>> schieffer: welcome back to "face the nation," page two. joining us now the former deputy director of the cia michael morell. he also served on that advisory panel that made the recommendations last month about what changes would be needed at the national security agency. mr. morell, thank you for joining us. >> good to be here. >> schieffer: i want to ask you first, chairman rogers made some interesting disclosures this morning suggesting that there is some reason to believe the russians may have been helping edward snowden and also expressing real concern about safety for the coming olympics. just give me your reaction to that. >> i share the chairman's concern about what the russian intelligence services may be doing with mr. snowden. i don't have any particular

evidence, but one of the things that i point to when i talk about this is that the disclosures that have been coming recently are very sophisticated in their content and sophisticated in their timing. almost too sophisticated for mr. snowden to be deciding on his own. seems to me he might be getting some help. >> schieffer: and what about the coming olympics, are you concerned about the lack of cooperation that the russians seem to be giving us? >> long history of cooperation between nations who are hosting an olympics and the united states government and united states intelligence community in particular. and we did not get that cooperation with the russians. so i share the chairman's concern about the safety of the olympics. >> schieffer: why do you think that is? just the russians being the russians or is there something else here? >> i think fundamentally they don't want to admit this they don't have complete control here

that they might need some help. >> let's talk about the president's speech, you were on the panel that made recommendations, how many did you make -- >> 46. >> schieffer: 46 recommendations on things that could be done. you heard the president's speech, what do you think the challenge is now for him? >> i think the president said two very important things. one was that the threats to this nation are significant, that intelligence has never been more important in dealing with those threats. that the men and women of the nsa are patriots. that 215 program was legal and fully authorized and there wasn't any abuse. and the program needs to continue for the protection of the nation. that's one thing he said. the other thing he said was that there is a potential risk here to privacy and civil liberties that we need to take seriously. american history has plenty of examples of why we need to take it seriously. and i think the changes that he

announced were significant. some of them will take some time to be implemented but some of them are in place today as we speak right here and one is the requirement to get a court order to query the 215 database. i think the real challenge going forward, bob, is that there are many ways to square this circle. there are many ways to accomplish both the national security piece of this and privacy and civil liberties piece. some of those ways will put one of those two more at risk than the other. i think the challenge here is for the administration and the congress to find the best approach that minimizes the impact on national security as we work to improve privacy and civil liberties. >> schieffer: do you -- chairman rogers has said, said again this morning, there have been no abuses. senator udall says there has. do you know of any abuses? >> there has been a handful of

cases, literally a handful where nsa employees have looked in to the database inappropriately. looked at boy friends or girlfriends and everyone of those cases they were dealt with appropriately and i believe actually some of them may have been fired. but that's the limited abuse that has taken place. there has been no systematic abuse, there has been no political abuses, has been minor, very minor. >> schieffer: why did your panel recommend that this great trove of telephone numbers, this giant phone book that the nsa has, why did you recommend that be put in private hands? i ask that in light of the recent messes of target and also with neiman-marcus where all of this information has been hacked in to. why isn't the government better

capable of protecting this stuff than private? >> government in the nsa case showed it was not capable of protecting classified information. and i happen to know some industries in the private sector who do a phenomenal job of protecting their data, financial institutions, for example. i think the government actually has some things it can learn from the private sector about how to protect it. >> schieffer: what do you think is the most immediate thing that needs to be done right here? what's the first thing the president needs to do? >> i think he's done it. which is to require a warrant for nsa to -- >> schieffer: how do you keep that slowing down the process? there might be some time you come upon information you need to act on it right now. >> there is an emergency provision so that if you need to act on it immediately you can bypass the court and go query the data. have a court look at it later.

