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Police Raid the Wrong House; Los Angeles Wildfire Detailed; Mysterious Priest at Accident Scene Sought; Hackers Can Hijack Smartphones

Aired August 08, 2013 - 15:30   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: So you saw part of the transcript, part of the exchange there.

Sunny Hostin, let me bring you in. Darren Kavinoky, let me bring both of you in here, attorneys.

Wow, Darren, beginning with you, watching sort of the before and the during, can you just tell just by watching that, did the deputies do anything illegal?

DARREN KAVINOKY, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, it certainly seems that way if, in fact, they were at the wrong home as it appears that they were.

The way they behaved is absolutely disgusting, and when it comes to law enforcement agents, we need to hold them to a higher standard. We expect them to have cooler heads.

We expect them to behave appropriately in the face of all kinds of craziness, and when you see this tape and you see that it's actually these law enforcement officers that are fueling the craziness, it's disgusting.

And the county better be prepared to write a big check as far as I'm concerned. They need to pay for this one.

BALDWIN: Let me talk about the county before, Sunny, I come to you next.

We know that we, CNN, have reached out to the DeKalb County sheriff's office. We haven't gotten a response.

Here's what a chief deputy told our Atlanta affiliate, WSV.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHIEF DEPUTY JEFFREY MANN, DEKALB COUNTY, GEORGIA, SHERIFF'S OFFICE: Our deputies were at the residence legitimately on a valid arrest warrant. I suspect there will be some disciplinary action.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Sunny, what do you make of all this? SUNNY HOSTIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Wow, you know, I think what we saw on the videotape is probably every homeowner's, you know, worst nightmare, someone coming into your home, not explaining why they were there, not having a warrant or at least showing a warrant.

As I think Darren will tell you, your home is your castle. It's your sanctuary. You cannot go into someone's home, even to effectuate an arrest, without an arrest warrant, without a warrant to search the home.

I suspect that Darren's completely right. We're going to see some big checks. We're going to see some disciplinary action.

But what I saw, what we're not showing, is these officers go on to really try to humiliate these two young men, one of which keeps on saying, I'm a college graduate. I'm just trying -- you know, it's my right to ask you these questions.

So I think there's a lot more at play than even what we're seeing going on here, Brooke.

BALDWIN: What are your rights as the person, you know, on the inside of this home when you have law enforcement banging town the door in this manner, Darren? What can you or can you not do legally?

KAVINOKY: Well, look, your home really is your castle. It really is your sanctuary, so certainly there's what you're legally entitled to do, which is to generally speaking to keep law enforcement out unless there is a valid search warrant, some legal authorization for them to enter into your home.

There are certain warrants that do allow the police to enter into your home forcibly, but unless that's produced, then you have the right to keep your castle safe.

But all of that said, there's the legal and then there's the practical, and that's the thing that's so offensive here. Here these homeowners are doing the right thing by trying to engage in a meaningful dialogue with law enforcement.

They called 911 to see who it was that was there and to actually send the police to talk to the sheriff to let them know they were at the wrong home, and instead these sheriff's officers were threatening to tase, were doing things that were insulting, were using language that would cause us to hit the bleeper button over and over and over again.

This one was so out of bounds, and this is why people are scared of government. I think about our last conversation about the NSA. This is exactly why people are distrustful because of these kinds of abuses of power. It is disgusting.

HOSTIN: And can you imagine if it hadn't been videotaped? Thank goodness we're sort of in the era now when you can use your phone or you can use whatever you have and actually have proof of this kind of encounter.

I suspect these kinds of encounters have been happening for years, yet we don't --

BALDWIN: Now we have the video proof. This is stunning. And this story is not going anywhere.

I'd love to talk to the people who took the video and I'd love to hear more from the deputies as well.

Sunny Hostin and Darren Kavinoky, thank you very much.

Fires burning thousands of acres in California, forcing dozens to evacuate, we will hear from one person forced out, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: A fast moving wildfire is raging near Los Angeles right now. You have 1,500 people near Banning, California. They were forced to leave their homes just a short time ago. Others in Riverside County, they're now doing the same.

It's called the Silver Fire. It has already scorched 10,000 acres of land and damaged buildings, damaged home.

