where they go after similar information for people without a court order or a warrant where these people are sensitive i think there's hundreds of thousands of different sense since two thousand and one yet barely one percent of them make up terrorism cases so it's just another example of the government using the patriot act which was passed under the guise of protecting us from terrorism but using it to her tail people's civil liberties and you know use it for ordinary crimes and was never meant to use force and it was passed cover in two thousand and one and i think a lot of people thought you know this is going to be temporary and it was and to some people surprise president obama sort of reacted by and signed on for another

term you surprised that this is still going on the land here today. oh it's certainly disappointing especially that president obama after kind of campaigning on the uses of war was wiretapping and the patriot act decided to reopen for a few more years luckily we have another chance this coming year not necessarily on the patriot act but more on the warrantless wiretapping front where as you may well know the bush administration had been engaged in massive warrantless wiretapping where they were basically sucking up the country's e-mails into a huge database and potentially reading the communications of innocent americans that is part of this this was waiter's allegedly codified by the congress and to validate the five amendment that called and this is coming up for renewal date of this year's we also have a couple court cases going on about this currently for two thousand and twelve to see a real watershed moment for both congress and the courts when it comes to work as

far as happy and so i wouldn't put a stop to it and just last question for you with these two senators you don't buy it and with this this letter that's out and i know you as you say they can't exactly be very specific in terms of their greatest concerns do you think that it's going to raise some eyebrows it seems to me that a lot of people are still sort of unaware of all of the issues that the patriot act . yeah it's very commendable of the senators to speak out like this because obviously given they have security clearances they're only allowed to go so far and they've written a justice partners well trying to get this information and base that we actually know what we do know and so we were able to file suit based off those what they said hopefully people in congress will continue to make a fuss about the patriot act as well as the five amendment limit factors coming up and the only way that the u.s. citizens will know that their constitutional rights are being a privilege is. boyce's or raise loudly in congress and there's of course back

to your seat ministration and so hopefully we're going to see more of that it's in like a lot of little things are going on around us that just so many people have no idea about it we appreciate you bringing some of this to light for ten activists for the electronic frontier foundation. also they is an historic day march nineteenth one year ago u.s. and nato forces launched air strikes in libya on the subsidy according to high ranking officials to say the libyan rebels those who fear for their lives under the iron fist of colonel moammar gadhafi it was made those responsibility to protect and within a few months the gadhafi regime and gadhafi himself were gone those strikes were launched on the same day today marks a 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 well to down to is gone for good and as a few months ago so are u.s.

troops. but how is iraq really doing now also in afghanistan ten years ago today the first large scale nonsense special operations mission operation anaconda and it a salad bin laden is now dead but that war lives on so we just want to talk about a few of these historic events and how they've impacted the world today robert naiman is the policy director with just foreign policy he joined us earlier today and i asked him about some of the differing views of the intervention of libya and its results there celtic will of course to. examine whether they need an employer's examples you have to have clearly and what you think. if the goal was to remove. who can contest it was a success the goal was to protect civilians the question is a lot more murky it certainly the intervention generally didn't. protect the

civilians that were killed by media were strains just the un report and the last few weeks. it didn't care that people were killed when the civil war was exacerbated so the people who are most gone who i think saying that it was people who. were just overthrew of libyan government we saw the. war from what it was described before the united nations security council resolution which was protecting civilians to once the nearest intervene then then the goal was to overthrow gadhafi so he does the most important or is clearly the work to call his and we've seen each of these conflicts and then you mention the justifications the time and we look back live in the words that

evolved were very different from was probably the time you imagine somebody to be going back in a time machine. talking to someone in the united states or britain in the fall of two thousand to see it's a group we're going to go to war this is how would you know i think people would evaluate it differently seems true for afghanistan allow me to tell talk about there's this notion out there or put responsibility to protect because there are some people who thought 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 billionth the protection of civilians is in fact the reason for going in there 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 more. more harmful for citizens of other countries who need to be protected because guess what when a lot of other countries russia and china for example you know we remember they didn't vote for the mission to go into libya and now they've vetoed any action in

syria what about this is notion that the r.c.m.p. doctrine is ruined because nobody will be nobody will believe the u.s. and nato forces in the future and i think it's a very poor boy you know i think fair minded people would many would say that he in the meeting i originally had a meeting idea of responsibility to protect is a reasonable one you know atrocities are taking place somewhere. and the world community should try you know the mission council try to take responsibility for that but unfortunately it was practiced it seems to have been evolved into a license for military intervention really unchecked military intervention you know the one what it is sort of moving quickly to military intervention have

a solution when the original idea was that military intervention would be a last resort first we were trying to promise you it's not a measure not of this was really tried in libya none of this was was 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 the libya start a terrible precedent for this person we're now having syria as you suggested people became cynical and said oh you just want to 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 the 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 that defense production act of one nine hundred fifty and there's a wide variety of wide interpretation 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 who. are particularly concerned about that. there's a certain amount of. anything can you describe is emergency martial law you know emergency the government takes emerge as you know other measures after nine eleven the government shut down the airports on the list concerned. the violations of civil liberties there happy new year. particularly since nine eleven when we're obviously not in a state of emergency there's not a national disaster but we're there's not there's not a war in the united states and you know we see. a civil liberties by the national

security state so the concerns me far more all right there is theoretical robert naiman policy director for just foreign policy thanks so much. well to wrap up this evening we want to tell you about some frightening moments for members of the archie family over the weekend the damascus office of artes arabic channel was pretty badly damaged after a bomb attacks in syria's capital the bureau is located in downtown damascus and it was a blast from a car bomb that ended up shattering the windows there it caused some pretty major damage to the front of the building as well now thankfully no r t staff or any officer at the time but we're told that their equipment was not damaged by those explosions so they were back to work today the bomb was one of two targeting syrian security service offices those glass killed twenty seven people and injured more than one hundred others. and that's going to do it for the news tonight but don't change the channel the big picture is coming up at the top of the hour if you

thought the internet protection bills of sopa and people are gone for good you might want to think again because the recording industry association of america and the motion picture association of america are still coming out for you it's all thanks to internet service providers like comcast horizon and eighteen d. and i have heard of them providers will begin cutting down or eliminating all together bandwidth for people who are sharing copyrighted material online now tonight host tom hartman will sit down with two attorneys specializing in cyber crimes and intellectual property rights to find out if this is the cyber law the cyber lockdown excuse me that critics predicted and for more on the stories we covered could argue dot com slash usa we should also check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america and you should definitely follow me on twitter you can find me at christine for his hour but for now i hope you.