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CNN Saturday Morning News
Mayoral Runoff Election Held in New Orleans Today; Assassination Attempt against Gaza's Chief Intelligence Officer; A Look into the Government's Tracking of your Personal Transactions
Aired May 20, 2006 - 07:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: Polls have been open for about a half hour now in New Orleans. Voters will decide who will lead the city's comeback following Hurricane Katrina. Here's a live look at one of the polling sites there.
The mayoral runoff race is between current Mayor Ray Nagin and Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu. Now pollsters say it is just too close to call. But you know what, we're going to have full coverage all weekend long so we'll tell you how it shakes out.
Now to the Middle East, the Palestinian intelligence chief is among nine people wounded in a bomb attack in Gaza City. His bodyguard was killed. The blast went off in an elevator at the intelligence headquarters in Gaza City.
And a pivotal day in Iraq. Just a short time ago, Iraq's parliament approved a new national unity government. The U.S. hopes the move will reduce widespread violence in Iraq and eventually lead to a draw down of U.S. troops.
Also in Iraq, Iraqi police say two British soldiers were wounded when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb. Look at this video. It happened in the southern city of Basra.
HARRIS: The polls are open, the race is tight, voting got underway about a half hour ago in the New Orleans mayors' race. Residents are deciding between incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin and Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu. Rob Masson of our affiliate WVUE reports on the mood of voters still coping with Katrina's aftermath.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ROB MASSON, WVUE CORRESPONDENT: Pontchartrain Park has a deep political legacy. The Moreaus and Bartholomews lived here, but for this mayor's race, the campaign trail passed elsewhere.
INEZ GREEN, PONTCHARTRAIN PARK RESIDENT: Very disappointed. This is the first time none of the candidates came around, first time.
MASSON: Inez Green has a lot of issues like trash on the streets and no flood insurance, but its son Nathaniel she cares about most.
INEZ GREEN: Give me help for Nathaniel, not for me. MASSON: Nathaniel has been disabled since a high school sporting accident. He worries about the neighborhood.
NATHANIEL GREEN, PONTCHARTRAIN RESIDENT: Not me myself but they got a lot of elderly people in this community, and they've lost everything they had.
MASSON: The experts say voters shouldn't be too hard on politicians for not canvassing neighborhoods like they once did. The landscape is very different.
SILAS LEE, XAVIER POLITICAL ANALYST: Traditional ways of canvassing neighborhoods had to be suspended.
MASSON: The landscape is different in front of Phyllis Retif's Lakeview home. She's the one with the lawn and garden.
PHYLLIS RETIF, LAKEVIEW RESIDENT: It was the first thing that I did when I was able to come back.
MASSON: But Mrs. Retif has concerns, too, like waiting three months for a city electrical inspection. Neither candidate has convinced her they've got a real plan to make things better.
RETIF: They say things, but it's hard to say whether they can make it happen.
MASSON: The candidates admit there's not a whole lot that separates one from the other, but in spite of that, the people we spoke with said they plan to get out and vote.
LEE: Yes, they have a lot of similarities but there are some differences between the two in terms of style.
MASSON: Despite the lack of philosophical differences in the candidates, the voters we spoke with said they wouldn't miss this election.
RETIF: I'm not extremely active politically, but, you know, I just try to assure that all my family does vote.
INEZ GREEN: All we want is whoever gets to be mayor visit us sometime. Ask us what you could do for us.
MASSON: We'll soon know which candidate gets the job.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HARRIS: So keep it right here for complete coverage of the New Orleans mayor's race. We will have live updates throughout the day and you'll hear from residents and political leaders about the race and what it means for the city's future. That's the big point here. And we'll have final election results as they come in.
NGUYEN: Well, big brother may be watching even more than you think. HARRIS: What are you talking about?
NGUYEN: Listen to this. Next on CNN SATURDAY MORNING, insurance companies, car dealerships, travel agents, and mutual fund companies could all be reporting you to the government. It is a story that you don't want to miss. That's coming up in just five minutes.
