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Big Tech Companies Connected with PRISM?; More Jobs Than Expected Added in May; Prince Philip Undergoing Planned Surgery; Interview with Rudy Giuliani; Interview with Jameel Jaffer

Aired June 07, 2013 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield.

We have a busy show ahead, to say the very least. And we begin this morning with what you say and what you do and who your friends are and, maybe more importantly, who your enemies are.

It used to be that you could trust that most of how you went about your private life would stay that way, private. But not anymore.

A secret government operation has been monitoring the phone records of millions of us and now we're hearing it goes way beyond phone records to our Internet habits and who we e-mail with.

In fact, today's "Wall Street Journal" is reporting that the National Security Agency is examining what, where and how we buy stuff by looking at our credit card transactions.

So what about the companies helping the government watch us? According to "The Washington Post" and "The Guardian" newspapers, nine Internet giants may be caught up in the secret government intelligence operation known as PRISM. Some of them are denying this.

But the director of national intelligence is confirming that the NSA is collecting domestic phone records to ferret out terrorist plots. Here's our Barbara Starr to ferret this out.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: A potentially explosive disclosure about how easily the government can collect information online.

"The Washington Post" and the British newspaper, "The Guardian," are reporting that the National Security Agency, the NSA, and the FBI are tapping directly into the servers of nine leading Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Goggle, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. That's according to a top secret NSA presentation, intercepting data like video, photographs and e-mails flowing online.

GLENN GREENWALD, REPORTER, "THE GUARDIAN": What this program enables the National Security Agency to do is to reach directly into the servers of the largest Internet companies in the world, things that virtually every human being in the Western world now uses to communicate with one another.

STARR: The program appears to be intended to grab non-U.S. intercepts, many of which flow through the robust U.S. Internet.

One slide in the NSA presentation explains, "Your target's communications could easily be flowing into and through the U.S."

CNN has not confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

Several of the documents reportedly cooperating with the government issued denials of involvement.

This follows the stunning news that a secret federal court order directed Verizon to hand over phone records of millions of Americans.

Former intelligence officials and privacy advocates say, it's reasonable to presume other telephone companies got similar orders.

STEVE AFTERGOOD, POLICY ANALYST, FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS & INTELLIGENCE: If this is an open-ended and indiscriminate collection process as it seems to be, then logically one would expect it to be much bigger than Verizon business.

STARR: And it all leaves the administration needing to explain this exchange in March.

SENATOR RON WYDEN (D), OREGON: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES R. CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: No, sir.

WYDEN: It does not?

CLAPPER: Not wittingly.

STARR: That Verizon program, law-makers say having access to that data helped law enforcement stop terrorist plots from being carried out.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: We have team coverage on this story with so many important facets of it.

Barbara Starr joins us live from the Pentagon, Dan Lothian, live from the White House, and also from Washington, our chief political correspondent Candy Crowley is with us live.

Barbara, let me begin with you, and the very last little of that very powerful report, and that was the director of national intelligence telling the Senate intelligence committee, no, not unwittingly are we collecting massive amounts on Americans.

Is he walking this back?

STARR: Well, I don't think so, Ashleigh. I think what he is very subtly doing there is acknowledging a technological reality. The Internet, telephone networks, all of this really has almost nothing to do with geographic boundaries.

The U.S. government is not supposed to collect information on U.S. citizens, spy on them, if you will. But if you are looking at phone networks data, if you are looking at Internet data, that does not acknowledge, really, international boundaries. So unwittingly, yes, sometimes they get this information.

What he is saying is the rules are very strict. This information is put aside. It's handled according to very precise procedures and that the government is not wittingly spying on U.S. citizens.

I don't think that's going to go very far in answering a lot of people's very deep concerns about all of this.

BANFIELD: So, effectively, the rest of us, and anybody who thinks he or she is perfectly innocent, but might be caught up in a dragnet, we would happen to be collateral damage on this.

This has got to be very difficult for the White House, Dan. What is the White House doing? Do they have a damage control program of their own? Are they allowing this to be managed by Mr. Clapper and other members of Congress to do this?

DAN LOTHIAN, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, for now, you know, some of the strongest statements do come from Clapper, as you pointed out.

