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New Day

DHS Shutdown Deadline at Midnight; FBI: We are Losing the Battle to Stop ISIS Online

Aired February 27, 2015 - 06:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to NEW DAY.

It has been a brutal and relentless winter. And for many, the snow and ice is not letting up yet. What is your weekend look like?

Let's get to meteorologist Ivan Cabrera for a look at the forecast.

How bad is it, Ivan?

IVAN CABRERA, AMS METEOROLOGIST: It's going to be cold and more snow is going to be on the way. It's just depressing stuff at this point here.

But silver lining, there will be a brief warm-up coming. The fact that it's going to make it all the way to New York where it's almost going to feel balmy. But right now, it's 19 degrees in New York and it feels well, much chillier. Look at these temperatures well below zero across the Midwest. And you factor in the wind and it makes it feel like it's about 15 below in Minneapolis and 9 degrees as you step out in Nashville, unbelievable.

We're already tracking the next storm. It's moving through Texas right now, a little piece of energy that actually will fizzle out. It's the next storm moving out of the four corners into this weekend. If you're in Oklahoma, heading into Missouri, heading into the Great Lakes. That is where we're going to be talking about accumulating snowfall.

And eventually, the storm will head off to the North and East, and yes it will be bringing snow to the Northeast again, where Boston may actually break its all-time snowiest winter ever. We've gotten this far, we might as well do it and we may do this t this weekend with another perhaps six inches on the way. That's the track of the storm.

Down in the Southeast, that's where we're talking about the warm-up. Frigid air to the north, but a nice little mild push of air will eventually make it to the Northeast briefly, to warm us up.

I know this is brief, but I must go back to the newsroom and convince everyone that that dress is white and gold. CAMEROTA: Thank you, Ivan. We agree -- I agree with you.

Christine sees it differently. Thanks so much.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Congress playing politics with the protection of the American people. Less than 18 hours to go -- that's why we have the clock up, because it matters that much and if that clock goes to all zeros and nothing is done -- money runs dry in too many parts of the Department of Homeland Security.

Remember, this isn't a debate about the department. It's about Republicans trying to stop the president's executive orders. The Senate could vote on a clean funding bill this morning that will keep the department running without addressing those orders. They'll do it separately.

The House Republicans playing an even worse game. They're preparing a stop-gap pleasure to keep the department operating for three weeks, while they figure out a different plan. Democratic leaders say they have no interest in supporting a short-term arrangement.

CAMEROTA: The FBI's top counterterror official says the U.S. is losing the battle to stop the ISIS propaganda machine. Michael Steinbach says ISIS has proven dangerously competent, far more so than any other group in using social media tactics to spread its message and recruit people. Steinbach says the U.S. counter-narrative is effective, but the volume of ISIS messaging has been too much for them to overcome.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: And America can't get enough llama drama. Social media lighting up with excitement over an unusual and unforgettable case, two llamas on the loose in Arizona.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What the heck is going on?

ROMANS (voice-over): For nearly three hours, Thursday --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is pair of llamas that are on the loose.

ROMANS: Much of America glued to their TV sets, and enthralled by two therapy llamas darting through traffic, evading capture over and over again.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We've been out here for an hour trying to capture them. We're wondering if we can get some help.

ROMANS: The llama drama began while the animals were visiting a senior living facility west of Phoenix, Arizona. The white llama spooked over a plastic bag became erratic and its handler lost control.

KAREN FREUND, OWNER OF LLAMAS ON THE RUN: Next thing I knew he went down to the ground and I kept screaming no big deal, let her go, because I figured no big deal, we'll catch her again, and then the rest is history.

ROMANS: Twitter exploding with hundreds of thousands of llama-related tweets, #llamas trending worldwide.

The llama owners were part of the dozens of residents and police officers desperately trying to wrangle them in.

FREUND: I was terrified that they would get caught in traffic. Cause an accident. Somebody was going to hurt.

ROMANS: This man tried to grab the black llama's neck, finally pursuers broke out the lasso.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So, we jumped into the truck, grabbed the rope and headed over there.

ROMANS: The black llama caught by a local and eventually another man in the back of this pick-up truck expertly throw as lasso around the white llama. Both animals back in custody this morning.

JIMMY KIMMEL: They're both in prison.

(LAUGHTER)

ROMANS: But not before entertaining a nation.

KIMMEL: Somebody needs to write a children's book, really. Lenny and Carney, the llamas that could run faster than everyone in Arizona.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS: That was something.

CAMEROTA: Llamas can be nasty. They spit.

ROMANS: What I do not know is what a therapy llama is, because those llamas needed therapy. Not the other way around.

CAMEROTA: Now they do.

CUOMO: Can you feign that real fear again because llamas, because they spit.