A short time ago new mandatory evacuations were issued for a number of communities there. That's where we find Stephanie Elam working this one for us.

Stephanie, set the scene for me.

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This fire, Brooke, just took off very fast. It happened around 2:00 in the afternoon, our time, yesterday, and very quickly people were feeling threatened.

In fact, we heard some people had to batten down the hatches and stay where they were. They had firefighters near them because the fire jumped the road that they would have used to get out. No injuries there. Everyone got out.

We do know, as of right now, four firefighters have been injured and one civilian also injured as well.

Good news here is that the fire is 10 percent contained, but when you think about the fear of what people were dealing with to get out, you can see how scary it is.

We talked to one woman who was evacuated. Listen to what she has to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LILI ARROYO, FIRE EVACUEE: The fireman helped me bring out pictures and stuff, but then I couldn't think of my purse and my medication in the back room in the bedroom.

And they wouldn't let me back in. They wouldn't let me go get it. I told them, please, let me. I can make it in a minute.

They said, no. You just have five minutes. We'll take care of everything. Get in the car. Get in the car.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ELAM: And one thing we can tell you, that the helicopters, about 13 of them, are out here dropping water. We've seen the DC-10 back out here.

The one thing they're really battling as you can see are the winds. They continue to push this fire towards Palm Springs, so the thousand firefighters on this fire are continuing to work it to try to get a better handle on it, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Stephanie Elam for us in California, Stephanie, thank you.

Coming up next, a story that has a lot of people absolutely mystified. You have these rescuers struggling to free a woman trapped in this mangled car.

A man appears, offers spiritual advice. Rescuers get her out, but then, poof, this guy's gone. Now the search is on to find the man they call the "Miracle Priest."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: A near fatal car crash in the Midwest has some people now uttering the "M"-word, "M" as in miracle.

With corn fields on either side of this road, really? Not a whole lot else around. First-responders say a mysterious religious figure suddenly appeared at this crash site and then quickly disappeared once again.

Our Sara Ganim reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA GANIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: People in a small town in Missouri aren't sure what to make of this.

For 45 minutes, rescuers struggled, trying to get a 19-year-old woman out of this mangled car wreck.

Listen to how the New London fire chief explained it to our affiliate, KHQA.

CHIEF RAYMOND REED, NEW LONDON, MISSOURI, FIRE DEPARTMENT: I can't be for certain what -- who said or how it was said or where it come from, but myself and one of the other firefighters that was beside me, we very plainly heard that we should remain calm, that our tools would now work and that we would get her out of that vehicle.

GANIM: The voice, according to the fire chief, was a man dressed like a Catholic priest who seemed to just appear at the scene.

REED: He came up and approached the patient and did offer a prayer. It was a Catholic priest, and he had anointing oil with him, and a sense of calmness come over her then, even more so than what she had been already. And it did us as well.

GANIM: How did this man get there? The road was blocked for at least a quarter of a mile. He doesn't appear in any photographs taken by officials at the scene.

He seemed to have vanished after the woman, Katie Lentz, was freed from the mangled metal.

TRAVIS WISEMAN, FRIEND OF KATIE LENTZ: Where did this guy come from?

GANIM: Family and friends of Lentz, who's a sophomore at Tulane, just simply want to thank him.

WISEMAN: We're looking for the priest, whether it was just a priest as an angel, serving as an angel, or an actual angel that came in wearing the priestly attire.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: Sara Ganim joins me now. This mysterious priest aside, how is this girl doing?

GANIM: She had a lot of serious injuries. The good news is that her mother has upgraded her -- or said she's been upgraded from critical to serious condition. Both her legs were broken, multiple lacerations of organs.

Thankfully, her mom said -- I want to read this. It was posted to her Facebook page. "Thankfully her face and teeth escaped injury, which is always in some ways a small blessing."

BALDWIN: How did this whole thing happen in the first place?

GANIM: Police have charged a man, 26-year-old Aaron Smith of Hannibal, Missouri, with felony assault, second-degree, in a vehicle, driving under the influence, and also driving on the wrong side of the road.

So you can just imagine the horrific scene of this crash and why her injuries were so horrible and why it was so hard for first-responders to get her out of that vehicle.

