tonight recording on the existing of a previously unreported top secret government spying program. the national security administration and the fbi reportedly tapping directly into the servers of the biggest internet companies in the world. essentially putting government taps deep inside the machinery that hosts hundreds of millions of american e-mail accounts and online storage and social media and communications. if this sounds familiar, you're mistaken. this is new. this new secret spying program is entirely different for example from the phone records spying program that was revealed last night by "the guardian" the program that has the government storing records of past phone calls allowing intelligence to go back to that data and mine through it at a later date.

more on the latest details of that program in a little bit. on the computer spying, the story breaking tonight, "the guardian" and the "washington post" reporting the national security agency and fbi are tapping directly into the central servers of nine different u.s. internet companies. big big names in american computing, google and yahoo! and microsoft, who was apparently first in, in the program. facebook and aol, skype and youtube and apple and something called paltalk. i was not previously familiar with it. in this middle east and carries a lot of internet traffic in syria and particularly vital as communications medium during the arab spring. of the companies named in these nsa documents published by "the post and "the guardian," five of the big names issued statements denying they participate in this program saying they do not provide the government direct access or some sort of secret

back door to their servers. nevertheless, the nsa says they're in. both papers were apparently given access to what seems to be the same document or similar document. it appears to be a power point slide show used to train intelligence operatives of capabilities of this computer program called prism that allows officials to monitor not just e-mail traffic in realtime but search histories and file transfers and live chats. nbc news has confirmed the existence of the program. as elaboration, one source is describing this realtime monitoring of computer traffic as the equivalent of standing in the post office and watching for specific envelopes that come from parts of the world or people that are deemed possible troublemakers. sources also telling nbc news the surveillance is mainly oriented toward communications that originate outside the u.s.

or that involve communications from the u.s. to a foreign country, key word there probably is "mainly oriented." either way, the program is one that american intelligence is relying upon with greater frequency. the post got its hand on an internal nsa report that describes it as the most prolific contributor to the president's daily brief citing it in nearly 1500 articles last year from prism and more than 77,000 intelligence reports in total cited the prism program as a source since data collection began in december of 2007. over 2000 prism reports issued every month. one career intelligence officer considers how this intelligence was obtained to be a gross invasion of privacy and therefore worth revealing to the world at large. quoting from the very end of the "washington post"'s report tonight, firsthand experience with these systems and horror at

their capabilities is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide these power point slides about prism and supporting materials to the "washington post" in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion of privacy. they quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type the officer said. joining us now is dominic rush, the u.s. business correspondent for "the guardian" newspaper. he contributed on their reporting. thank you for being with us. thanks for having me. >> you've been reporting on this. you know it in more detail than i do. i'm reading what you wrote. did i mischaracterize any of that or anything i missed? >> no. it's a shocking story. we live our lives online now. who among us has not been online today to check an e-mail or look on google, chat with people. it's part of our everyday life now. it appears that a lot of communications we thought of as private are anything but. >> in terms of the company's response to this, we're watching

the companies one by one saying, hey, don't blame us, we're not participating in this, we didn't provide -- google saying we didn't provide any back door access to the government so they could intrude on our users' privacy in this way. what do you make of their denials here? >> i spoke to a lot of silicon valley senior figures today. they were all confused is probably the most accurate word. seems to me they didn't know about this. one had a blanket denial from apple today they ever even heard of prism. there's a disconnect between what we see in the documents and what people in silicon valley and these tech companies are telling us. i think there's just so questions raised by this we need some kind of inquiry into what actually happened there. it's hard to disentangle it at this stage. >> the thing that is hard to disentangle is the nsa's assertions to what appear to be training document, these slides.

