by combining their purchasing power, she says group members get insurance for 40% less than it would cost them individually. and for all the headaches -- >> because they don't work that 9:00 to 5:00, they can be home when their kids come home from school, they can still do the things they love, the projects that many of us say, well, we'll do that when we retire. >> reporter: and she suspects many freelancers despite some economic jitters are feeling more free because they left the everyday office behind. tom foreman, cnn, kansas city. hello, everyone, i'm don lemon in the cnn newsroom. we are going to begin tonight with breaking news at the top of the here on cnn. the person who says he leaked top secret information about a government surveillance program has emerged from the shadows and identified himself. he is edward snowden and he says he was privy to classified details of the so-called prism program when he worked for the

cia. national security officials do confirm prism exists and that it secretly tracks telephone and computer information for anti-terrorism work. snow den says he walked away from six figure defense contracting job in hawaii, is hiding in hong kong and intends to seek permanent asylum abroad. peter king wants him prosecuted and back in the united states. king calls the leak of top secret information a matter of extraordinary consequence to american intelligence. we're getting this information in from the white house. the white house will not respond. we're told by our folks at the white house that the white house deputy press secretary josh earnest told reporters on the tarmac at joint andrews air base there would be no comment tonight from the white house on the identification of the nsa leaker. and president barack obama on arrival on the south lawn via marine one did not answer

questions shouted by reporters about the nsa whistleblower. we are getting some new information in, though. this is from the director of national intelligence in washington. new information just in to cnn. it says, "we have seen the latest report from "the guard n guardian" that identifies an individual claiming to have disclosed information about highly classified intelligence programs in recent days. because the matter has been referred to the department of justice, we refer you to the department of justice for comment on any further specifics of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by a person with authorized access. "the intelligence community is currently reviewing the damage that has been done by these recent disclosures. any person who has a security clearance knows he or she has an obligatinlbligation to protect d information and abide by the w law". that is sean turner of national

intelligence. again, that is official word from the government tonight. again, the white house is not responding tonight. not making any comment, but the director of national intelligence through a spokesperson, they are commenting tonight. you're about to see the entire on camera interview that edward snowden gave "the guardian" newspaper. and remember, he is holed up in a hotel in hong kong and he says he can never return to the united states after what he did. here's edward snowden explaining why he gave away american secrets. listen. >> my name is ed snowden, i'm 29 years old. i work as an information analyst for nsa in hawaii. >> what are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community? >> i've been a systems engineer, systems administrator. senior adviser for the central intelligence agency. solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information

systems officer. >> one of the things people are going to be most interested in in trying to understand what, who you are and what you're thinking, is there came some point in time when you rocrosse this line of thinking about being a whistleblower, to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. walk people through that decision-making process. >> when you're in positions of privileged access, like a systesystem s add administrator, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee. because of that, you see things that may be disturbing, but over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances. when you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. and when you talk to people about them in a place like this

where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them for seriously and, you know, move on from them. but over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it. and the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored. the more you're told it's not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public. not by somebody who is simply hired by the government. >> talk a little bit about how the american surveillance state actually functions. does it target the actions of americans? >> nsa and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can. by any means possible. it believes on the grounds of sort of a self-certification that they serve a national interest. originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically.

and to do that, they, the nsa specifically targets the communications of everyone. it ingests them by default. it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. so while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. any analysts at any time can target anyone. any selector anywhere. where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the censor networks and the authorities that analyst is em poupowered with. not all analysts have the ability to target everything. i sitting at my desk had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you, your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if i had a personal

e-mail. >> one of the extraordinary parts about this episode is usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can which they hope often is forever. you, on the other hand, have this attitude to be the opposite which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. why did you choose to do that? >> i think the public is owed the explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. when you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy, and if you do that in secret consistently, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, it will kind of give its officials a mandate to go, hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side. but they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. that falls to individual

citizens, but they're typically maligned. it becomes a thing of these people against the country, they're against the government, but i'm not. i'm no different from anybody else. i don't have special skills. i'm just another guy who sits there day-to-day in the office, watches what's happening and goes, this is something that's not our place to decide. the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong. and i'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say i didn't change these,s i didn't modify the story. this is the truth. this is what's happening. you should decide whether we need to be doing this. >> have you given thought to what it is that the u.s. government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you? >> yeah, i could be rendered by the cia, i could have people come after me or any of their

