Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Newsroom
Gunman Enters Georgia School; NSA Spying Broader Than Publicly Disclosed; Tracking Your Every Move Online; Good Samaritan, Dr. Oz Help Injured Tourist; Republican Senators Draw Line on Obama-care; Warning Level Highest Since Japan Earthquake; Dolphin Deaths on Rise.
Aired August 21, 2013 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Now in police custody, Hill faces charges including aggravated assault on a police officer, terroristic threats and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Parents complain about lack of communication. Most say they heard about it on local news.
CELISA RAYSOR, GRANDMOTHER: After they put the school on lockdown and secured the kids, the parents should have been called immediately, right then and there.
MATTINGLY: And there's new fears about security from parents deeply shaken by what could have happened.
REVA FIGUEROA, MOTHER: We have a button to push to go in and you're supposed to show I.D. And it aggravates me.
MATTINGLY (on camera): Are you going to let your daughters go back to school?
FIGUEROA: I don't want to. I want to home-school them.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: David is joining us.
David, this took place after so many horrific school shootings, especially the Newtown school shooting, the massacre that happened there. Were there any security changes to the plan that the school was going to go on after the previous attack at Newtown? Did anything change?
MATTINGLY: I talked to the superintendent about this. He said, after Newtown, they did a complete review. This is a big school system, 138 schools. They have 48 armed officers working in those schools. You don't have enough officers for every school. There are zero officers, armed officers assigned to elementary schools. When I asked the superintendent, Michael Thurmond, he told me this, quote, "We have to weigh budgetary issues as well as where the threats might present themselves." But when the threat presented itself here at this elementary school yesterday, here is how the shooter got inside. They have security here. There are double doors here to get in. You either have to have a security card for the card reader here or you have to push the button or be visually identified and somebody talks to you. What the shooter did here was he waited for someone with a card or to be buzzed in to go in through these doors, and before it closed, he grabbed the door and went in straight to the office where he ended up taking the officer workers hostage.
Now after all that happened, he exchanged gunfire with police. You can see this window was blown out by gunfire and the one next to it was. The one over here. This one was blown out by gunfire. And take note up here. This is a bullet hole that was caulked and painted over just today.
These kids are going to be coming back to school here tomorrow to this very school, back to their desks at the very school where this happened and some parents were telling me, unless improvements are made now, they are very nervous about letting their kids come back here.
MALVEAUX: Sure. David, thanks for taking us through that. It shows how you can avert that system, the security system in place, and just sneak through.
David, thank you. Appreciate it.
We'll have much more on this story throughout the day. At 3:00 eastern hour, my colleague, Brooke Baldwin, will speak with the DeKalb County police chief about that shooting, a terrifying incident that happened just yesterday.
And the NSA surveillance covers more of your Internet communications than the agency has previously admitted. That is coming from the "Wall Street Journal." We'll tell you just how much, up next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MALVEAUX: It's no secret the government has the capacity to spy your Internet activity but it might be more than you realize. A new "Wall Street Journal" report say that the National Security Agency has a broader online reach than officials have publicly disclosed. As you may know, the NSA has only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens. Well, now, current and former officials say that the agency has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic. It's intended to hunt for foreign intelligence. However, according to the report, in some cases, it retains the written content of e-mail sent between people in the United States and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology.
And it's not just the government watching you online. Our Tom Foreman shows how the Internet tracks just about every move. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Worth more than the company that produced the "Star Wars" film, more than McDonald's makes a year, even Ferrari, that's how valuable Internet advertising has become, raking in over $30 billion annually, spurring a gold rush among companies for information about you.
JUSTIN BROOKMAN, CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY: Just over the last couple of years, you've seen an explosion of trafficking and targeting technologies.
FOREMAN: Jason (sic) Brookman is with the Center for Democracy and Technology.
(on camera): So let's talk about how this works. Imagine there's a couple that finds out they are expecting a baby. They go online to look up the word pregnancy. What happens?
