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NSA Surveillance Changes; Ohio Execution Raises Controversy; California Drought

Aired January 17, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: We have new information and a major development here, because the state of Ohio said it took nearly 25 minutes for Dennis McGuire to die after the drugs were injected.

We are also told it does not appear painless like lawyers of course had wanted, and now the family is filing a lawsuit. I want you to hear this. This is McGuire's son talking to reporters today. He describes the horror of witnessing his father's execution.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DENNIS D. MCGUIRE, SON OF DENNIS MCGUIRE: Yesterday, I watched the state of Ohio kill my dad. I witnessed his execution, along with my wife and my sister. It is difficult for me to talk about what happened.

Shortly after the warden buttoned his jacket to signal the start of the execution, my dad began gasping and struggling to breathe. I watched his stomach heave. I watched him try to sit up against the straps on the gurney.

I watched him repeatedly clench his fist, and it appeared he was fighting for his life, but suffocating. The agony and terror of watching my dad suffocate to death lasted more than 19 minutes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The words from the son.

Sunny Hostin rejoins me.

And, Sunny, we were just talking about this yesterday making the point, listen, executions are not pretty. But to hear somewhere between 19 and 25 minutes to die, this lawsuit they filed says the state of Ohio violated the cruel and unusual punishment, Eighth Amendment the U.S. Constitution.

SUNNY HOSTIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: That's right.

As I said yesterday, it's going to be a close call because certainly the Supreme Court has made it really clear, you cannot execute someone in a cruel and unusual fashion, but we know that executions don't have to be necessarily pain-free.

But I think what the import of this is, is that people will be especially in Ohio reexamining the death penalty and how do you really put someone to death? When you look at the policy behind the death penalty, we know that support in the American public has really dropped. It's still about 60 percent, but it has dropped.

But I think more importantly you see that it doesn't really send the message that many people think it sends. It's not a deterrent to crime. I don't think you can show people not to murder by murdering someone. I think we will see sort of a reexamination, at least in Ohio and maybe all over the country of how we put people to death should we put people to death.

This is an important step, I think, in that examination, the fact that the family has filed this lawsuit.

BALDWIN: Do you think the family could file a civil suit and could the state of Ohio be forced to pay the family something?

HOSTIN: It's possible. We I think will see a lot of legal proceedings come from this, especially with the 1983 action. What you are seeing is a family saying these rights were violated. The constitutional rights were violated and we have been injured as a family.

This is in fact sort of the start of that, because you can get civil damages in a 1983 suit. We are going to see I'm sure a lot more litigation and, Brooke, I guess we will be talking about this.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: We will. We will follow that as well. Sunny Hostin, thank you very much.

Let me move on and talk about West Virginia, because we have got some news here. The company that owns the facility where the chemical leak occurred, guess what, they are now filing for bankruptcy. Freedom Industries filed for Chapter 11. And the chemicals used in the clean coal spilled in the water supply eight days ago near Charleston and contaminating water for than some 300,000 people.

Also today, just a short time ago, authorities there lifted more do not use orders for thousands of additional customers. As a precaution, West Virginia health officials advised pregnant women there to keep drinking bottled water until further notice.

We hope you caught it right here watching CNN today, the president of the United States offering an answer today not just to us Americans, but for people all around the world who have rightly come to fear that the U.S. government knows way too much about us and can even learn more if it wants to.

Even though he didn't quite say it here, the president's hand was forced by the shocking revelations of the man on the right side of your screen, Edward Snowden, the fugitive now seeking asylum in Russia who frankly spilled the beans on the government, among other things, when revealing when you make a phone call, chances are very good it goes straight into the records of the super secret National Security Agency, the NSA.

The big moment this morning, here was the president at the Department of Justice laying out changes designed to ensure that mass surveillance only gets used against the bad guys and terrorists and the like and not against us. The president also signalled that he personally shares our worries that, yes, he said he gets it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King, who were spied upon by their own government.

And, as president, a president who looks at intelligence every morning, I also can't help but be reminded that America must be vigilant in the face of threats.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Let me run through just a quick look at what the president said he wanted to do.