But the White House is being very cautious in the kind of reaction that they are giving top aides here, pointing out or emphasizing that the president has always talked about how you have to find that balance between security and civil liberties.

And they point us to a recent speech that the president gave at the National Defense University where he talked about this issue, talked about how you deal with new communications.

But they insist that there is great oversight here, that there is a safeguard, a system in place in order to prevent any kind of abuse, but, certainly, you know, this is big for this White House because it almost seems like every day we are seeing one of these controversy pop up.

This is a White House that's trying to focus on issues such as the economy, push the president's second term agenda, but now they are having to answer these tough questions.

BANFIELD: So, Candy, look, the safeguards -- when it comes to the safeguards, that requires a tremendous amount of trust, trust on the part of you, and me, everyone on the screen and everybody watching.

But that trust is encroached upon by other things that have been happening as well. So politically speaking, where does if administration get off -- sorry for being so callous -- but in asking us just to trust? Can't we verify? CROWLEY: Well, no. I mean, they're going to say, look, this is a -- one of the administration's reaction is, who leaked this stuff? We're going to go after whoever leaked the fact that this -- that these programs exist.

So they have very much sort of staked out this is about national security, and I have to say, this is not an issue that parses as easily along the party lines, even of the IRS or Benghazi or any of those sort of existing political problems the president has, because what you have here is kind of an alliance of progressives, who are disappointed with the president because they think he's looking an awful lot like President George Bush who they criticized for overreach, and those libertarians, Rand Paul and those sort of people who say, wait, wait -- Bernie Sanders -- saying, wait a second, this is too much.

So there's this -- there's not an alliance that fits easily. You have Lindsey Graham saying, hey, I use Verizon. You want to look at, you know, my phone number, feel free to do it.

So -- and both members of the Senate -- leaders in the intelligence committee -- so you have an alliance for the president that is not just a bunch of Democrats standing behind their guy. He has some bipartisan support and some bipartisan criticism on this. So I don't think that it parses as easily as the other things we've been covering.

BANFIELD: So, Candy, let me ask you this. When I used to work in Iraq, pre-Saddam days -- or pre- Saddam being ousted days -- I remembering fearing every moment that I picked up the telephone. And I was so judicious with everything I said.

In fact, I was judicious with most things that I broadcast, knowing full well it could jail me.

I don't think anybody who's innocent in this country isn't worried that that's the kind of chill that you can get. You just don't want to feel like you live in America and you've got Big Brother watching.

That said, are civil liberties a moving target? It seems, generationally, we all seem to differ on just what we're willing to give up?

CROWLEY: Well, there's certainly polling that shows that most people, or at least -- not the majority, but most people are unwilling to give up civil liberties, but let's now begin to parse what's a civil liberty? You know, what are you willing to give up to curb terrorism? Are you willing to -- this is a general question, and people say, well, sure, I'll give up some civil liberties in order to curb terrorism.

Older people, more worried about terrorism than younger people, so you see more willing to give up civil liberties, but, you know, the question is, what are those civil liberties? Do you want the federal government listening to your phone conversations, which as far as we know, they're not doing? This is a collection of numbers, not a collection of names, but a collection of numbers and who dialed -- or, what number dialed what number for how long and from where.

So I think this brings up that discussion, what do you think a civil liberty is? What are you willing to give up? Because the federal government, and that includes Congress, which knew about this, many members, you know the federal government says we are doing this in the name of fighting terrorism.

OK, America, what are you willing to give up? And that's a conversation we still haven't had.

BANFIELD: And you know, it's important to have it. And later on, the conversation on this program, the difference between getting what you just talked about the metadata, the numbers and the connections as opposed to the content because, legally, it's a lot tougher to get content than it is to get the data.

Thank you all, Barbara Starr, Dan Lothian and Candy Crowley.

Coming up, a lot more. Other stories we are following today, in our top stories, if you live on the East Coast, you can plan on a pretty wet weekend. Tropical Storm Andrea, already drenching Florida and expected to dump heavy rain as it continues its path northward.

It is losing strength, but don't let it fool you because flash flood watches are in effect in parts of 13 different states. Washington, I'm looking at you because you are looking up to six inches of rain today. And here in New York City and the state, we could get one-to- two inches of rain per hour -- per hour -- at times tomorrow.