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(WEATHER REPORT)
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HARRIS: The Senate Intelligence Committee set to vote next week on the confirmation of General Michael Hayden's nomination to head the CIA. Some Senate Democrats say they still have big questions about his past role in the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Our Veronica De La Cruz of the dot-com desk joins us now with some of your thoughts online.
Veronica, good morning?
VERONICA DE LA CRUZ, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning to you. How are you doing?
HARRIS: Outstanding.
DE LA CRUZ: You got the pink tie going on again. I like it.
HARRIS: I do. Everybody's back. Mr. Marciano's back. It's a great day around here.
DE LA CRUZ: It feels good, doesn't it?
HARRIS: And Reynolds is welcoming a bundle of joy.
DE LA CRUZ: Aniston, so welcome Aniston to the world.
HARRIS: Yes, great to see you to.
DE LA CRUZ: Good to see you. Well speaking of that program we were just talking about, you remember last week that "USA Today" report.
HARRIS: That's right, that's right.
DE LA CRUZ: Pretty controversial. It revealed that the NSA had compiled a database of millions of domestic telephone records. So we wanted to gauge the reaction of our users at CNN.com, find out what some of you had to say, and here it is.
David from Pennsylvania believes such monitoring is fair and just. He says, "if you're not doing anything illegal, what is there to hide"?
But Karen in California disagrees. "I am disgusted that some of the large telephone companies would agree to this conspiracy. I think this behavior is an impeachable offense."
Jack in New Jersey says, "We should ask the families of 9/11 victims what they think. He writes, I would bet that they would say that anything that could prevent another 9/11 would be worth it."
And Nancy in Florida says, "The monitoring of telephone calls is the beginning of the slippery slope that erodes our personal freedom. What happened to the conservative movement, that is less government."
And you can read more of these e-mails online at CNN.com. You can also learn more about that super secret National Security Agency to find out more about its operations at CNN.com/NSA.
HARRIS: All right I have a question for you.
DE LA CRUZ: Yes.
HARRIS: Look. We did a great interview last week with Bill Cosby, and I'm getting deluged. So how do we get to the video, if folks want to see the interview, how do we get to it at CNN.com?
DE LA CRUZ: You're not interested in the NSA, you're interested in Bill Cosby?
HARRIS: Absolutely. Because we can find that too at CNN.com, right?
DE LA CRUZ: You can find it all at CNN.com. But here's how you find it. You can go to CNN.com/video and in the search engine you will type out Cosby, that's what you're searching for?
HARRIS: Right.
DE LA CRUZ: Or you could do it my way because I'm a little bit lazy. You go ahead and you go to the front page, CNN.com, you can click on the tab that says best video or most popular. That opens up the player, and then you just search for Cosby.
HARRIS: Great.
DE LA CRUZ: That is a way to find your interview.
HARRIS: That's the way to find it. OK so you can stop emailing me. That's how you find the interview.
DE LA CRUZ: That's how you find it, CNN.com/video, search for Cosby.
HARRIS: All right, Veronica thank you.
DE LA CRUZ: Good to see you.
HARRIS: Betty?
NGUYEN: Tony you know you just got one email. You were just trying to plug your Cosby interview. That's all that was. We're onto you, buddy.
All right, we're going to move on though. With all eyes on NSA surveillance tactics, here's something else to chew on this morning. Your bank or mutual fund, your insurance company, even sending a money order could trigger a suspicious activity report to the government. This includes cash transactions as little as $5,000. And now the Treasury Department is considering whether to include car dealers, travel and real estate agents and other companies in this new rule.
Here with his eyes on the eyes that are on us is Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of "The Privacy Times." He calls this a dragnet approach to collect personal information. So let's get more on that. Evan exactly how does this work?
EVAN HENDRICKS, EDITOR, "THE PRIVACY TIMES": Well, this is a -- stems from a program out of the 1970s when the bogey man was drug traffickers and money laundering. And so they started by requiring banks to report all suspicious transactions, they're called suspicious transaction reports or SARs, is the acronym for it.
And so they have a huge database in the Treasury Department called FINCEN, which stands for Financial Center. And all of this massive amount of data is reported into this database so they can analyze it and look for the bad guys.