they have to count on their corporate partners for access to this information but they have been able to count on those corporate partners and therefore get this information in mass amounts providing this exponentially increasing proportion of the intelligence that the united states considers worthy of acting on or at least of telling the president. that can't both be true and -- that can't be true and the companies' denials that they know anything about it. those two things can't co-exist. >> one is wrong. in these documents they use the word "assistance." how do you have assistance if no one is assisting. we don't know at the moment. certainly, the denials, to me, felt genuine. a genuine sense of shock from senior figures who were saying they haven't even heard of this scheme. i just had an e-mail from microsoft just now saying they never give information unless there's a subpoena. they have systems in place. they get requests from the

government all the time for private information and then they are assessed on a case by case basis. this is something entirely different. >> with the glen greenwald piece reported last night "the guardian" about phone data, not the prism program but phone data we're talking about later on in the show, the government response to that in part was saying, don't worry about this. don't think this is a great intrusion. this is just metadata. we may know who you're calling when you're calling them and how long you're calling them for and we may know that for everybody in the country but we don't know what the content of your conversations is. that's been the sum of the character of their assurance on the phone spying issue. on prism, we're actually talking about the content of communications, aren't we? >> yes, we are against the background of legislation we have in place in the u.s. is

frankly around the world is totally out of date. when we rely on so much, the junk mail you get in your postbox has better protection than your e-mail and that stuff you pick up and throw straight in the trash is better protected by u.s. legislation than your private e-mails to your boss, to your doctor, to your children, it's a shocking state of affairs. for the government to say that you shouldn't worry about it is worrying in itself. >> it's hard to get that assurance on spying on phone data and then within the 24 hour period lose that assurance when it comes to everything you do online. increasingly people are making phone calls using voiceover internet protocol and include that and text e-mails and your skype chats. it's rich data, right? >> yes. very rich data. >> it's something that started, as far as your reporting goes, 2007 the start of this program? >> yes. >> dominic rushe business correspondent for "the guardian."

thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> this is part of the breaking news. internet snooping and breaking news about the government's prism program, a lot going on. and we have someone from the aclu who has very very stern reaction to some stuff breaking over the last couple of days. stay with us. lots still to come. a crowd but not your nasal congestion, you may be muddling through allergies. try zyrtec-d®. powerful relief of nasal congestion and other allergy symptoms -- all in one pill. zyrtec-d®. at the pharmacy counter. [ female announcer ] what does beauty feel like? ♪

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at the end of the reagan administration a scandal resulted in that administration that resulted in 14 officials being indicted, not subpoenaed not accused but criminally indicted up to and including the secretary of the defense and the head of the cia and not one but two national security advisors to president reagan. one of the national security advisors that got indicted, bud mcfarlane, he was convicted but then got a pardon from poppy bush and john poindexter was convicted on five counts but later overturned by a court so he did not have to get the pardon like everybody else did. for george h.w. bush, it was an awkward way to start a presidency, the way ford started pardoning nixon and papa bush pardoned them so they don't go to the pokey. but he kind of picked up where dad left off. he decided to complete the

rehabilitation of the reagan administration's people not by pardoning but giving them jobs in the government. putting one of those old convicts in charge might have been the first mistake the bush administration made with the total information awareness program. other mistakes probably included the name "total information awareness" seriously? also, maybe the logo was a mistake. if you're trying to earn people's trust and not freak them out about what you're doing, a, do not call it total information awareness. b, do not use the glowing eyeball in the pyramid gazing out in total over the globe and do not give this a latin logo asserting knowledge is power from the glowing eyeball out of the pyramid looking over the whole globe. do not put the iran contra

convict john point dexter in charge of it. the whole debacle was wrong. even in those heady days after the 9/11 attacks, start of the afghan war and start of formation of the department of homeland security. have we ever used the word homeland in this country when it seemed like nothing too orwellian enough to freak us out, john poindexter's program with the eyeball freaked us out. that engendered the first and long series of periodic upsets we have had as a nation over privacy since 9/11. not just since 9/11 broadly but specifically since the big change to the law we enacted right after 9/11 which congress passed in fact 44 days after 9/11. 132 pages long called the patriot act, under patriot act authority the george w. bush administration tried to create this total information awareness thing.