BALDWIN: Mystery police -- or mystery priest still a mystery for now, Sara Ganim, let us know if he pops up.

GANIM: Absolutely.

BALDWIN: Thank you very much.

And now it's pretty incredible video of this bus crash. You have to see to believe.

I know. It takes your breath away. Another view shows the driver of the bus being thrown out the window. We'll show that to you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BALDWIN: Just a quick warning here, the video we're about to show you is extremely graphic, so just a heads up.

Roll it. You can see these passengers, they went flying when a truck rear ended this crowded bus. This was last Friday as it was backing up on a highway.

Nearly two dozen people were hurt, including these 10 passengers who were thrown out of the bus. The truck driver was killed.

You can see the same crash from a different angle. Keep your eyes on the driver. It shows the driver upon impact out the window he goes. Incredibly, he survived. That was China last week.

We have heard a lot about privacy lately when it comes to e-mails and texts. So, next, how quickly a hacker can get into your cell phone and take pictures of you without you even knowing.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Reading your text messages, reading your e-mails, even taking photos of you without your knowing, a hacker actually showed CNNMoney's Laurie Segall how to trick a cell phone to spy on its owner.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Your smartphone, turned into a spy phone.

KEVIN MCNAMEE, RESEARCHER, KINDSIGHT SECURITY LABS: I'm looking at my phone. I'm looking at playing the game, Angry Birds. I'm doing my thing here.

SEGALL: You see Angry Birds on the screen. On the other end, a hacker can see you.

MCNAMEE: We use the peep function to take a picture. And let me just do that right now. So there's us looking at the phone.

SEGALL: And that's just the beginning.

MCNAMEE: The other thing we can do is record conversations. I can use the listen function here, and when I click listen, I'm going to record ten seconds of conversation in this phone. Hopefully it will record the thing. We'll see how it goes.

SEGALL: So how did they do it?

MCNAMEE: We used Angry Birds because that's a very popular game.

SEGALL: Popular app, but be careful where you download it.

MCNAMEE: Send them an e-mail, saying, we've got this really great game that you can download if you just go to this link. You go to the link. You download the game. When they install it in their phone, they're all happy. They get to play the game. But the spyware is there.

SEGALL: It's not the app that's the problem. It's a malicious link users click or a fake app they download.

McNamee's a security researcher. His work is designed to find security flaws like this one.

MCNAMEE: What we've done is created a Trojan, a Trojan horse. We've got an application with the malware buried inside it.

So the person installed the application all by themselves, and the Trojan horse inside it creeps out and takes over their phone.

We can do this to any game we want or any other application.

SEGALL: Once you download the bad link, your private data, exposed.

MCNAMEE: So then we go to the website, and the first thing we can do is we can locate where they are. And here we are at Black Cat in Las Vegas, OK? That's where this phone currently is. You can see it right there.

Now what we have on here, we immediately get their e-mail address, we get the telephone number, the type of phone that they own, and we've also taken the contact list off the phone here.

SEGALL: Google and Apple recommend users only download apps from their respective app stores.

So what do users need to know about how to protect themselves? Because you guys have come up with this code. You're not going to release it. But you guys have come up with it, so that definitely opens the door to other people being able to do that.

MCNAMEE: That's correct.

What you first of all can do is, first of all, be very careful with the applications that you load.

If you get an e-mail from someone saying, here, click here to download the application, unless you really know that person, don't do it.

SEGALL: Laurie Segall, CNNMoney, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: I've got something for you if you are near the water, something pretty adventurous to check out over the weekend.

In fact, Leonardo DiCaprio, heard of him? He's hovering over water. And you can, too. What is this? We'll explain, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BALDWIN: I just wanted to leave you with these cool pictures. If you love water sports like I do, I love water skiing, trying to learn how to surf, this is super cool.

When you're a Hollywood A-lister, you get to roll like this, Leo DiCaprio, fly boarding. Heard of this? He's off the coast of Spain.

You basically strap on these jet boots. There's this hose connected, and you sort of get to fly, almost like a dolphin.

It's like a skateboard. You hover above the water. You can dive into the waves, though it's not cheap. Quickly, Chad Myers did the math, about $450 per hour to rent.

Enjoy, fly boarding.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thanks for being with me.

John Berman and "THE LEAD" start right now.