NGUYEN: Right. OK well let's break this down. In the past banks, if you made a transaction, if you pulled out more than $10,000, you're flagged already and that information is sent on. But now it's changed because it involves mutual funds and it includes cash transactions of $5,000 or more, correct?
HENDRICKS: Yes, they've lowered the threshold to $5,000 or any other suspicious activity, which would be a Suspicious Activity Report. And that's going to be quite a judgment call for people that aren't really trained to make those calls.
NGUYEN: Well that's something I want to ask you about, because this Suspicious Activity Report, what's the definition of suspicious activity? Do banks have the same definitions as mutual funds, as these other companies?
HENDRICKS: Well it's generally something that falls out of what they consider to be a normal pattern. The crazy thing about it is if you think of all the transactions we normal consumers do in terms of like settling a mortgage or refinancing --
NGUYEN: Or buying a car or house or anything.
HENDRICKS: Giving gifts to our children, you know, when they come of age. I mean those are all large transactions that move from one account to another. So I'm pretty convinced that this fairly secret database is filled with all of these, you know, useless details about normal transactions of law-abiding citizens. And I think the brilliant point we get to on this is what do they have to show for it?
I mean this system was in place before 9/11, after 9/11. They went to try and track the finances of the al Qaeda members, and the big catch-22 here is that the real evil people like the drug dealers or the terrorists assume they're under surveillance anyway and are basically not going to feed information into the system. It's only our information that goes into the system.
NGUYEN: Yes I think that's a good point because there's a lot of people that make a lot of large transactions. So you've got all of this information out there and you're looking for one or two bad eggs and you're saying that so far what's come of it? What has come of this system? And my question to you, for those who are just finding out about this system, tell us exactly what information is given to the government and what do they do with that information?
HENDRICKS: Well that's a big problem here Betty is so much of it a secret, we don't know exactly what they do except it goes into this huge database called FINCEN and then supposedly they analyze it. Or if they get a lead, they might look at it. But this is going to be a massive database, given you know we have 250 million people in this country doing deposits, and, you know, this is kind of like they're trying to find the needle in the haystack.
With an approach they're taking where you opened with, talking about car dealers, mutual funds, and getting them to pour information into the system. It's like they're dumping more hay on the haystack. And this is again a trend in U.S. government to just get these all- encompassing databases, like with the phone records, as opposed to really having targeted investigations --
NGUYEN: Are you ever red flagged? Do you ever know that your information was sent to the government? Do they ever tell you that?
HENDRICKS: No. There's actually a prohibition against telling you that, so, you know -- so, again, it's the problem when you have collection of data coupled with secrecy. It usually doesn't lead to very good data integrity because they never contact you to see, well, what's this information about. And you don't know, so you don't have a chance to explain. So I think it's really -- you know, it's a system --
NGUYEN: So what can you do about it?
HENDRICKS: I mean, the thing is, again, it's like so many other things, it forces us to act like undercover operatives and we have to make sure if we don't want any information to go into the system, you have to make sure you don't have cash transactions over $5,000. Which is kind of impractical for many of us in certain situations.
NGUYEN: Yes, it is. And there are a lot of people, whether immigrants or low income that don't have bank accounts and they do all of their transactions in cash, so this could cause a big problem. Thanks for kind of laying it out for us, helping us understand the new laws and how they're going to take effect. Evan Hendricks, thank you for your time today.
And all this brings us to our email question this morning. What do you think of mutual fund companies and insurance firms reporting your information to the government. Our email address, weekends@CNN.com. Kind of scary, Tony.
HARRIS: It is. Another one for you. Have you ever gotten a credit card in the mail? Want to talk about scary. So you throw it away. Guess what? Thieves could be using your discarded application to cash in. Details ahead on CNN SATURDAY MORNING.
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HARRIS: So every year the credit card industry mails five billion preapproved credit applications to consumers, most of us just simply throw them away, and that actually can be a problem because a skilled identity thief can use those applications to cash in. Here's a preview of a report you'll see tonight on "CNN PRESENTS." CNN Drew Griffin reports.
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DREW GRIFFIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: David George was a modern day alchemist. He could turn junk mail into cold cash. Postal inspector Matthew Borden and Harris County investigator Mike Kelly finally stopped him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably the most prolific criminal I've ever arrested.