third-party partners. you know, they work closely with a number of other nations. or, you know, they could pay off the tri heads. any of their agents are assets. we have a cia station just up the road in the consulate here in hong kong. i'm sure they're going to be very busy for the next week. and that's a fear i'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. >> you can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because there are such powerful ad adversaries. no one can meaningful oppose them. if they want to get you, they'll get you in time. but at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you, and if living unfreely, but comfortably, is something you're willing to accept, and i think many of us are, it's the human nature. you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect

your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interests and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. but if you realize that that's the world that you helped create, and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk. and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied. >> why should people care about surveillance? >> because even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded and the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion by somebody even by a wrong call and they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made. every friend you've ever

discussed something with. and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. >> we are currently sitting in a room in hong kong which is where we are because you traveled here. talk a little bit about why it is that you came here and specifically there are going to be people who will speculate that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the united states which is china, in that way what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the united states with which you intend to seek asylum. can you talk a little bit about that. >> sure. there are a couple assertion in o those arguments that are sortem

the choice of hong kong. the first is china is an enemy of the united states, it is not. there are conflicts between united states government and the chinese prc government, but the peoples inherently, you know, we don't care. we trade with each other freely. you know, we're not at war. we're not in armed conflict. we're not trying to be. we're the largest trading partners out there for each other. additionally, hong kong has a strong tradition of free speech. people think, oh, china, great firewall. mainland china does have significant restrictions on free speech, but the hong kong, the people of hong kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known. the internet is not filtered here. more so than any other western government. and i believe that the hong kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading western governments. >> if your motive had been to harm the united states and help

its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain, were there things you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing? >> absolutely. i mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that i had could, you know, suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to russia. you know, they always have an open door, as we do. i had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the nsa, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world. the location of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth. if i had just wanted to harm the u.s., you know, that -- you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon, but that's not my intention. i think for anyone making that argument they need to think if they were in my position, you know, you live a privileged life. you're living in hawaii in paradise and making a ton of

money. what would it take to make you leave everything behind? the greatest fear that i have regarding the outcome for america, of these disclosures, is that nothing will change. people will see in the media all these disclosures. they'll know the lengths the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over american society and global society. but they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things. to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. and the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies

will change. because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. even our agreements with other sovereign governments. we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. and because of that, a new leader will be elected. they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority. we need more power. and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it and it will be turnkey tyranny. >> now the fallout. for you. americans. our government. politic politically. and for that young man. for people who know, bob bear, a former cia operative will join us, fuentes, and daniel

ellsberg, a whistleblower of the pentagon papers. right after the break. it starts with little things. tiny changes in the brain. little things anyone can do. it steals your memories. your independence. ensures support, a breakthrough. and sooner than you'd like. sooner than you'd think. you die from alzheimer's disease. we cure alzheimer's disease. every little click, call or donation adds up to something big.

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s mu now on . more now on the breaking news. edward snowden tracked americans' phone call records inside the country and e-mails of nonamericans living overseas. the 29-year-old computer technician says he talked with the "washington post" and britain's "the guardian" newspapers. he has worked for the cia and defense contractors. and right now he is holed up in a hong kong hotel preparing for the expected fallout from his disclosures. we have a response from -- with the we've seen the latest report from "the guardian" that identifies an individual claiming to have disclosed information about highly classified intelligence programs in recent days. the intelligence community is currently reviewing the damage that has been done by these recent disclosures. any person who has security clearance knows they must

protect classified information and abide by the law. i want to bring in bob baer, from orange county, california, and cnn analyst, former fbi assistant director dan fuentes in vancouver. and on the phone, jeffrey toobin. how did someone like this have access to classified information? >> well, because he's a technician, don, he has to be one of the people that makes sure that the connections work, that one computer can talk to the other computer, and information can be passed. you know, there's been so much criticism about stove piping. in order to prevent stove piping you have to have the machines talk to each other across agency lines and company lines. in this case, corporations feeding information to the united states. so that takes a small army of technicians, like him, to make sure that those systems continue to operate and move the data. >> so was the fbi aware that he had access to this classified information? i mean, doesn't the fbi keep track of all people who have access to our classified