there is that emergency provision. now i know that german feinstein and chairman rogers of the intelligence committees have pointed out that have taken nine days to get things done. that's too long. the court has to move faster that's one of the things that has to be looked at is how do we make sure the court can move as fast is it can move. >> schieffer: i want to get you on record for one thing there seems to be some disagreement. some say that if the government had the capabilities before 9/11 it has now it could have prevented 9/11. do you think that's true? >> yes, i do. quite frankly i've been criticized a little bit for saying that. here is what i meant, bob, when i said that. if the program were in place before 9/11 i believe it would have prevented 9/11. by the program i mean two things. i mean nsa's ability to query the database which would have allowed nsa to find one of the 9/11 hijackers in california and

the part of the program where nsa shares such information with the fbi. if both of those pieces had been in place 9/11 would have been prevented by this program. >> schieffer: how badly do you think our national security has been harmed by the disclosures by edward snowden? >> i believe this is the worst disclosures in the history of the u.s. intelligence community, i agree with chairman rogers that it will cost billions and billions of dollars to repair the damage. >> schieffer: and are they repairing the damage? are there steps going on now? are they doing things in different ways and i guess the other part of that question is, are the other guys doing things in different way because of these disclosures? >> even before i left government in august, we were watching the adversaries change their approach as a result of the disclosures. so they moved very quickly to adjust to the collection that we

were doing against them. and i don't know it, but i would imagine my former colleagues are working aggressively to adjust as well. >> schieffer: how has this affected the morale of people who do this kind of work? >> i think it has affected the morale in a negative way, particularly nsa. i thought one of the most effective things the president did in the speech was to compliment the work of the men and women at nsa. i think it was very important for country to hear that i think it was very important for employees of nsa to hear that from their commander in chief. >> schieffer: mr. morell, thank you for being with us this morning and we're going to see a lot more of you starting tomorrow, mike morell will be joining cbs news as a contribute or to all our broadcasts. welcome aboard and we'll be back. >> thank you, bob.

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tylenol®. >> schieffer: back now for some analysis of all of what we've been talking about this morning, david sanger is the national security correspondent for the "new york times." christie parsons we welcome her for her first appearance on "face the nation," she covers the white house for the "los angeles times." and all the other tribune newspapers. and columnist for the "washington post." david, let me start with you. the president's speech. >> i thought it was interesting for what it said and what it didn't say. certainly addressed the most critical political issue which was the one of whether or not the collection of phone numbers that you've been discussing should be moved from government hands to private hands. he said, yes on that. whether or not they should always be a warrant or court order to query it. he said, yes on that. he said no on something that the

fbi had pushed back on hard was recommendation from that group that mr. morell was on that said that if there's ever a national security issue, there are thousands issued, they should also have a judge pass on those. president rejected that one. what he didn't talk about, bob, were the issues that were of most concern in some ways to american companies and to the nsa, which was a recommendation that the nsa not weaken the encryption systems used to protect all of our data, what goes to target, our health data, the nsa has weakened those over time so they could break in to them. also recommendation that the nsa get some additional supervision when they're looking at weaknesses of software to do cyberattacks on other countries. on those the president still said that. >> schieffer: you've been covering president obama for a long time s. this a different

president obama than the obama who came to office talking pretty critical. >> he was. that's what people remember when they think about barack obama who ran he was critical of the bush warrantless wiretaps, for example. a speech said -- fact that when he's been in office, he actually has been more open, for example, he voted to reauthorize the patriot act. he's been open to things like this kind of surveillance. the thing that we see time and again he really does approach these things like a lawyer. he can get to the point where he's comfortable with programs like this but he wants to run it through his process, see rules and checks and balances and he wants to do public ex plaintiff makes. >> schieffer: you had really interesting column you talked

about the two kinds of loyalty. talking about bob gates and then talking about this whole issue. where did you come down on the president's speech? >> on the president's speech i came down slightly more positive i think in terms of the impact than david did. i would call it significant. emphasis on the significant. i think the biggest change is something that mike morell mentioned that the president has now said, we will have judges, not bureaucrats at nsa no matter how well meaning they are, 22 folks at nsa now who have the authority to query this database. but they have self-interest they see things from a particular perspective. i'd rather have federal judges helping oversee and make this decision that is a huge change and i think it's a very important one. >> schieffer: and tell me a little bit about that -- what you had to say about bob gates. >> well, i wrote a little bit about loyalty and one of my big