BROOKMAN: Right away, they shared with Google that they are interested in pregnancy. They can add that to their profile and they get served a lot of ads. I start clicking on links.
FOREMAN (voice-over): With every click, powerful marketing companies drop cookies onto the couple's track to record their browsing history, what they looked at and for how long and much they spend. Some may link to the couple's real-world shopping habits, noticing they purchased a home pregnancy test and, suddenly, on their e-mails, on their Smartphones and social media sites comes an avalanche of ads for baby bottle, strollers, car seats, cribs and much more.
(on camera): And all of this could happen before the couple tells their family they're pregnant.
BROOKMAN: Yes. There's hundreds of companies in the advertising game. They can drop a cookie and say this person is pregnant.
FOREMAN (voice-over): If you search something more delicate, like sexually transmitted disease, infidelity or escorts, all of this can be tracked. And all of this is drawing the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.
JESSICA RICH, BUREAU OF CONSUMER PROTECTION, FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: Consumers are concerned if their children are tracked in this way. And there's also questions about whether this information is -- who is this information given to. Can your employer get it? Can your insurer get it and learn about your habits?
FOREMAN: Still, so far, the government is relying on the Internet ad industry to control itself, even as it grows steadily better at tracking your every move purchased and clicked.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MALVEAUX: Wow. Learn how to protect your privacy. Watch "Erin Burnett OutFront," tonight at 7:00 eastern here on CNN.
Senator Ted Cruz tells a crowd how he plans to dismantle Obama-care and why he believes the country will blame the Democrats for shutting the government down.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MALVEAUX: This guy just wants to live a normal life but life has been anything but normal for this U.S. Navy veteran. An update on Michael Boatwright, who woke up in a California hospital earlier this year. He has no memory of his past and spoke only Swedish. Doctors say he has dissociative amnesia, a rare condition typically associated with a traumatic event. Police found him unconscious in a California motel in February. Now, the hospital booked him a ticket to Sweden since he lived there on and off for about 20 years. And the story has a happy ending sort of. Boatwright's former girlfriend saw a newspaper article and she's now helping him rebuild his life.
This, it was a chilling scene. This is New York on Tuesday. This taxi jumped a curb near Rockefeller Center, plowed into a British tourist, severing part of her leg. A quick-thinking Good Samaritan jumped into action until paramedics arrived. Also on the scene, Dr. Oz, whose TV show tapes nearby. The doctor spoke to CNN affiliate, WPIX, about the unlikely items that were used to help save that woman.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. MEHMET OZ, HOST, THE DR. OZ SHOW: There was a dog leash and a belt. These are two mundane things you wouldn't think of, but they saved your life. You don't have much time. You pour out blood. (INAUDIBLE).
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: It's pretty amazing. Dr. Oz praised the Good Samaritan as a hero in a Facebook post. The young woman was sent to Bellevue Hospital, the victim, that is, where she underwent surgery to reattach her leg.
Republican Senator draws the battle lines. This is over Obama-care. Senator Ted Cruz says he has a plan to do away with the president's signature health care reform plan. He calls it a job killer that's hurting middle class families. And Cruz outlined a strategy in a speech last night. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TED CRUZ, (R), TEXAS: The House of Representatives should pass a continuing resolution that funds every penny of the federal government, everything in its entirety, except Obama-care.
(APPLAUSE)
CRUZ: It should prohibit the federal government spending even one penny, discretionary or mandatory, on Obama-care. Now, what happens next? We've all seen this movie before.
(LAUGHTER)
What happens next is President Obama and Harry Reid will scream and yell "Those mean nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the federal government."
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
CRUZ: What has to happen after that is we've got to do something that conservatives haven't done in a long time.
(SHOUTING)
CRUZ: We've got to stand up and win the arguments.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: I want to bring in Jim Acosta, one of our senior White House correspondents.
Jim, first of all, the budget battle, they use this all the time to score points or change, in some way, policy. Is it likely he could get enough support to carry out the plan to use the budget in a way they would not fund Obama-care?