GRIFFIN: When they searched David George's suburban home, bundles of stolen mail were everywhere, in the drawers, the closets and attic.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it had to do with identity theft and credit card fraud. We found it at that house.
GRIFFIN: There were credit card applications in the bathroom and 115 credit cards in every name but David George. Among them, Jessica Durow, 22 years old, a student with a poor credit record.
JESSICA DUROW, STUDENT: I wanted a credit card, but I was told that I was under a restriction at the time. That I could not apply for any or get any until I had some hospital debts cleared up.
GRIFFIN: But if Jessica couldn't get a card in her name, David George would do it for her. It took a combination of junk mail, a stolen identity, and a phony address. Days later he had a credit card. In Jessica's name.
DUROW: Gold, like money.
GRIFFIN: Gold like money for Bank of America. It would charge as much as 64.58 percent in finance charges and interest.
DUROW: That's just ridiculously high. They figured they got a sucker. They should make a ton of money off of that.
GRIFFIN: But, in fact, it was the other way around.
What would you like to do? GRIFFIN: David George used the credit card for cash advances. Essentially, loans. Totaling $2,100.
Don't forget to take your cash.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HARRIS: Don't forget to take your cash. You can see more of Drew's report on identity theft tonight and Sunday night on "CNN PRESENTS." It's a special report called "How to Rob a Bank". Tune in for that at 8:00 p.m. eastern.
NGUYEN: That is going to wake you up. Invest in a shredder, folks. That's probably the best thing to do to shred all of those.
All right. "The Watercooler" always full of surprises like the chilling back story on this airplane builder, his first brush with aviation nearly 20 years ago are again prominent infamy. That story and more straight ahead.
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HARRIS: Everyone knows that the most interesting news happens ...
NGUYEN: Right here.
HARRIS: ... and is shared around "The Watercooler." For example if you drink a can of beer every day for oh, X number of years, guess what?
NGUYEN: What?
HARRIS: Your house would look like this. Do we have it?
NGUYEN: Show it.
HARRIS: This is an apartment in Ogden, Utah.
NGUYEN: Oh, my goodness. Are those beer cans?
HARRIS: Yes. Piled several feet deep in Coor's Light cans and other trash. The 70,000 silver bullets were worth about 800 bucks at a recycler's.
NGUYEN: But that's the key, you have to recycle it.
HARRIS: You got to recycle it. So it should go a long way, the money at least of getting that barroom smell out of the apartment.
NGUYEN: Oh, nasty! So you think that's bizarre, this is Ben Nevis in Scotland. You see the peak there, right, the highest peak in the UK. The altitude must cause strange behavior because someone hauled a piano, yes, check that out, a piano up there and buried it under a large pile of rocks. Now it's probably been there for about 20 years. The piano has since been dismantled and removed. HARRIS: All right, stay with me here Betty. This is an oddity we found on MiddleEastonline.com. According to the site, the do it yourselfer is convicted hijacker Hussein Hariri who spent 17 years in a Swiss prison for a 1987 hijacking in which a passenger was killed.
NGUYEN: OK.
HARRIS: So since returning to his native Lebanon in 2004, Hariri has been building his own airplane and now he's awaiting permission to take it on a bit of a test flight. So there you go. Oddities.
NGUYEN: Galore.
HARRIS: Straight from "The Watercooler."
NGUYEN: Where's our little music. Next hour of CNN SATURDAY MORNING continues in just a moment.
HARRIS: But first Jerry Willis with your "Tip of the Day."
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GERRI WILLIS, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Before you hit the road with your pet this summer, make sure your four-legged friend is travel ready. Get a clean bill of health from your vet and pack all vaccination records.
And don't forget to bring proper ID. Your pet should wear a name tag that includes its name, your name, as well as an address and phone number.
And remember, not all rooms are created equal. PetVacations.com gives you the inside scoop on pet-friendly hotels. Just type in your destination and fetch the results. You can also check with the convention and visitors bureau in each state.
I'm Gerri Willis, and that's your "Tip of the Day." For more, watch "OPEN HOUSE" today, 9:30 Eastern on CNN.
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