information? >> no, there's 850,000-plus people in this country with top secret security clearance, according to the "washington post." the fbi is not in the position to track every one of those people. along with the other 750,000 on the terrorist list. so the assumption the fbi can track all these people is just not true. >> okay. so now to bob. some people will view snowden as a hero. others as a traitor. how would you describe him? >> the problem, don, is that he released sources' methods. it's one thing to expose a crime that's not being investigated, that congress won't look at and blowing the whistle. when you've exhausted all avenues, it's a different matter. in this case, he revealed sources and methods, and he's clearly crossed the line and there's no doubt in my mind that the department of justice will come after him in a very serious

way. they cannot not do it. >> so if he thought what the government was doing was wrong, then what alternatives did he have, bob? you're saying he should have done it a different way. but what real alternatives did he have? >> well, you know, frankly the way i like ook at it, if he can identify the abuse of this system, he would be on much stronger ground. if they were actually going after somebody that wasn't involved in terrorism or counterintelligence, there was abuse of power, he then has to go to congress. there's inspector generals he could go to. and so forth. apparently this didn't happen. i can't say for certain. and i also have a big problem with his going to china. china is not a friendly country. it's the absolute worst place he could go and do this interview. if he'd gone to iceland, if he'd done it on capitol hill, we'd be more sympathetic. i think he's not -- doesn't quite have it all together. >> that's one legal aspect of

this, jeffrey toobin. there are many more. he's in big legal trouble, isn't he? jeffrey? >> yeah, don. i'm sorry. it's hard to hear. >> he is in big legal trouble, isn't he? >> he is in a world of legal trouble. and he should be. anyone who has access to classified information, whether a government employee or a government contractor, like snowden is, signs forms and is told in no uncertain terms that it is a very serious crime to disclose classified information. he has done that on an enormous scale and then he's run off to hong kong. you know, the idea that he's some sort of hero and wants to be engaged in civil disobedience, why didn't he hang around and face the music? now he's in essentially part of the people's republic of china where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get him back. i find his behavior appalling.

>> is there -- you said difficult, if not impossible. he seems to think there are mechanisms the government can use and will use to get him back, however, jeffrey. >> well, frankly, don, i am just researching this now. apparently there is an extradition treaty between hong kong and the united states. remember, hong kong is a quasi independent but mostly a subordinate province of the people's republic of china. we are now engaged in an enormous battle over access to information with the people's republic of china. so in theory, i think, it is possible that he could be extradited and returned to the united states to face trial. in practice, i think it's going to be enormously difficult, and he seems to have picked one of the few places in the world where he is likely to get away with it.

>> tom, what will the government do next? how will the government try to get him back here? because they're going to try to do it. >> i think first of all, don, they're going to bring the charges which will be the basis for even requesting extradition in the first place. secondly, once they've charged him with a serious felony, the department of justice can request department of state to revoke his passport and that will push the chinese to decide whether to actually grant him asylum or not because he will be in their country illegally without a u.s. passport. and i've done that procedure several times when i was in the fbi having someone's passport revoked, then there are immigration authorities under international law can deport him to the country that he entered from or his country of citizenship which would be the united states. so that will be a decision the chinese have to make, and, yes, the accusations have been made of the tremendous amount of hacking and other activity of chinese intelligence and military agencies, but are they going to want to publicly acknowledge having done that or supporting that by letting him

stay? so they've got an interesting to make in china political and otherwise. >> tom fuentes, bob baer, jeffrey toobin. coming up, i'm going to talk to daniel ellsberg, his role in the pentagon papers leak. plus more developments in the deadly mass shooting in california. the details right after this. like a milk-bone biscuit. ♪ say it with milk-bone.