JIM ACOSTA, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Suzanne, this is going to be the big show in town coming up this fall. Ted Cruz is very serious about this. He has some other conservative Senators, like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, who are right there with him, who feel that if the president does not defund his suggest legislative achievement, health care reform, that there could be some kind of filibustering or effort to bring the government to a halt and not continue to fund the government unless something is done to defund the president's health care law. And Ted Cruz was making that point very clear once again last night. He was doing this town hall in conjunction with the Heritage action group here in Washington, conservative outfit here in Washington. They're going around the country to have these sorts of town halls with Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina Senator. And basically what they're saying right now -- I talked to an official there a few moments ago, Suzanne, who called this a game of legislative chicken. As this deadline gets closer, they want to drive a hard bargain and see if they can get this defunded. Now, nobody thinks the president will sign that into law. So that's where the conflict will lie.
MALVEAUX: A lot of people speculating, Jim, that he might be a 2016 presidential candidate. Take a run for that, make a run for that. He's running into some obstacles, with a lot of attention that he was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father, and faced questions about his citizenship, whether or not he can actually run for president. He called it silly. Does this only add to the speculation that perhaps this is somebody who is serious for 2016?
ACOSTA: Suzanne, he was just out in Iowa a couple of weeks ago with Rick Santorum and Donald Trump at a Christian conservative gather out there in that very important battleground state. Judging by the reception he had out there, Ted Cruz, I think has to be considered as a serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2016 as things stand right now. A lot of people will say it's too soon, he just arrived and so forth. Just in the way that the issue of government surveillance and drones has brought a lot of attention to Rand Paul and raised his profile as a potential contender, this Obama-care issue is doing the very same thing for Ted Cruz, and he's seizing the moment, you might say.
MALVEAUX: Jim Acosta, thanks. Appreciate it as always.
ACOSTA: You bet.
MALVEAUX: Officials say that you could get a five-year dose of radiation in just one hour from the water in Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant. Why the warning level is the highest it's been since the earthquake there.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MALVEAUX: Concerns over a toxic water leak at Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant are now intensifying. That is because the country is getting ready to push the nuclear accident warning level to three, which means it is classified as serious. That is the highest level it has been since the huge earthquake and tsunami triggered the massive meltdown back in 2011. The situation is so troubling, Japan's top nuclear official is now comparing that plant to a house of horrors.
Chad Myers explains.
The warning level here at Fukushima is jumping now from one to three. What does that tell us? What does that mean, Chad?
CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: There was a water leak at one of those large barrels that you see, those big white things that were just on the screen. Think about, like, you know, those oil tanks around the United States where oil is stored. Those big tanks, they're all through here, here, here. Many of them storing the water that is pumped into the system to cool it, then pumped back out. But it's so radioactive when it comes out, you can't just dump it somewhere. You have to put it in these big, giant barrels. Like 1,000 tons of water can go in each one. They use 300 tons of water each day.
Well, one of these was actually leaking into this pool. It was separated. It wasn't leaking out just everywhere. But it was probably leaking into the ground as well at least for a little while. About 300 tons of water. So because of that, because of that leak, they're considering taking this from what was just a current level of a one -- remember, Fukushima and also Chernobyl were both level sevens, major radioactive launches into the atmosphere. This was an ugly, ugly event. So it was a seven. But after the cleanup, a couple of years, now it's back down to a one. But with this dumping or this losing of some of the water and possibly into the ground water and into the ocean, eventually, this could go up to the three. Three Mile Island was a five. Seven, the only two sevens we've had, Chernobyl and Fukushima. So it's not over. This may take 1,000 years to truly clean up everything. So we're going to have these little bumps in the road, without a question. MALVEAUX: Wow. Still a very dangerous situation.
Thank you, Chad.
MYERS: You're welcome.
MALVEAUX: Appreciate that.