Looking at the markets, a better story than the weather, they're upbeat, at least stocks, somewhat, even after a better-than-expected jobs report this morning, had an interesting effect on unemployment. It's up, even though the numbers are good in terms of the jobs created.

Labor Department reporting 175,000 jobs added in May. That is more than the analysts expected, and it's better than April, too. The U.S. unemployment rate edging up, though, just barely, to 7.6 percent, still not good enough in a recovery.

Other news, overseas, Britain's 91-year-old Prince Philip is about to undergo surgery in London today.

Buckingham Palace says that the husband of Queen Elizabeth is in good spirits. He is expected to spend two weeks in the hospital after what's called an exploratory operation on his abdomen following tests earlier this week.

The palace says the procedure had been planned, that it was not an emergency.

Prince Philip turns 92 on Monday. Back to the federal government, spying on your phone records, maybe even your credit card purchases and more, is this our new normal? Or is the government now going too far?

It is a great question and it is one we must ask and discuss. The former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, coming up next to discuss, as he knows, that intelligence is critical in working against terror.

On the other side of the coin, Jameel Jaffer from the ACLU says spying's got to stop as Americans are losing their civil liberties in this country, precious liberties.

And later, our chief White House correspondent Jessica Yellin, traveling with the president for a two-day summit, the topic is supposed to be China's new president and cyber attacks, so just how high on the agenda will that be for all the reporters who want to know more about all that spying?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Back to the story so many people are talking about today, debating, arguing, agreeing with or really fearing, the United States government spying on Americans. Honestly, there is no other way to put this. It is spying. And the debate that's raging over whether we are spying too much or whether we're spying just enough, because we all need to be protected, right?

Former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani is probably one of the foremost voices on this, onlybecause are you the guy at the forefront of dealing with post-9/11, with dealing with how to find those 19 guys before they perpetrate 9/11. How far can we go to get those guys? Here we have Boston, here we have thwarted (ph), attacks. It's very hard to come down on an answer.

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR, NEW YORK CITY: It absolutely is, Ashleigh. First of all, this is very troubling, it very -- but we don't know the exact dimensions of it. Did this go further than what was done in the past? My experience with the FISA court which goes back to the creation of it when I was in the Justice Department, is by and large, they've been very careful, they've been very prudent, very judicious. It happens only when there isn't quite probable cause, we are talking national security, something close to probable cause, they're not just going to sign, get all the records, then you can go fishing. So they --

BANFIELD: Okay. I'm going to tap you not just as the former mayor and a terror fighter extraordinaire, as a former U.S. attorney, a man who knows a lot about the law and about probable cause. I do not understand how you can go to FISA and get probable cause for millions of records and how me, little old me who has nothing to do with terror can get caught up in a dragnet like that because I might some association or 15 links of Kevin Bacon.

GIULIANI: So I can figure out -- what they say.

BANFIELD: Right. Where is the probable cause in that? GIULIANI: Well, it's pretty attenuated (ph), but the idea is if you have all of these connection available in the super computer, then when you need to find something, when you need to make a connection you got all the data there.

BANFIELD: It's pretty speedy, though as I know, right? Listen if need to go to FISA you are not waiting weeks.

GIULIANI: I'm trying to explain it, rather than necessarily defend it. You gather all the data, all the connections, you got them all -- 99.9 percent you never look at or have to deal with. Then when you have to make search --

BANFIELD: It's there.

GIULIANI: -- it's there.

BANFIELD: It's at the ready.

GIULIANI: And it's there and you can get it within one minute or two minutes.

BANFIELD: One minute or two minutes could be critical.

(CROSSTALK)

GIULIANI: I'm guessing, maybe I made a best better case or a worst case. I'm guessing. The problem here is the president is a president who is going to slow this down rather than speed it up.

BANFIELD: Now you are getting political on this.

GIULIANI: This is why the people don't trust it. The fact is he has to come out and explain it to the American people. He's got to explain -- we can't have this explanation like Clapper gave, well, it wasn't done wittingly.

BANFIELD: He said not wittingly.

GIULIANI: I can't figure that out.

BANFIELD: First of all, he said no, which I find troubling, and it required a second question.

