corruption russia might need to reconsider that moratorium on the death penalty but that's just. the. cohen welcome to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle in the national security state is given an inch would always take much more than a mile for years we were keenly told the government does not spying on citizens now we know this is not true we are spied upon an unbelievably massive way and it's not just surveillance oversight of the intelligence community has been shown to be cavalier this is also true of torture kidnapping detention assassination by drones and death squads do we need a supercomputer to keep track of the many ways we have to see.

to cross out the national security state i'm joined by catherine maher in washington she is director of strategy and engagement at the digital rights organization access and a fellow at the truman national security project in new york we have michael kelly he is a defense reporter for business insider and in philadelphia we cross to dave lindorff he is an investigative reporter author of the book the case for impeachment and a founding editor of the online newspaper this can't be happening dot net all right cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want katherine if i go to you first in washington d.c. when we look at the size of the national security state now is it manageable and is there any way we can reign it in over considering all the things we have heard of the last few weeks and months. i mean i think that it's really evident that the national security state has grown tremendously in size if you look at reports from the washington post in two thousand and ten about some of the depth and expansion

of that state and sort of the understanding that the deity itself doesn't even understand really what the contractor has millions of contractors doing around around the world globally i think their recent reports about the fact that they couldn't even identify the function of those contractors in afghanistan for quite a number of them it seems clear to me that the national security state as a whole is actually well be on the scope of efficient management i mean in terms of what we can do to rein it in i think that the number one problem that we see is over classification and secrecy the discussions that we're having today are very much around the fact that we have secret courts issuing secret opinions that are not public to the that are not available to the american public and we've heard from from numerous senators including senators wyden it all that this is part of the problem in that there's a clear miss clear gap in understanding between what sort of these interpretations are and what the american public actually understands them to be you know david let me go to you in philadelphia i mean this classification thing gives the national security state power ok we have information you don't ok and they like it that way . well democracy depends on freedom of information and we basically don't have that

anymore we're told that there's anything basically important is too important for us to know but worse than that it's even too important for members of congress to know and so and even when they're told they're told it under rules of secrecy that they aren't allowed to tell us i mean it was really ridiculous that senator wyden said he knew this terrible stuff that americans would be really go ballistic over if they knew but he couldn't tell us because you've sworn to secrecy the problem is the there's no courage in congress even from people like senator wyden to say well wait i took another and that was to uphold and defend the constitution and that's takes priority over these silly secrets he should have been out a year or two ago when he found out and told us exactly the american people what it is that the n.s.a. is doing what it is that the f.b.i. is doing but i think even maybe beyond that

a bigger problem not to do with classification is that the american people have been suckered into this fear that terrorism that makes people say oh well i'm willing to surrender all of these these rights to privacy because i'm so afraid of terrorism and kill the american people wake up and say and demand that be stopped and that it be opened up where we are really falling into a deep deep hole with this mission of security. mentality michael what do you think about that i mean it's turned into a huge industry i mean it's vast the budgets are vast and every organization every bureaucracy wants more and more and more and fear sells. well particularly to the i say it goes beyond classification and the public and what they know because they've the silicon valley the tech companies helped build this. messick spying apparatus

or even the global spying apparatus so the actual hardware and technology is intertwined with private companies so if you're going to try to rein that in you're going to have to deal with private companies that share information regularly with intelligence agencies and they get classified and intelligence back so you have a partnership a public private partnership that you would have to to get to really the meat of it even before you decide to or even after you decide to declassify things and get the american people to wake up you know catherine how do you feel about that i mean when we have google and facebook and all these other companies i mean we don't know how willing they were they claim they weren't ok but is this an added facet for you you know when we look at it from like the cold war today i mean we have now private companies that are doing the work for the doing the work for the government against us. well i mean i think the interesting thing here is that if those companies are doing the work for the government that's really in

a passive way i mean we're elective consumers of their services and when we do use the services there are certain things about our use of those services like content data the content of our emails for example or our chats that are implicit or in intrinsic functions of the services and then there's data like meditated which i think is at the heart of sort of the discussion about the mobile phone concerns with regards to the court order on the rise and that the systems just leak as a part of of of the structure of the systems themselves in the way that they transmit information and that's very hard in fact to reveal now we don't actually have any sort of expectation of privacy with regards to mete data because of the one nine hundred seventy nine supreme court decision with regards that those public consumer records so i think that you know in with that expert with that understanding an expectation that's not necessarily something that the companies have tremendous control over there is actually precedent within sort of the american common law now i think that the problem that we have here is very much around the lack of clarity about what's going on with regards to the companies themselves and whether or not they were indeed compelled as they would argue to