Number one, if the government wants to check the records it collects, it is going to have to ask that secret intelligence court, FISA court, which the president wants to bolster with the privacy advocate.

He also wants to move the records out of the government's hands while making sure they are still accessible to U.S. law enforcement and this is a biggie here. He said he wants to extend privacy rights, as I mentioned, enjoyed by we the citizens here in the United States to everyone around the globe, especially heads of states who are frankly easy pickings for U.S. surveillance systems and are none too thrilled about that.

Let me bring in two voices here.

Jeff Toobin is with me, and he's our senior legal analyst, and from Washington, Jim Sciutto, CNN's national security correspondent.

Mr. Toobin, let me begin with you, because I remember talking about the FISA court with you before, and you did not mince words. This is the secret panel of judges that is supposed to ensure the government does not overreach on surveillance, yet it basically rubber-stamps everything the NSA asks for. Do you think the president is putting some teeth into the FISA court for us?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: It could be.

This section of the speech was a little mysterious to me, to tell you the truth, because what he said was, I want privacy advocates to have a role. He said they were outside the government. But it wasn't clear what role they would have and frankly given how secret those proceedings are and given that the government has to disclose very secret operations to the court, will these privacy advocates have access to all of the information that the court does? Will they be like an opposing litigant who does have access, or will they be sort of an outsider just sort of giving general advice? That was unclear to me, but certainly it's different from the situation now where this court only hears from the Justice Department.

BALDWIN: OK. So, that's a mystery.

Jim Sciutto, we talked about the president trying to reassure our good friends around the world they will not be spied upon unduly. Let me play one more sound bite, because we thought this was pretty interesting.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Moreover, we cannot unilaterally disarm our intelligence agencies. There is a reason why BlackBerrys and iPhones are not allowed in the White House Situation Room.

We know that the intelligence services of other countries, including some who feigned surprise over the Snowden disclosures, are constantly probing our government and private sector networks, and accelerating programs to listen to our conversations and intercept our e-mails and compromise our systems.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Why, Jim, do you think he did that? Why did he call out some people there?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, listen, I think that was aimed particularly at a country like China and Russia, which happened to be two of the countries that Edward Snowden stopped on his way to asylum here.

But I think this was a president who was apologizing for some things or explaining them and then making clear on other things he was not going to apologize, one being right there saying we are still going to spy overseas because everyone spies overseas and we may have a national security interest in doing so.

He did set a limit, though, saying on close allies and friends, I am no longer going to spy on the leaders of those countries.

BALDWIN: You think they believe him?

SCIUTTO: I think they probably believe him. But how much of a difference does that actually make? You are not going to spy on Angela Merkel, but you have got her advisers and her cabinet and her government and her government agencies, this kind of thing.

It's a limit and it's an important one. But I think it shows where the president will go with these kind of changes and where he's not. Jeff referred to another one and he is going to ask Congress. Right? He can't do this himself. He will ask Congress to appoint a panel of public advocates, but in the language there, he said to pipe in on significant cases. Not every case, but what are those significant cases?

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: That's another mystery. It's a great...

(CROSSTALK)

TOOBIN: I thought the point Jim was making about not spying on leaders, he said, except in extraordinary circumstances.

We are not going to spy on them unless we really want to know what they are talking about.

(CROSSTALK)

TOOBIN: And, frankly, why shouldn't we spy on them? I don't understand all this outrage about our spying on Angela Merkel. Yes, we don't talk about this openly, but, come on, what is kidding whom? We have spied on our allies since before World War II.

BALDWIN: Yes. NSA existed long before 9/11 and one more thing, Jeff Toobin. I want to get this in, because if I heard the president right, he was also saying this. He was saying, listen, I'm not the bad guy here and I'm not the threat, but the threat comes from the terrorists, folks like Edward Snowden, who spill state secrets.

Does it strike you as extraordinary that he felt it necessary to send that message specifically?

TOOBIN: I think he was trying to draw a difficult line here, which is that, yes, there perhaps was overaggressive surveillance, but we need this stuff. There terrorists out there and there are bad guys and they use cell phones and they use Gmail and we have to look at it.