concerns, like all of us in the news gathering business was inside information. it's a little hard to criticize us to people who give us inside information. that said, i think particularly with secretary gates a republican brought in to democratic administration not inside line position, but in a really critical policy making job. to then turn around write his memoirs while the president is still in office, really, if i were president, would give me pause about selecting somebody from the opposite party. loyalty is an under appreciated virtue in washington these days. >> schieffer: i tell you what i found interesting, much of the criticism that mr. gates made, i happen to agree with. but i thought making the criticism at this point while the president is still a sitting president, i was very surprised that bob gates did that. because either you talk about

loyalty, i think there's a certain loyalty to the presidency. and i think when you make it harder for a president while he is still in office i think -- i have problems with that. either said it after the president left office maybe he thought it was important enough that it ought to be said now obviously he did. >> that's his argument. i was at a breakfast with him on friday where he reaffirmed that he didn't feel that he had transgressed issues of loyalty. i have to respectfully disagree for exactly the reasons that you said. not while you're in office. >> schieffer: david, what about mike rogers talking this morning about the russians may have had a hand in helping edward snowden make some of this information public. and both he and mike morell said it goes back to the idea of what kind of information he was releasing. what was your take on that? >> there's a lot we don't know yet about whether or not edward

snowden was operating independently. whether this was his idea as a protest about what the nsa is doing. or whether or not he was operating on instructions from someone else or decided later on to cooperate with someone else. but certainly there are a lot of issues about whether or not china and russia obtained the information out of computers he was traveling with when he showed up in hong kong then again in rush a. then whether he struck any kind of deal for his stay in russia. and we don't know. we also don't know how much information he's actually in possession of now or how much he may have left others in possession of. clearly everything we've heard suggests that the intelligence agencies are worried more about what may come than what has already out. i wrote a little bit this week about documents published in europe that showed how the agency uses radio wave technology to get in to

computers that are completely separated from the internet. we will publish this because the information had already appeared in european papers as well as the documents. but certainly the nsa has to be worried about how many more of their techniques are out there. >> schieffer: christi, what are you hearing at the white house, is there concern there about the safety of america's athletes going to these olympics? >> haven't heard people talk about that an awful lot to tell you the truth. the focus of the last couple of weeks, white house has been so consumed with containing the fall out from the snowden revelations, for example. and so much of the focus has been on preparing these reforms that the president talked about on friday. i haven't heard them talking about that yet. >> schieffer: they also have congress back in town and there will be plenty on their plate there, what is going to happen, ruth? >> i think a safe bet to say not very much. because, hello, one of the most

vivid parts of the gates' book were the string of adjectives he released on disfunctional congress, hard to disagree with that. congress only deals with action forcing events. eventually the authorities of the patriot act, for example, to get to the nsa are going to expire there is going to have to be decision whether to reaffirm those. but it's going to be very hard to see really substantive change from this congress unless there is a deadline bearing down on them and perhaps not even then next really big deadline we'll have to deal with is the dealt ceiling already you can see the jockeying on that. i hope they have learned their listen will blink women below the event. >> it doesn't expire until 2015 half of the term election. but at that moment it really is going to be -- congress will have to make decisions on all of these positions the president has taken and several he hasn't

taken. because alternative will be that the entire patriot act will just expire. >> that's why the president's approach to congress seemed like something we'll see an awful lot more of, which is he proposes some changes, he describes the situation, makes the case for change then kind of kick it over to congress says, see what you -- >> schieffer: here is the problem what -- you know, when he turned it over to congress to write the stimulus package that first time around that didn't work out very well. i'm not sure congress is capable of doing something like that. that to me where the concern is. >> absolutely. our constitutional arctic wants to put a lot of these policy making decisions in the hands of lawmakers. but they haven't proven themselves capable of doing the policies that leaves it to the other branches of government which is not healthy. >> on the other hand in this case for some of these changes with the nsa, the president feels all the reasons mr. morell said, this is a way of slow walking some of the changes.