participate in this program and there's obviously a significant gap between their initial denials that they've never heard of it and they're sort of later admissions that yes in fact they have been gagged under these five orders and have been compelled to compel to comply i think that we've seen a history over the course of the last decade or so of these companies increasingly being drawn into this national security process or this national security state and with time these companies that actually made some some of these companies have made efforts to actually reveal the extent to which they are compelled to cooperate so companies like google for example issue transparency reports of transparency reports refer to requests for law enforcement data now we know that those law enforcement requests they could be sort of local requests municipal requests and the like and they also could include things like f.b.i. national security letter requests which only recently have these companies have been given permission to actually give very broad understanding of the number of requests that they receive so between one and one thousand. for example nothing more granular than that what we're beginning to understand is that in addition to

those highly secretive requests which also included gag orders these national security letter requests is that there's this whole adit additional function underneath that has a very very broad. broad interpretations of the law that allows for sort of essentially perpetual data gathering and up until now it seems as though those companies were legally prohibited from actually revealing that and so i think that there's tremendous opportunity for us to actually seek clarification around the extent of that company's interaction and really understand better the sort of technical implications and the amount of data that's being revealed and i think that you know we have seen some of the companies come out in a push for that i think obviously well the information while information is still being gathered and received there are a lot of questions remain up in the air will get you know david i want everyone gets on these social networks so you can remember for years your privacy is so important to us you know google says that facebook says that it's all nonsense in retrospect isn't it. there's so much hypocrisy going on in the private sector and in the government it's just mind boggling i wrote

a piece recently. talking about just stopping all the b.s. because there's so much of it but look if the companies like google and microsoft and apple and yahoo and all of these firms that are being having this information just vacuumed up really were concerned about it they would have filed appeals of the size of court rulings they never did the only company i know of that tried to stop this was back in the bush administration when well ok correct me but qwest filed a lawsuit against it when he did not when verizon did not and i don't see any evidence of these companies going to court to really try to stop this ok kathleen me if i'm wrong catherine did you want to jump in their reply i guess i just want go ahead you want to clarify something i want to know that there are reports there i just want to note that there were reports that have come out very recently that indicate and i have you know again

a lot of this information is still sort of coming to light that for example with regard to sort of yahoo's complicity or participation in this in this five scheme it seems as though they did in fact petition and lost and i do think that we really don't know exactly what the extent of sort of the company's pushback on this was and so i just want to be clear about that it's not that i'm going to say well it wasn't everyone doing right now there is great. dave go ahead you wanna finish your point but it wasn't there were two things yet two things there catherine one is one is that you petition no you go into court you file a lawsuit and when you lose you appeal it to the next level and none of them have done that these should all be going up to the supreme court and nobody's been pushing this and the second thing is you know time i would agree that they have now gone as a large level and i don't live in my own heart. no that's right and then the next thing is this pathetic joke about our legal system now with regard to national security stuff is. and correct me if i'm wrong here but i think when you appeal the

files of court they can keep the appeal court secret secret is it a little kinds of levels of secrecy that are similar sort of act you can do we want and that is the great appeal we are hold i want to go to michael before we go to the break we're going to go to michael like this jump in michael go ahead. oh well i just want to go back to something that catherine said about common law that nine hundred seventy nine law interesting thing to me is the i believe it was two thousand and ten the law that ruled that the government can't put a track a g.p.s. tracking device on a drug dealer's car so they're talking about you can't put physical hardware to do surveillance and that's interesting to me because the eighteen to whistleblower mark klein and n.s.a. whistleblower thomas drake they both talk about this is really made naris hardware in james bamford of of wired had a great report on this and in two thousand and ten. naris made israeli hardware that you can they put on the eighteenth tee made wiretapping rooms so they put the

hardware on the cables and split them so i don't have to turn his head all of the day i'm sorry folks i have to jump in here we have to go to a short break and after that choppers will continue our discussion of the national security state stay with our great. highway builds on the bones of its make its the winds through one of the wildest and most beautiful regions of russia a place that's home to less than a million people and the keepers of the great fronts. join me james brown as i

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the state department to comment on your part to say. no more weasel words. when you question be prepared for a change when you throw a punch be ready for a. pretty tough speech and down the street into cost. please please.