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back to our breaking news in a moment. first other news. prayers across south africa today for former president nelson mandela. mandela is in the hospital with pneumonia. the 94-year-old was rushed there early yesterday. this is the fourth time he has been hospitalized since

december. very little information has been released since yesterday when he learned, when we learned he was in serious but stable condition. the death toll from friday's mass shooting in california has risen to five. the family of marcela franco says the 26-year-old has succumbed to her injuries. she was with her father in an suv on the campus of santa monica college when they were shot. her father, carlos franco, died friday. the gunman has been identified as john zawahri who was shot and killed by police an coon come u. he carjacked a woman and fired at a public bus. a judge in philadelphia denied bail to the crane operator charged in that deadly building collapse there. benschop is charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter. he was operating the heavy machinery used to tear down the building that fell on a salvation army thrift store. six people were killed and 13

injured. law enforcement source says benschop had marijuana and pain meds in his blood after wednesday's collapse. his lawyer says this was an accident and his client is being made a scapegoat. so who is edward snowden? what inspired him to leak classified top secret information? we'll have more on that next. even in stupid loud places. to prove it, we set up our call center right here... [ chirp ] all good? [ chirp ] getty up. seriously, this is really happening! [ cellphone rings ] hello? it's a giant helicopter ma'am. [ male announcer ] get it done [ chirp ] with the ultra-rugged kyocera torque, only from sprint direct connect. buy one get four free for your business. but with advair, i'm breathing better. so now i can help make this a great block party. ♪ [ male announcer ] advair is clinically proven

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more now on our breaking news. edward snowden leaked details of a government program tracking americans' phone call records inside the country and e-mails of nonamericans living overseas. the 29-year-old computer technician talked with the "washington post" and britain's "the guardian newspapers." he's worked for the cia and defense contractors. he says he leaked classified information as an act of civil disobedien disobedience. right now he is holed up in a hong kong hotel preparing for the expected fallout from his disclosures. here's edward snowden now in his own words. >> the nsa specifically targets the communications of everyone.

it ingests them by default. it collects them in its system and filters them and analyzes them and measures them and stores them for periods of time, because that's the most valuable way to achieve these ends. so while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. any analyst at any time can target anyone. any selector anywhere. where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. not all analysts have the ability to target everything. but i sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities it require tap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if i had a personal e-mail. >> if true, it's very scary. i want to bring in now lisa,

she's in washington. lisa, i mean, what is this? what stands out to you about edward snowden? >> right, we spent the last few hours getting to know this man who's actually going to be monumentally, potentially, important in this debate. and i think what stands out, don, is how normal he seems. you know, this is a man who's 29 years old, doesn't have a high school diploma according to "the guardi guardian." he worked his way up, to showing he could be a computer expert, to getting the top access to our intelligence in the country. what we don't know is how many other people had that kind of access. he seems like a rather normal man. let me show you a couple other facts about edward snowden we've been learning from this "guardian" article. 29 years old, as we said. right now he's in hong kong. now, how much was he making when he was working as a private contractor? his current job, $200,000. that's as a contractor for hamilton working with the nsa. he left the u.s. three weeks ago, don, left hawaii, left his girlfriend who he lives with,

his family, his whole life there, and moved to hong kong as you've been reporting. don, there's so much to say, of course, about how this otherwise normal seeming guy is affecting our debate over security, justice, freedom, liberty. but i want to point something else out. this is what i've been thinking about, don. i think the story is also about how the information age has changed. i know you're going to be talking to daniel ellsberg coming up about the pentagon papers. think of another famous leaker, the famous deep throat from watergate. those two men were 40 in ellsberg's case. older than this 30-year-old, 2-year-old. also those two men had privy. they were among few, a small group of people who could access documents. what we're seeing now, instead, don, with these huge leaks is 20-somethings who are generally computer savvy who have not necessarily the same kind of clearance that top-level officials back in the nixon era would have had but instead have

clearance because of their computer skills. it's a complete change in the dynamic of information, and it's something that obviously the intelligence agencies are having a problem with. don? >> lisa, thank you very much. i'm glad you mentioned him because, put him up on the screen. there he is. recognize this guy? this is daniel ellsberg once called the most dangerous man in america for his role in the 1971 pentagon papers leak. you better believe he's got a lot to say about the nsa leaker, edward snowden. you're going to hear it next. [ male announcer ] my client gloria