he can appear to embrace some big broader changes, but say look, this requires congressional action. congress is not exactly up for the task. >> you are under valuing what he did, because i do think once again that the question of judicial involving inquirying these huge databases which is going to happen with or without congressional action. it is a big deal. >> also did set some changes in motion, for example, by requiring judicial review before querying the database. congress is not obligated but now it's being done if no great calamity comes. that may have actual affect whether -- regardless of -- >> schieffer: the other thing is, this is inside baseball, but it's very important. the president is really bolstered up his congressional teeth, he's put in a new congressional relations guy, new white house lobbyist on capitol hill.

people outside say, come on, that's not a big deal. it's a very big deal because i had democrats and republicans coming up to me last year saying they didn't know who the president's chief lobbyist on capitol hill was. they had never seen the person. i don't mean this to be disrespectful to the person, but his lobbying effort, his ties to capitol hill were almost nonexistent. >> the lobbyist needs to be the president. >> schieffer: of course it does. >> really big question of how much effort he wants to put in to that and at this stage how big an impact that can have because relations are afraid both for republicans and democrats. >> schieffer: i think you're right. i couldn't agree more on that. but it has to be anyways to face, one on one congressional relations not just going on television making a speech. expecting everybody to fall in to line. >> it's been interesting to hear the white house talking about congress being one element of

their strategy going forward. apparently someone equal with the pen and the phone that a president has acquired. there they are. >> schieffer: all right. we'll stop it right there. thank you all very much. it's fun to talk this morning. back in a moment with our "face the nation" flashback.

>> schieffer: out of this world interviews are tough to come by but 45 years ago this month, "face the nation" scored a scoop with three astronauts who had come back from a trip out of this world. that is our "face the nation" flashback. >> we have lift off. >> schieffer: with cold war attentions running high the apollo eight group had given americans the ultimate christmas gift on december 25th, 1968. when they became the first men to orbit the moon. >> merry christmas and god bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.

>> schieffer: less than three weeks later they were on "face the nation." >> spontaneous unrehearsed news interview with the apollo 8 astronauts. they were already looking ahead to the next big mission. shortly we'll have people who actually land and walk and explore the lunar surface. i think these new symbols will far over shadow what we've done. >> kind of fill cough call question. this program, man on the moon, apollo program that is going cost on the order of $24 billion, does it trouble you or please you that it's spent for putting a man on the moon? start with the commander. >> i think that it doesn't trouble me at all. i think that is what we have done in the apollo program and space program is essential. i look at the sprays program as technical life insurance for the future of this country. i don't think we can afford to neglect it. >> schieffer: at the peak of the apollo program nasa funding accounted for 4.5% of the

federal budget now it's less than half of one percent. only imagine what the apollo crew would say about that. at 1406 35th streety bast the old dining table at 25th and hoffman. ...and the little room above the strip mall off roble avenue. ♪ this magic moment it is the story of where every great idea begins. and of those who believed they had the power to do more. dell is honored to be part of some of the world's great stories. that began much the same way ours did. in a little dorm room -- 2713. ♪ this magic moment ♪ is your tv powered by coal? natural gas? nuclear? or renewables like solar... and wind? let's find out. this is where america's electricity comes from. a diversity of energy sources helps ensure the electricity we need is reliable.

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>> schieffer: well that's it for us today. we'll see you right here next sunday on "face the nation." see you then. captioning sponsored by cbs captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

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right now in their quest for six. good evening... i'm brian hackney. and i excitement early on for 49er fans, the team looking good, so far, right now, in their quest for 6. good evening, i'm brian hackmy. >> it looks and sounds electric. >> reporter: you bet. every once this in awhile we will hear a roar here. the third quarter just began. the crowd very much into this thing, one false start against the 49ers probably due to the 12th man. a lot of people have been anticipating this for awhile. a lot of people saying this is the sur