they did actually create the office and put john poindexter in charge of it. >> not the office and the logo and creepy latin motto. now the office and logo and creepy latin motto doesn't exist anymore exactly the way they rolled it out. the de-funding of that office may have taken away all those may have taken away all those trappings of the office but didn't take away the surveillance powers ascribed to that office. surveillance of communication and various transactions across the u.s. border and surveillance of communication activities inside the united states, even by u.s. citizens has all increased dramatically since 9/11, mostly under powers granted under the patriot act. while that does not seem to upset us as a nation in the abstract, every once in a while when we find out what it means

in terms of privacy it does bug us and gets political traction. in 2004, john kerry was picked as the democratic nominee for president to try to make george w. bush a one term president. although it was john kerry's convention, the speech that stole the show was the keynote by u.s. senate candidate barack obama. at the apex of that great great speech he gave in 2004, then senate candidate barack obama referenced over one of these privacy stories. privacy upsets that have periodically roiled us since 2001. >> even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us. the spin masters, the negative ad pedalers who embrace the politics of anything goes. well, i say to them tonight there is not a liberal america and a conservative america, there is the united states of america.

there is not a black america and a white america and latino america and asian america, there is the united states of america. the pundits -- the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. red states for republicans, blue states for democrats. but i've got news for them, too. we worship an awesome god in the blue states and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. we coach little league in the blue states, and, yes, we have some gay friends in the red states. >> when he said at that apex of that speech we do not like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states, what he was -- that was july 2004, what he was referencing there librarians around the country sounding the alarm

they're being told to cooperate with efforts to spy on people's efforts in libraries. it was not without worry. fbi agents showed up at the door of a library and delivered a letter demanding subscriber information and billing and access log or person or entity that used the computers in that library on a particular day at a particular time. that demand letter was top secret. the librarians were not allowed to tell anybody they had received it or what had been demanded of them. in top secrecy, the librarians fought the order to divulge knowledge otherwise confidential information. only when they won their case four years later could they reveal the concrete claim to the records of what was going on in their library. there was drama and upset over privacy even inside the george w. bush administration. some of this came rushing back just last week when we learned

president obama was going to tap former bush justice department 6'8" prosecutor guy to run the fbi. the thing he's very famous for other than being very tall in a job where you don't have to be very tall has to do with bush attorney general john ashcroft getting pancreatitis. john ashcroft got acute pancreatitis had to go to the hospital in 2004. at the time there was this big standoff inside the bush administration over the government spying on people. the national security agency does signals intelligence. that is phone calls, e-mails, electronic digital radio based transmissions, all that kind of stuff. signals intelligence. they're supposed to be doing it outside the country supposed to be part of our spying on other countries. after 9/11 the bush administration reportedly told the nsa to start vacuuming up that kind of stuff inside the united states as well not just a broad turn those sensors inward,

every five days president george w. bush would give the nsa a military order as commander in chief directing them the surveillance they were doing internationally, they should do it inside the country, too. that's a big deal. if you're at the nsa and get an order like that it raises the question whether that very big deal order from the president is actually legal. can the president legally tell us to do that? john ashcroft with pancreatitis kind of decided, no, those orders weren't legal, at least not the way they were trying to justify it at one point during the bush administration. that is what led to the big dramatic standoff in that hospital room in march 2004 when the bush administration's program to have the nsa spying on all of us by presidential order needed to get its periodic legal rubber stamp from the justice department and john ashcroft was wicked sick. in the hospital. he appointed big tall james comey to be the attorney general instead. it would be comey who was going

to have to sign off on it. the white house tried to go to james comey to get him to sign off on it and he wouldn't and then tried to go around him and have sick john ashcroft authorize it and he raced them to john ashcroft's hospital room and sat by his bed and told the fbi agents not to let anybody in or out and wouldn't let it happen. that was what that whole drama was about, whether the bush administration spying on us was being done in a legal way. the resolution of that drama ultimately the justice department wouldn't sign off on the program as it was. a big drama. everybody threatened to quit. words were exchanged. reportedly swearing. they did keep spying on us, kept doing the spying they were doing but tweaked the rationale to make the justice department more comfortable. we finally learned they were doing that, spying in that way in 2006 when "usa today" broke the news all these phone