please. welcome back to crosstalk where all things are considered i'm peter lavelle were discussing the national security state. ok catherine i've got to go back to you in washington d.c. but we're talking about the surveillance in the national security state here but you know when you look at you know while the obama administration is aside to arm the the rebels in syria we had libya not long ago i mean if foreign policy national security policy is really beyond the grips of people the average people nobody votes about it there's hardly any discussion about it either. yeah i mean i think that's really right if you look at sort of voting trends what you'll see is that

the american public make their decision on very sort of pragmatic considerations around things like economic policy sort of a consumer confidence trust in perceptions of trust in public individuals but foreign policy tends to be very far from the actual discourse and debate if we do have a conversation on foreign policy it tends to be around homeland security as opposed to thinking about the longer term strategic implications of our interventions overseas or our engagement with the with the world writ large i think that you know with this surveillance issue one of the things that we've seen is that u.s. administration and other officials have come out and said well don't worry it's not the american people who are being spied on in fact which means that in fact we're spying on everybody else in the world which is in direct violation of our of our segment of our relate our role as a signatory to the international convention on civil and political rights which is a un human rights instrument upon which we use to judge other countries with regard to their behavior and human rights like their respective human rights and so i

think you know that's incredibly problematic when we start actually engaging with sort of violations of these universal rights at the global level at a foreign policy level in a way that puts us up for this sort of judgment against this dual standard ok michael what do you think about that because you know i was kind of a child of the vietnam war i'm a very small child ok but you know there was a big national discussion about the war and i've never seen such a national discussion about war and national security since then if you will with the exception of these recent leaks. you know since september eleventh two thousand and one the president under article two the constitution of defending the united states of america has taken great liberties in doing that and then that. too to extend to drones anything that they would like to do in syria and surveillance all of it and that's what i'm talking about the covert. actions things that happen libya syria and the fact that the n.s.a.

is a covert foreign intelligence signals agency so all this stuff was supposed to be secret and then it just got too big and you had whistleblowers you had human beings that said they couldn't take it anymore dave in philadelphia want to jump in on that i mean it's just gotten so big that it isn't even it doesn't even know its own parts anymore go ahead. well it is amazing i mean i was an activist against the war back in the sixty's and i had the f.b.i. investigating me you know there were you have an f.b.i. file i had people telling me they'd been visited by the f.b.i. all over my anywhere activities now we have the. sort of a fragmented weekend. movement and it is actually investigated under the counter terrorism brick of our national security state so i mean it's unbelievable so when you oppose the war now you're considered a terrorist it will if you look also at the movement that was investigated by the

counterterrorism organizations around the country these these i forget the terms they used for. the unifying of police and private security and the f.b.i. that they set up about twenty one of these centers around the country that were monitoring and harassing and interfering with these demonstrations which were peaceful which were legal and which had permits and everything and there's actually i mean it gets so bad that i'm looking at a document right now in which the f.b.i. in houston talked about a plot to assassinate the leaders of the occupy movement in houston which they sent up to the to washington and there was never been an arrest for that plot we don't know who it was but the f.b.i. talked about it very casually in their memo so i mean it could have been the houston police involved it could have been the bank security guards involved but

somebody was planning on using sniper rifles according to the f.b.i. memo to assassinate these leaders this is what we're entering into here it's far beyond what the church committee showed in the cointelpro investigations from the nixon era well dave you just read my mind catherine do we need a church committee exactly what my next question is going to be is there a political a willful right. yeah. i mean i absolutely think that we need sort of a modern day church committee i think it is worth in struct of to know that actually the legislation being used to justify quite a bit of the surveillance. grew out of the of the findings of the church committee now admittedly some of the authors they authorizations active in congress voted on in two thousand and twelve is really what i think is led to these widespread abuses but it is it is worth noting that that that this tool that is being used to justify this is an outcome of the church maybe but yeah this is exactly what we need what we need is a full congressional inquiry into the extent and scope of this surveillance we need oversight and control of the national security agency and other intelligence

gathering agencies and we need to do this in a public and accountable way i mean one of the things that we've seen is that the intel committees in particular tend to hold closed door hearings that are not of bailable to the public i mean many of the staffers of the of these of these different senatorial offices don't even have the classification levels to be able to read the documents that their bosses are handling the degree of secrecy and the lack of information that we have about about what is actually going on is actually is completely staggering we need a committee we need investigations we need it to be open to the public and we need it now and we need the political will power to do so and it's clear that's not coming from the administration they're perfectly happy in supporting these programs in direct violation of prior statements prior and and certainly you know from some of made the point earlier with regards to sort of congressional power and congressional support there are certainly people who are dissenting that we haven't get seen sort of the outrage that i think that that i think the american public deserve michael you know i think the national security state really likes this congress because they're quite benign with the exception of a few voices. yeah and