Scientists, they want to know why dozens of dolphins have now washed up this summer along the east coast beaches.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRETT WHITAKER, VETERINARIAN, NATIONAL AQUARIUM, BALTIMORE: Go ahead. Feel his teeth there, Brian. Nice, nice, sharp teeth. We look under the tongue. Make sure there's nothing. Some of the viruses cause lesions.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: We're going to tell you what scientists think is happening to them, up next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MALVEAUX: The beauty and the grace of the dolphin has captured our imagination for centuries. But now government scientists are raising a red flag about a sudden increase in the number of dying dolphins along the east coast. The death rate this summer is seven times higher than normal. Scientists, they're trying to figure out why.
Brian Todd is following the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They're among the most resilient and beloved creatures to roam the seas.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Look it!
TODD: But something in the water is killing bottle nose dolphins across the east coast of the U.S. And at the moment, it's a mystery.
SUSAN BARCO, VIRGINIA AQUARIUM AND MARINE SCIENCE CENTER: We're seeing lesions in their respiratory systems. We're seeing animals having joint problems. We are not seeing animals that are feeding normally. A lot of them are thin.
TODD: And dead by the time Marine authorities find them. More than 200 dead bottle nose dolphins have washed ashore from New York to Virginia this summer. In Virginia, the count is around 80 for this month alone. Mostly along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline. The average number in Virginia in August? Seven. Pollution or bacteria could be possible causes of this die off.
At the National Aquarium in Baltimore, I asked top veterinarian, Brett Whitaker, about another possibility
WHITAKER: We don't know exactly what's causing it. We expect it suspect it might be a virus called morbillivirus.
TODD: Dolphin morbillivirus, a pathogen that's been deadly before. It killed more than 700 dolphins between New York and Florida between 1987 and '88. In humans, the strain of the morbillivirus causes measles. But experts say it doesn't spread between humans and dolphins.
How do these maladies spread so quickly among dolphins?
(on camera): Experts say part of the problem is dolphins are very social creatures. They're always swimming with each other, touching each other, breathing on each other. That's a way they can transmit illness.
(voice-over): They also feed on the same food at the same time, says Whitaker.
At the aquarium, Whitaker and I do a quick exam on both the young males.
WHITAKER: Got ahead, feel his tiny teeth there, Brian. Nice, nice, sharp teeth. We look under the tongue. Make sure there's nothing. Some of the viruses cause lesions under the tongue.
TODD: We check the stomach area, where the liver and other organs are, the blowhole.
WHITAKER: All right. Look at that. We've got mucus and basically spit on the side. We take it to our laboratory. We do special stains. We look at the cells, which tells us an awful lot about what's going on inside of her.
TODD: That, and a nice clear eye tell us Bo is healthy. As for those out in the open water, who are infected --
(on camera): Can anything be done to end this or stem it at all?
WHITAKER: The reality is wild populations with an extensive disease like this could be very, very difficult for us to help at all.
TODD: Whitaker says that's because dolphins migrate so fast over such great distances that by the time experts figure out what's wrong, try to catch them en masse and treat them, this so called unusual mortality event might be over.
Still, experts are worried that this will spread quickly farther south. Because this is the time of year that Atlantic bottle nose dolphins are migrating south.
Brian Todd, CNN, Annapolis, Maryland.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MALVEAUX: That's it for me. CNN NEWSROOM continues. Have a good afternoon. BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: It's a country with no leader and no end to this out-of-control violence. And now the former dictator could walk free. Does this essentially reverse the Arab Spring?
I'm Brooke Baldwin. The news is now.
A man armed for war walks into a school.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank god no one was hurt. No one.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: But some parents aren't satisfied.
Dr. Phil under fire today for a tweet about sex and drunk girls.
Plus --
(APPLAUSE)
BALDWIN: -- another personal struggle for the vice president.
And after a baseball player is murdered, new calls to rethink visits to the U.S.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't believe your Second Amendment provides for semi-automatics or automatics in --