How you draw the line between those two objectives is what this whole controversy is all about and that's really what the speech was about.

BALDWIN: OK. Go ahead.

(CROSSTALK)

SCIUTTO: I was going to say, we talked about how that relates to foreign leaders.

One thing that is key here, you will need a judicial finding to access this phone metadata and all of our phone numbers and phone calls and when they were taken. But he's not going to end bulk collection. Bulk collection will continue under safeguards. The NSA will need a judicial finding to make a search.

You may have a panel of advocates to argue on that court that will adjudicate these searches, but that collection will still happen and the president said it's still going to happen because he still believes there is a need for our national security. That's the bottom line really.

BALDWIN: Fellows, thank you, Jim Sciutto, Jeff Toobin. Appreciate it.

SCIUTTO: Thank you.

BALDWIN: There is a lot going on today, including have you heard about this reporter from "The Wall Street Journal" left his home on Saturday and went out for a quick walk and has not been seen since? His family said a story he was investigating may have something to do with his disappearance.

Also in California today, the governor there, Jerry Brown, declaring a drought state of emergency, saying it is the worst they have seen in a century. We will tell you what they are doing about that.

And take a look at this. That is the mayor of a small town in North Carolina dancing after being stopped by police for driving drunk. And she is still on the job. Stay here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: New developments today in the case of the autistic teen who disappeared in New York City back in October.

A lawyer for the teen's family told CNN that body parts have been found next to the East River in Queens. Police believe it could be that of the Avonte Oquendo. He went missing from a school in October.

His mother desperately searching for him, who cannot -- this teenager can't communicate verbally. She will provide investigators with her DNA just so that they can determine whether the remains are that of her son.

And hundreds of volunteers and police are scouring this area of New Jersey today. They're searching for this missing "Wall Street Journal" reporter. He is 55-year-old David Bird. He was last seen leaving his home in Long Hill Township, New Jersey, on Saturday afternoon just to go out for a walk. He hasn't been seen since.

The mystery deepens because media reports indicate Bird's credit card was used in Mexico Wednesday night. It's unclear what that clue may mean. Investigators are not commenting.

But, Alexandra Field, let me bring you in, because you are following this for us today. First of all, what do we know about David Bird and what is his family saying?

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, first and foremost, his family is desperate to find him. His disappearance makes no sense to them.

And it has stumped investigators too. For a sixth day, authorities and volunteers in the search for David Bird, a 55-year-old "Wall Street Journal" energy reporter, are combing the area near his Long Hill, New Jersey, home. They're also doing a water search of the Passaic River. Bird takes medication twice a day following a liver transplant nine years ago. His family is concerned about his condition without that medication. They say, when he left for a quick walk on Saturday afternoon, he didn't have his cell phone with him and they expected he would be right back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS FLEMING, SISTER-IN-LAW: As well as can be expected under the circumstances. We are staying hopeful. Obviously, it's tense and stressful, but we are desperate to find David.

We actually -- we keep hoping, but that's why we really appreciate getting the word out to people, to anyone who knows any information. Obviously, we are all heartbroken that this is going on for so long.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FIELD: You can hear the heart break in her voice. "The Wall Street Journal" has released a statement following Bird's disappearance from managing editor Gerard Baker, who writes: "Mr. Bird is a longtime member of the Dow Jones newsroom. Our thoughts are with his family."

Bird is a father of two, a marathoner, an avid biker. According to his family, he often walks and trains on the trails near their Long Hill home -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: He is an energy reporter for "The Wall Street Journal." Tell me about the story he was working on that could be of interest to police.

FIELD: Brooke, as an energy reporter, he had reported on OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting countries.

Some media outlets report that Bird's family has wondered whether his disappearance could be connected to that work. His sister-in-law tells CNN she has "no idea" what could have led to his disappearance. There have been reports that Bird's credit card was used in Mexico. A source close to the investigation says that, at this point, investigators have not confirmed the use of the card there -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: OK. Alexandra Field, thank you.