(CROSSTALK)

GIULIANI: Well, not wittingly. In other words --

BANFIELD: SLet's play it, in case anybody missed the top of the program and Barbara Starr's report. Here is the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who is speaking answering questions at a national -- Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. He was asked specifically about the millions of us whose data may or may not be being collected. Have a look at it. We'll talk about it in a moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. RON WYDEN, (D) INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMED CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: No, sir.

WYDEN: It does not?

CLAPPER: Not wittingly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: You're laughing. You're laughing.

GIULIANI: The whole body posture and the body language, having been in court.

BANFIELD: I don't like the "no, sir."

GIULIANI: The "no" and then "not wittingly."

BANFIELD: That part I get.

GIULIANI: But it starts to create a defense for the "no."

BANFIELD: Listen, you are --

GIULIANI: All of a sudden he said no, now he realizes, oh my goodness, there is something going on, I better say not wittingly.

BANFIELD: You are a conservative Republican as the next guy, certainly as conservative a Republican as Mitt Romney anyway. This would have been the kind of thing I'd have expected you to come out right away and say, look, you got to fight the bad guy, sometimes you got to do the things you don't want to do. Instead I'm hearing you, especially I heard you say on Fox News earlier this morning saying , hey look at this guy, look at the background we're dealing with, the IRS, James Rosen and all the rest how can we trust these guys?

GIULIANI: But I think that's the problem.

BANFIELD: Isn't that being political? Let's really be serious about this.

GIULIANI: It's being realistic about where things actually are. The president develops credibility or he doesn't. This president has squandered it away. This is like crying wolf. You cry wolf once, you cry wolf twice, or three, and then you cry the fourth time, he may very well be right about this.

BANFIELD: Look, if it's a credibility issue, all I can say to that from my very miniscule knowledge, all of this is classified, is you have bipartisan support all over the map on this thing.

GIULIANI: Right.

BANFIELD: You got three levels of government weighing in on this saying it's okay.

GIULIANI: I tend to think they were probably right. On the other hand, you got bipartisan criticism as well. Libertarian Republicans, liberal Democrats, very, very out raged about this.

BANFIELD: Let me ask you --

GIULIANI: I don't have the details.

BANFIELD: We were talking about this massive vault. A vault of information you said, terrific, because in a minute or so, we can access, triangulate information and get a bad guy quickly. At the same time you got a big vault, you got people like this one that leaked it to "The Guardian" out there. How secure is our vault? This is critical information. Apparently, it's so critical that the people who handle it are specialized and trained in FISA.

GIULIANI: So, now, first of all , it's not -- nothing is secure. Anything that is available on the internet, anything that's in a computer, somebody can try to get. Now, they might not get it. They can get it. There is a second problem here I have been worried about since before September 11, which is the data glut. The overwhelming amount of data that we now collect. Sometimes makes it harder for us.

BANFIELD: To get through it.

GIULIANI: To get through it. Because we don't necessarily have principles of relevancy or another controversial topic and because there is a certain political reluctance to profile. What profiling does for you is cut through the general amount of information with the most specific information you are looking for.

BANFIELD: I haven't heard profiling coming up in this discussion a whole lot. What I have heard is patterning. And --

GIULIANI: They don't want to say the word profiling. Profiling is considered to be a bad word.

BANFIELD: Sure, but patterning is not a bad word. And don't you think that -- let me give it to you this way. Let me give it to you straight, mayor, if you had the opportunity to use this kind of a trove of information prior to 9/11.

GIULIANI: In a second.

BANFIELD: Could it possibly have stopped 9/11 had we had these freedoms?

GIULIANI: Yes. If we used the information correctly; if we had the proper human intelligence so we know what to look for, know what not to look for; if we properly profile, which is you look for the characteristics that are most likely the person who did it; if somebody reports to me a 6' 4 white man committed a crime, I look for a six foot four white man. I don't look at the entire population. The crime is narrowing it down to suspects. So is profiling.

BANFIELD: At some point if some of this gets declassified before I think it's 2038, which is the last date I saw --

GIULIANI: That's the problem we have. We don't know -- honestly, you and I don't know what we are talking about.

BANFIELD: We can't -- exactly. I hate admitting that I don't know what I'm talking about with a guest like you, but the truth is, it's all qualified and therefore a lot of these explanations --

GIULIANI: And I am going to guess it's legal, number one.