CAMEROTA: I've been on the receiving end.

CUOMO: They're mad at you for wearing those sweaters.

CAMEROTA: A pancho.

CUOMO: I don't like that my Spanish joke went down. I'm still holding onto it.

ROMANS: They're telling to let go and so we can go --

CUOMO: I know, go ahead.

All right. Regulators voted for an open Internet. What does that mean for you? At CNN money time right now, let me bring that to you.

What is net neutrality? Net neutrality means Internet providers can not slow down certain websites or charge more for faster access. The government has decided that the Internet is like a utility, like water, and electricity. Websites like Netflix and Facebook love these new rules. Internet providers like AT&T and Comcast are promising a big fight.

So, what does it mean for my "House of Cards" watching? That's what you all asking. Those rules won't be official until this summer. But if upheld, it means your Internet provider can't slow down your Netflix streaming after you watched too many episodes.

What does it mean for your cable bill? It will keep going up. I think there's no question about that. A lot of people warning rates going up as providers make more investments and consumers demand more speed. I think the path of least resistance for cable bills is higher, higher, lots of investments to make. No matter what the government does, I think you're going to see higher cable bills. Sorry about that.

CAMEROTA: OK.

ROMANS: But you're getting more out of your cable, right?

CUOMO: That's true. Now I feel better. Thank you.

All right. So they're among the most wanted men and women in the world. A new breed of terrorists, cunning, calculated elusive. Who are they? Why are they so hard to eliminate? We're going to introduce you to the new bad guys, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I'm not in a position to either confirm or deny that the individual named in these reports is the individual that we're searching for. But I can tell that the United States' commitment and the president's commitment to insuring that we find and hold accountable the terrorists who are responsible for the murders of American citizens has never been stronger.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Neither confirm nor deny. One of the most loaded non- responses can you get from the government. That from White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Jihadi John, identified publicly yesterday.

It turns out the ISIS executioner is just of the least of our problems in terms of fighting terror.

Let's take a look at the landscape of some of the most wanted terrorists notice world. Who they are and why they matter. Bobby Ghosh, CNN global affairs analyst, managing editor of "Quartz",

and Philip Mudd, CNN counterterrorism analyst and a former CIA counterterrorism official.

I'm not starting with Jihadi John because he's a new breed and I'm not convinced he matters like these guys do.

So, Mr. Ghosh, who is this man? Why does he matter so much?

BOBBY GHOSH, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, he's the leader of ISIS, he's redefining what it means to be a Jihadi leader. He's announced himself as a caliph, a religious leader.

He's different from everything that's gone before. He's different from Osama bin Laden and many others because he doesn't simply launch attacks, he takes territory and holds onto it. He sees himself as a ruler. Not simply as a leader of a band of bad guys or --

CUOMO: Why isn't the fact that he's calling himself a caliph more enraging to Muslims?

GHOSH: Well it is, it's absolutely enraging to Muslims all over the world.

CUOMO: Because that's new.

GHOSH: Because that's new and that's a level of temerity that doesn't sit well with Muslims anywhere. That's a big call. That's like calling yourself a pope and what you are is a mass murderer.

CUOM: Right. And now, Philip, there are rumors out there about whether or not he's been hit, maybe in Mosul, along the border of Iraq and Syria, very far apart. They are rumors, but we can't really put any meat on those bones.

So, let's talk about this man.

PHILIP MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: A couple of things you're going see, common characteristics through this conversation. The first is he's been around since the early 2000s, as the leader of the organization. Al-Baghdadi has been around, captured by the Americans in 2004. They have duration experience in these organizations.

The second theme you'll hear consistently is what we call ungoverned space, an area of geography where governments lack the capability to reach -- Iraq one, Yemen the other. In the third is shown intent to come after the United States. We've seen it with ISIS. This guy is the architect of the underwear bomber over Detroit in 2009. So, that combination of space you can't control, leadership and intent --

CUOMO: Why is ISIS eating his lunch? Is it because of the caliph thing and it's appealing more on a religious level? Why is he eating his lunch?

MUDD: You look at the access that is has to a universe of people in Western Europe and the United States. The amount of geography they control.

CUOMO: OK.

MUDD: That's a bigger magnet I would say than Yemen is.

CUOMO: All right. And this man?

GHOSH: Well, Abubakar Shekau is the leader of Boko Haram. In this country, they first came into everyone's attention when they well this man is the leader of Boko Haram in this country they came to everyone's attention when they grabbed those girls last year. They're still missing. But this group has been sort of running amuck in Nigeria and some of its neighboring countries, Cameroon, Chad and they're especially brutal. They, too, are redefining the art, if you like, of terrorism.