Coming up next, to California we go, the governor there declaring a state of emergency not for the wildfires burning outside of Los Angeles, but for an intense drought. The governor is saying it's the worst the state has seen. We will tell you what they're doing about that.

And then this video, a mayor caught on camera driving under the influence of alcohol, giving a little, what shall we call this, an impromptu dance performance to police. She is still on the job and we will tell you what her constituents are saying about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK) BALDWIN: California now in a drought emergency. And it is possibly in the midst of its driest year ever, at least since reportings began about a century again.

And the governor there, Jerry Brown, is urging all citizens to curb their water use by at least 20 percent.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. JERRY BROWN (D), CALIFORNIA: We are in an unprecedented, very serious situation and people should pause and reflect on how dependent we are on the rain, on nature and one another. And I'm calling for a collaborative effort to restrain our water use.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Chad Myers joining me now. Driest ever.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: L.A. had three inches of rain this year, 2013, not 2014, the whole water season.

It's called La Nada.

BALDWIN: Nothing.

MYERS: It's kind of an interesting term, yes, because it isn't El Nino and it isn't La Nina. It's in the middle.

And that's when California gets Nada, literally nada. Some spots in Northern California are 10 percent of where they should be. Folsom reservoir supplies Sacramento its water, at least a lot of it. It is at 18 percent full. And it's raining season and it's not raining. We are not getting anything here.

BALDWIN: Wow.

MYERS: Back in January of 2013, the state was in great shape. It was rainy and it was good.

January and February, the rain stopped. The snow stopped and now we are in this severe to extreme drought across almost half of the state. That's what a lot of it looks like. And 90 percent, 90 percent of the state right now in severe drought, 63 percent extreme, which is one step up from there.

Burbank, California, picked up in 2003 three inches of rain, UCLA four. Now we will move you up to the driest year ever on record since they have been out there. They need a lot more than this. There should have been 20 inches of rain. Now we will go up to Oakland. Oakland, you should have had about 24. You had four.

Calistoga, 41, you had six. Big Sur, 44, you had seven. Remember the big fires of Big Sur just not that long ago? -- 18 percent, 24 percent, 15 percent of normal. The rain, it just is not happening. The snow is not happening. And the state is under significant drought and even red flag warnings. The fire yesterday, we just showed you some pictures of them, they couldn't get the fire out. It wasn't even windy. Everything was so dry. It just wanted to burn.

BALDWIN: Feeling for the folks there in Southern California specifically with those fires and the drought.

Chad Myers, thank you.

MYERS: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, this latest hack at Target has affected millions of people. You know that. But here's what you may not have known. There is now a possible link to Russian hackers. That group may be part of a much bigger cyber-attack. Who else, what else could be hit? We will talk about that next.

Also, in case you haven't heard, this woman celebrating a bit of milestone. She's turning the big 5-0 today. We will tell you what turning 50 means for the first lady and for a colleague of mine. Don't miss this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Just about the bottom of the hour. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

And the U.S. government is today warning retailers all across the country be on high alert, because it turns out those hackers who used that malicious software to steal information from millions of Target customers may be using that very same software at other stores across the country.

And it gets worse, because there are reports now that these hackers could be tied to the Russian mob.

Here's CNN's chief business correspondent, Christine Romans -- Christine.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Brooke, a lot of what investigators know about the hack attacks is under wraps right now, as cyber-forensic teams sift through these clues.

But what we do know is that Homeland Security is worried this is not an isolated event.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS (voice-over): The U.S. government now warning retailers across the country to be on high alert, that massive attack on Target over the holidays, may have compromised the personal information of up to 110 million customers. It could be just the beginning.

In a brand new bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security now revealing that target may not have been alone. That the malicious software has potentially infected a large number of retail operations. And for the first time, they are detailing just how those hackers pulled off one of the biggest data heists ever.

ROBERT SICILIANO, MCAFEE ONLINE SECURITY EXPERT: Now, with this new information that many other retailers could have potentially been breached, that number could potentially double in the next couple of weeks.

ROMANS: Here's how they did it.