a nother issue is a micro of bloomberg had a great article recently about the public private partnership and how these companies get swapped data for intelligence and an expert told him the congress is simply outmatched technology has gone so far so fast the congressional. lawmakers they they get stuck there they don't understand what is actually happening the all the technology that's involved here so to ask them to for oversight is a tall task because they don't even know what they're talking about dave what do you think about that because i would bet you maybe maybe one or two members of congress read the patriot act the rest of them just voted for it. yeah that's right but i would i would point to show recently i think it was the tenth. the daily show which is the only news show worth watching anymore. yours yours yours excepted

in which they showed clapper showed collaborating hearing lying lying flat out lying to senator wyden and nobody is calling him to the carpet nobody is filing a contempt citation against him you know for lying so blatantly and until they start doing that i mean that used to be sort of irregular in these hearings back in the seventy's looking at the at the abuses in the nixon administration nobody is calling these people to the carpet and demanding that they tell the truth so that the idea of a church committee is almost ludicrous because we have such you know one one real risk i think is that the security state is gone so far that even if they don't do this i think that the members of congress have to be thinking gee they know all my phone calls and they're going to dig up all my skeletons if i get to you if i get too rough on them and that's you know you can laugh but. it's true catherine go

ahead i mean it's there's such a thing as perjury anymore that's going to say is there any concept of perjury anymore and congress had been away for a while. to me i mean i love the fact that freedom works which is a right leaning sort of political action group called for lindsey graham if you so secrecy could he just release his bank they tell us on the path for instance e-mail it's a campaign that they're running currently and i think if it is really a fascinating what you've seen is it uniting the far left and the far right and say you know wait a minute this is completely unacceptable to there's a bipartisan issue this is not in any way sort of it being for political football this is about the fight this is about the constitution and constitutional rights and i think that it's instructive i don't remember david. david and michael mentioned earlier the thing that all these individuals do is they swear to defend the constitution first and foremost that is their oath of office and it's not about defending the national security state it's not about defending even the security of the homeland it's defending the constitution and it's clear that these programs are

in clear violator been very simply not met and i feel it is so. i'm sorry go ahead dave jump in. it's and it's and it's not about keeping america safe either i almost blew my coffee through my nose when exactly in one of the debates president obama got on and he said my first my first responsibility is keeping american safe as a white that's. the ability and then euthanizing that out of responsibility that inner thought the ability was to defend the constitution yet that's his oath that first america safe and second. and that's the wrong order ok michael jump in here the oath and have written the constitution and they forgot we forgot in the constitution in the united states well the it goes to my point of article two the defending the nation will say article two first in the red and the rest of the kind of station constitution later and that's why i really think that if something occurs here it's going to happen in the courts it's the electronic frontier

foundation just one of a big case in which the they've got a ruling in which they could get moving forward so that the fees a secret ruling that said that the n.s.a. surveillance violated the fourth amendment at least one time they want to see that and the court. knocked down the argument saying that it was secret and said that well actually potentially they can see this and then the second one is the a.c.l.u. they just sued the the d.o.j. because over this metadata and they said well you this leak says that verizon is giving you hundreds of millions of of call records a day so we're verizon customer therefore we have standing and you're taking this metadata which violates the first and fourth member the constitution just collecting it and then you're taking it to build profiles of everyone that has been associations where you're moving where you're going and that is a further intrusion of everyone's freedom ok and we have run out of time i'm sure

n.s.a. has recorded this program and will watch it later many thanks to my guest today in washington new york and in philadelphia and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t. c.n.n. . simon remember across south wales at. least one. has a. clue

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this is r.t. tonight foreign leaders under surveillance they just leaks from the n.s.a. whistleblower reveal how delegates in the g twenty summit in london four years ago a former russian president among them were targeted by u.s. and british intelligence. the bombshell disclosures fit more attention to the g eight summit convening in britain against the backdrop of the protests. but it's syria that set to take center stage for world leaders at the g. eight in northern ireland looking to narrow the differences and meet fears the conflicts ascent to escalate even.