He's sending young girls, eight, nine years old, into marketplaces strapped with bombs and blowing them up. That is a level of sort of moral degradation that we have not seen.

CUOMO: Philip Mudd, do you believe rumors from the Nigeria officials that they killed them?

MUDD: I don't think so. I don't think the Nigerians have been effective in this fight, I think he's still around.

CUOMO: All right. So, enough with the he. Let's go to a she. Do we see this as a novelty or is this a real player? And why?

GHOSH: I think she's kind of a camp follower. We don't know enough about her. We know that Hayat Boumeddiene was in the periphery of the Paris attacks, she was the girlfriend of one of the attackers, the one who attacked the kosher market.

And then she vanished. She left before the attack was actually conducted. The French police aren't saying enough about her actual role in it. It's possible that she was a camp follower, a hanger-on and they sent her away because they didn't want her imprisoned.

CUOMO: Not a leader, obviously.

GHOSH: No, clearly, clearly.

CUOMO: Somebody who may have helped before or after the fact. But not somebody we see. But she is a point of fascination. And then we have this guy in the news right now.

Jihadi John, you know, it feels to me like he's a face plate. He's getting a lot of respect right now, Philip, for being like a major player. He's always in the video. Who do you think he is as an animal?

MUDD: He's not a major player, but he's a snapshot with Hayat Boumeddiene with what has happened in the past 15 years. Twenty years ago when I was doing counterterrorism, you didn't have to worry about these people, because they didn't have an outlet to become a faceplate. They're not on Facebook, they're not on Twitter.

Today, these two folks are an example of why people who are not operational leaders, he's not an operational leader, are critical, because they can serve as the face for the organization. For a 15- year-old kid in London or New York who joins the organization. That's why he's important. Propaganda, not operations.

CUOMO: Final word?

GHOSH: The important thing with these two is that they're Westerners, really. They were raised here and they're within Western communities. They're not from poor disadvantaged, Middle Eastern communities. They're from the West, from the middle class, and it reminds us that we can't, that we have to look everywhere, that there's no clear definition of what makes a terrorist.

CUOMO: It shows that no one is immune. You look at education, social, economics, no one is immune.

Philip Mudd, Bobby Ghosh, thank you very much. Very helpful.

Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: OK. The FBI says ISIS is winning the war of online propaganda and recruitment. So, why can't U.S. tech companies shut these sites down? And is it their job to do so? We will talk to a top cyber expert.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: One of the FBI's top counterterrorism officials says the West is losing the battle to stop the spread of the ISIS message online. Why can't companies like Facebook and Twitter shut down accounts linked to terror?

Howard Schmidt is the former cybersecurity czar in the Obama administration and is a partner at Ridge-Schmidt Cyber, LLC, a company that advises corporations and government leaders in cybersecurity.

Mr. Schmidt, thank you so much for being here.

HOWARD SCHMIDT, PARTNER, RIDGE-SCHMIDT CYBER LLC: My pleasure.

CAMEROTA: Can you explain why Twitter and Facebook can't just shut down any accounts linked to terror?

SCHMIDT: Well, they can, because a lot of these terrorist groups and other people, cyber criminals actually violate the terms of service when you log in, you have all of those words that you click and you say agree. But what happens is there's competing forces out here. U.S. government may say, leave it out because we want to collect intelligence off of it. We want to identify some of the participants, another government says shut it down right away. And so, these multinational companies like Twitter and Facebook and Google are really in a bad position. If they see it, and it's clear that it's terrorist, they try to take it down, unless law enforcement asks them not to.

CAMEROTA: Well, look, everybody understands leaving them up for investigative purposes, that makes perfect sense. But it sounds like Congress is giving Twitter heat. In fact, there was this recent Brookings Institution study they said they found as many as 46,000 Twitter accounts were being used by ISIS sympathizers. Congress doesn't like that.

Can't they put some sort of controls over that many?

SCHMIDT: Well, that's not the worst of it. There's about 90,000 posts of one form or another, every day from these groups, tracking them down is difficult. But yet, they have the technical ability to do it. It's extremely difficult. But once again, you have those competing interests out there.

There's another component that comes into it, played into it for quite a while. When you look at the international laws, flipping it the other way. We have other countries that say we want to leave it up. We're tracking somebody down, and it takes a tremendous amount of coordination.

The last thing is they do a very good job taking these things down, getting notified by the FBI, getting notified by customers. But there's not a framework, there's not a way of looking at this thing that's consistent that makes Congress happy and also the other 186 countries in the world.

CAMEROTA: I mean, I think what we're responding to is that the FBI counterterrorism official, who has said we're losing this war, we're losing the war in terms of propaganda and recruitment and we see evidence of it. The three Brooklyn men who were just arrested this week trying to head there.