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leaking details of a top secret american program to british and american newspapers may be brazen, but what edward snowden did wasn't the first time an american has leaked secret government data. 1971 an american military analyst named daniel ellsberg gave a "new york times" reporter

a copy of a department of defense study on u.s./vietnam relations. a series of documents that later became known as the pentagon papers. he became the first person prosecuted under the 1917 espionage act for releasing classified information to the public. the case was later thrown out after the judge learned that the government had engaged in the illegal wiretapping of ellsber. daniel ellsberg joins me live from california. thank you for joining us. >> thank you for the opportunity. i'm very impressed by what i've heard in the last couple hours including snowden's own video here. i think he's done an enormous service, incalculable service. can't be overestimated to this democracy. it gives us a chance, i think, from drawing back from the total surveillance state that we could say we're in process of becoming, i'm afraid we have become. that's what he's revealed. i didn't expect there was any

chance of reversing that course, what was called earlier, total surveillance. i think if the public now is given authentic documents or official documents that congress simply can't plausibly deny or plausibly claim ignorance of, maybe we will see hearings with genuine oversight. >> you've been waiting, first of all, you said you like what he has done. but he has broken the law. >> yes, you know, in this case, i would say he has clearly broken, i could even give you 18 usc 798. that is a clear-cut law which, by the way, i support on the whole. most of such communications intelligence deserves secrecy. i was cleared for that. i put none of that out. that's higher than top secret. i had the clearance for that and i didn't put any out because this system that has just been

disclosed did not exist then and could not exist. could not have existed. we just didn't have the physical digital capability for it. if i had known that the nsa, the national security agency, as i say, to which i had access, if i had known that they were spying on every american multiple times, different phone lines, bank data, credit cards, gps, everything else, if i had known that, i would have done just what he's done. i would have broken that law of civil disobedience. i must say, it would raise -- he undoubtedly, they will make every effort to prosecute him. i think probably sooner or later they will succeed if worst doesn't happen to him. and it will be a very significant case to address the question, can it really be criminal to reveal secrets of unconstitutional activity? i have no doubt that this violates the fourth amendment of the constitution and probably other parts of the bill of rights and should have been

exposed. can it really be a crime to expose crime? that's never been judged by any court. including the supreme court. i think this is a good time to look at it. >> now back to the original question -- >> if he'd given those documents to me right now, if i had been made aware of what this government, an administration i supported, by the way, in both elections. if i'd been aware, i certainly would have put them out even though i would expect to go to jail for the rest of my life, as i did 40 years ago. i don't have that much left in my life, but he does. >> yeah. back to my original question that i was going to ask you before i changed course. you said you've waited decades for this moment? >> decades in a sense that of seeing somebody who really was prepared to risk his life for his country as a civilian. to show the kind of courage that we expect of people on the battlefield.

there have been very good leaks, but there haven't been leaks of enormous scale until bradley manning, by the way, who i also support. but he didn't have the kind of access that either i had or snowden has had. it wasn't as valuable to the public to learn this. he had only field-level information. but even then i think that snowden here now has opened the possibility for democratic debate on the question of whether we really want the executive branch to know every detail of the private life of every member of congress, every member of the so-called oversight committees which i would say have been shown to be totally co-opted here. every member of these so-called foreign intelligence surveillance court which is shown to be what one former analyst has called a kangaroo court. >> mr. ellsberg, let me jump in here. with all due respect. you're going on the assumption

that everything mr. snowden is saying is accurate. that may not be the case. >> i think it's been authenticated by mr. clapper, already, the director of central intelligence. has confirmed there is a prism project which was revealed actually -- >> i understand that. he had the capability and the capacity to, you know, get records and phone calls and to intercept e-mails for people as high as the president of the united states. >> yeah. let me tell you what i do assume. far beyond what has been revealed so far, if there was a true investigation, and that would take a special committee, a select committee of congress in which very few members of the oversight committee currently ought to be on it, really, with the record that they've shown. except for ron wyden and mark udall. if there was a committee that looked into this, like the church community looks into it back after watergate. i believe what they would find