BANFIELD: You better.

GIULIANI: I'm going to guess it's appropriate, number two, but I'm also going to say that it has to be examined, because --

BANFIELD: Good luck with that. The examination part.

GIULIANI: Somehow, this has got to get out. We have to be able to look at it. Somebody has to look at it beyond just the committees because they sometimes become inside baseball.

BANFIELD: Little known fact the reason you're here is because your golf game canceled today. That would be thanks to the weather.

Mayor Guiliani, it's always nice to see you. Thanks very much. It's great discussion and I don't think it's the last time that we will be discussing it with you. Appreciate it.

All right. So, some Americans say enough is enough, though. Time to stop the secret spying. I'm going to talk to the deputy legal director of the ACLU when I come back with some of these tough questions to that person. Because within it comes to your secrecy, is your privacy more important than your safety? Is your safety more important than your privacy? And where is that balance struck? That's coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: So is the government spying on you and monitoring your cell phone calls, your e-mails, and the Victoria Secret bra that you bought? In so many words, yeah. Pretty much. That's an entire possibility depending on where you are and who your friends are, and whether there's a dragnet big enough that you got into it -- maybe by mistake.

This after two newspapers, "The Guardian" and "The Washington Post" reported that the National Security Agency and the FBI have collected and continue to collect vast amounts of info. How much is too much in terms of trying to keep us safe? How far is too far?

In the latest CNN/Time ORC poll, which was taken two weeks after the Boston marathon bombings, about half of you asked were not willing to give up some civil liberties to curb terrorism, but four out of every ten were.

After these revelations, you got to wonder if those numbers would change after we have been hearing that it's been going on so much. Let's bring in Jameel Jaffer, who is the debuty legal director of the ACLU, to delve into this.

I already know, I think, what you are going to say. I want to push back on it because I think this is -- Jameel, it seems to be a moving target, what we're willing to do. People complained and squawked in 2002 that they had to take their shoes off. Now no one even notices it any more, are we getting more okay with people watching us, considering we put ourselves out there on Youtube every day?

JAMEEL JAFFER, DEPUTY LEGAL DIRECTOR, ACLU: Well, you know, I think part of the problem here is that we don't often know what we are giving up in terms of civil liberties because so much is secret. All of this was secret until two days ago when "The Guardian" and "The Washington Post" disclosed that the government is engaged in this broad dragnet surveillance of everybody's phone calls, not the content but the metadata, meaning who you called, and how long the conversation was and where you were when you made the call.

All of that information is swept up into government databases. And we never had a debate about whether that was wise or legal or necessary. All of it was secret. So you know I think at some point you may have to ask this question what are you willing to give up? Although, I think those questions come up relatively rarely.

At some point you might have to ask it. Before you ask the question, you have to have some information about what the government is doing. Too much is secret. I don't think I ever said this before, but I actually agree with Rudy Guiliani. I agree that no president should be trusted with this kind of power. This is the kind of power that not only can be abused but will inevitably by a abused if it's not subject to real oversight. I think the disclosures over the last couple days made it clear there hasn't been no oversight.

BANFIELD: To that point, no president in your estimation and the good mayor's estimation, no president should have this much sweeping power.

You said it yourself -- there is a vast difference between metadata and content, and for those forgetting those terms, the metadata is the phone number you called the time you made the call. Not what you said in that call. And your histrionics --

(CROSSTALK)

JAFFER: There is a difference.

BANFIELD: There is a massive difference even when it comes to these warrants. For when you don't need a warrant necessarily all time. The Supreme Court made that very clear. For the other, you do. In these kind of searches that have been going on and under surveillance, it's meta, it's not content.

JAFFER: Right, well I guess I'd just say two things to that, first, I don't think the Supreme Court has decided this question. The case that the government keeps citing, these are cases from the 1980's and they involve discreet requests for metadata, so requests for metadata about one person's phone calls over a short period of time. That's quite different from asking for everybody's metadata for a three-month time or a seven-year period which is what turns out to have gone on here. This is surveillance on a scale that I don't think the Supreme Court has ever considered.

The other thing is, are you right. There is a difference. There is a difference between metadata and content.