So, why isn't the FBI taking precedents? I understand that you say there's all of these competing agendas, but if the FBI says we're losing this war and we need to do something about their technical and online prowess, it seems as though that should take precedents.

SCHMIDT: You're absolutely right. It should take precedents. It's one of the things that the FBI and those folks involved in the investigation between the United States are spending a lot of time working with the Twitters and the Facebooks and everything else.

You know, we need to be clear that those bodies not only have to deal with the law enforcement community worldwide, but they also have to deal with what's by many accounts people consider First Amendment issues. So, you get in a real conflict and it's just becomes jumbled up.

But the bottom line is, we are losing, we have to get a better control, because their message is getting out more than our message is getting out. And I think a number of experts have said that we need to make sure that we, our volume is much louder than them. When they say something we drown it out with accuracy. But we need the cooperation, shutting it down and getting the right message out. CAMEROTA: We've heard from some cybersecurity experts that it's a

game of whack-a-mole. You know, you find one site that's somehow linked to terror or a social media account and you shut it down and it pops up somewhere else. How hard is it to trace the user of those sites?

SCHMIDT: Well, it could be very difficult. A number of these sites by the way are registered through United States domain servers. So, we wind up in a situation that's not just trying to track something down in Yemen or Nigeria or a place like that. We have to deal with U.S. servers, and what happens they bury themselves so deep. So, you may have access to a server where you have 1,000 accounts on it but only one of them is involved in terrorist propagation, recruitment.

And so, tracking those down, proving basically to yourself or the courts, that this, this indeed is involved in terrorists, and then you shut it down. So, it's really complicated. And they're growing.

And that's one of the other problems we have. They're growing and there's ways to hide where they're coming from.

CAMEROTA: It is complicated. But, Howard Schmidt, thank you so much for helping us to understand it this morning. We appreciate it.

There's a lot of news to follow this morning, so let's get to it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: The Department of Homeland Security going unfunded. Down to the minute.

EARNEST: This is not a partisan dispute. This is a party dispute.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: When I make decisions, I'll let you know.

CUOMO: Six Canadian teens are feared to have fled to join ISIS.

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: It doesn't matter where you are, we'll find you, we'll hunt you down and we will hold you accountable.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What they're trying to do is engage in cultural and heritage genocide.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What the heck is going on?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They continue to elude the animal control authorities.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was terrified.

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo, Alisyn Camerota and Michaela Pereira.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to NEW DAY.

With ISIS recruiters reaching right into America's living room, Congress still cannot figure out how to keep the department of homeland security funded. The money runs dry just 17 hours from now. That's when thousands of jobs will be furloughed at the government agency in charge of protecting us from terrorism.

CUOMO: Matters enough to have the clock up, no question about it. Remember, it's not a debate about what DHS does. This is about stopping President Obama's immigration reforms.

Now, to his credit, Leader Mitch McConnell separated DHS funding from the president's order and has the Senate poised to pass a clean spending bill today. The House, though, seems to have a different agenda.

CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta tracking the developments.

Oh, the symbolism of the Boehner kiss, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and the song's name? "As Time Goes By." Come on, Jim.

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Let's hope it's not the big kiss-off, Chris, let me tell you.

You know, Washington is once again peering over a cliff. This time, it's a Homeland Security cliff. As you have up on screen, 17 hours to go until the Department of Homeland Security runs out of money. As you mentioned, there are competing plans on Capitol Hill, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has a plan we keep the department funded until September.

Over in the House, House Speaker John Boehner looking at a plan that he thinks can he get past his more conservative caucus. That would last only three weeks. So he's going to be herding cats or herding llamas as the case may be up on Capitol Hill later today, which is why the White House is characterizing this as an intraparty Republican fight.

Here's what they had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EARNEST: Republicans made an aggressive case over the course of last year about why the American people should entrust the United States Congress to Republican leadership. Here we are, seven or eight weeks into their tenure, and they're on the precipice of falling down on the job, particularly when, that's notable when we're talking about something as important as funding the Department of Homeland Security.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ACOSTA: You know who is not a fan of the idea of a three-week spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, that would be the secretary of DHS, Jeh Johnson. He sent a letter to lawmakers yesterday saying, "A short-term continuing resolution exacerbates the uncertainty for my workforce and puts us back in the same position on the brink of a shutdown, just days from now."

And, of course, there's some serious implications in all of this. TSA, border security, the Secret Service, thousands of employees could go without pay for weeks depending on how long this lasts. But the, the thinking is up on Capitol Hill, guys, that this will get done and Ivan mentioned to House Speaker Boehner that Chris Cuomo had his own questions on all of this.

This was the response that he gave to us on that. Just want to put up.