is the cia, i should say the nsa, fbi, essentially the nsa, collects everything and is not defined only by metadata, what they call metadata. i'm sure, i feel personally subjectively sure subject to this investigation that they listen, that they have collected all the content of this, that they are not neglecting names inside the message, not just a to and from part. in short, i think they have everything, and that is the recipe for a potential tyranny in this country. >> daniel ellsberg. thank you, sir. appreciate you joining us on cnn. >> thank you. coming up here on cnn, are you ready for this guy? i'm not sure you are. he's already wreaking havoc on the cnn staff here. his name is george strombopolous. you may be hearing about him,

but i've had my brush with him already. ♪ ♪ chances are, you're not made of money, so don't overpay for boat insurance. geico, see how much you could save.

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at university of phoenix we kis where it can take you.cation (now arriving: city hospital) which is why we're proud to help connect our students with leading employers across the nation. (next stop: financial center) let's get to work. big night for c tonight, 9:00 p.m. eastern, the season finale for boyne boyne, and then we have a new. i sat down with him and he told me why americans really don't know who he is and why you will,

very soon. >> it's funny. i know you, i'm sure you're toured of people saying americans don't know you. you like it? >> it's sort of liberating. >> i like that idea. >> who is strombo. >> i don't know how to answer it, to be honest. i genuinely fell into this game. i wanted to be an architect, a graphic designer, but i failed all the classes, got kicked out of the school, that kind of stuff happened that i couldn't pursue my dream. i sometimes ended up in radio. the last 20 years, i went to work every day, and i'm really interested in a lot of things. i'm a curious person. i like people. so i started interviewing people. i just got further into them, and then somehow i ended up here. >> i was on your show. it was the best and most interesting interview that anyone had ever done on me. >> the audience loved you in

canada. think like some lemon. >> thank you. you scared the bejesus out of me. you were putting up pictures i had never seen. the picture thing is fun. i want to elicit an emotion, but not for a gratuitous way. you have some celebrity, nothing alien yates you more than your celebrity. we're in an era where so many are famous, it's just not enough for me. i want you to connect with them. that's why. >> why do you pick the guests you pick? >> i think that people hearing your story, it will have an impact on their life in a better way. that's what it is. i want to talk to somebody who the conversation can affect somebody at home. that's all we do, man, is serve the people at home. >> why should somebody tune into you? >> i'm a different connection to the guests. the interview is not about me on any level. i'm going to be just a connector to the audience. i'm just an emotional

archaeologist. that's what i do. all right. there he is. come back to me on camera. make sure you watch him. look at me. watch george, one of the best interviewers ever. i'm serious. mom, dad told me that cheerios is good for your heart,

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they were sight-seeing when the driver asked if they wanted to see the children. >> they were just like starving, picking through garbage for a few cents a day. >> so the smiths decided to help one person. >> i remember seeing this little girl with the red hat.

i don't know if it was the red hat or if it was her eyes, but just looked kind of hopeless. >> he had a motor guy that came up and said, you know, this foreigner wants to talk to you, they want to help you, help you go to school. >> they took her home to talk to her mother and met 12-year-old saline. >> we're like, we've got to help the sister, too. >> the couple agreed to pay the girl's mother what the children earned at the dump, about $10 a month each. >> the deal was that they could never go back to the dump again. we would put them in school, we would pay for everything. >> reporter: over the years, the girls became close to the smiths. >> we feel like second family. i get emotion, because i don't have like a feeling with my family that much. >> reporter: now the two young women are attending college in claw. >> education to me is like a second life. .

i'm don lemming "bore deign now" strombo at 10:00. don lemon, out. peru is a country that's historically driven men mad, mad for gold, for cocoa, for its magical ancient history. now, there's something else drawing outsiders to its hidden mountain valleys. we love the stuff. we obsess about it, gorge on it and fetish-ize it. i'm talking about chocolate, once a common treat, it's now becoming as nuanced as fine wine making the pursuit of the raw good stuff all the more difficult. i'm joining that hunt in remotist peru, but not before i've re-immersed myself in the booming lima food scene.