companies had been told to turn over phone records to the nsa, not just people suspected of anything but anybody so the usa could create a giant mega base of any call in the country, and just as people got upset when they heard about total awareness and the library and upset they were collecting all this information. upset enough in 2007 congress voted the bush administration should not be able to do that kind of thing just on their own say-so anymore. their decisions about spying on us getting data about phone calls and e-mails even for the millions of us not suspected of wrongdoing, they should not be able to do that just because they say so, want to, a court should be involved. there should be judicial oversight. after a periodic upset over privacy issues in 2007, congress passed a law that put something called the fisa court in charge of decisions how much the government can spy on us even if

we've done nothing wrong and they don't think we've done anything wrong. fisa is a real court but meet in secret and rulings are in secret so we never know what they're saying it was okay for the government to do. when barack obama became president in 2009 the justice department said that year they would start a review process to maybe declassify some of those fisa court rulings to maybe let us know what some of those court rulings said since that was the legal basis how much we could be spied on. they would start a review process to redact and release some rulings of that secret court so we could know how much we are being spied on. whether or not they started that process, whether or not they ever reviewed those fisa court rulings none have ever been released. that's how we get to last night's all caps exclamation point big deal report from greenwald writing for "the guardian" newspaper in britain. not new the government deems the right to collect records of any kind as long as it's

anti-terrorism investigation. that's the law in the patriot act in 2001. not new the government is collecting wholesale information from our communications. we learned about that in 2005 from the "new york times" and expanded way from "usa today" in 2006. what is news now is that we finally get to see one of these orders from this secret court which we've never been able to see before and it spells out this is the kind of power the government thinks the law gives them. it spells it out in detail. the court order specifically is about verizon business customers. specifically about the government getting access to 90 days worth of calling records from verizon business customers. there's no reason to believe the other parts of verizon are not subject to similar orders and no reason to believe all phone companies are not similar -- subject to the same orders and no reason to believe the 90 day period is anything special.

the top senator on the intelligence committee came out today and confirmed the authenticity of the court order and said, yeah, it's not just 90 days. we've been doing this since 2007, since that congressional decision to put all this under fisa authority. since then, fisa courts have apparently okaying mass surveillance without suspicion of all the top level data on all our phone calls. who knows maybe all our e-mails, too, since they've got the power to do it. senator feinstein represents one of the three types of political responses to this revelation today. feinstein reaction shared by saxby chambliss and lindsey graham. you can ascribe their reaction as the big whoop reaction saying there's nothing new here. we've been getting briefed on programs like this for years and voting on programs like this for years and authorizing programs like this for years. why are you freaked-out about this? reaction number one.

number two, typified at the hill newspaper today. today. patriot act author extremely troubled by nsa phone tracking. patriot act author is troubled by this? jim sensenbrenner original author of the patriot act in 2001 which cleared the way for all this to happen he says i had no idea this would happen. first reaction is big whoop we all knew this was happen. the second reaction was who me caucus? i had no idea this was going on. senator isaacson who voted for the patriot act and fisa reauthorizing last year in the who me category along with jim sensenbrenner. he said i never voted intentionally for any bill that would grant blanket authority to monitor every phone call. senator, apparently yes, you did. the third reaction is from members of congress who do think this is a big deal and who did know this was happening and

trying to get others concerned about it. mark udall writing to the attorney general last year warning if the secret court rulings were ever made public they would stun americans saying there is now a quote significant gap between what most americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. when the fisa court authorizing was up for another vote in december last year, those senators and others supported an amendment that would have forced the security administration to reveal how many americans are being surveilled by that agency. that amendment only got 43 votes and failed and tried another amendment that would have made the program transparent to the public. it got only 37 votes and failed. in 2009 when the patriot act was being re-authorized, russ feingold and dick durbin said people should not have their records seized by the government unless there was some tangential connection to terrorism.

that amendment failed, too. back to 2005 senators tried and amendment that would have kept the nsa from seizing your phone records unless they had specific facts showing the records they wanted was quote the agent of a foreign power, that amendment was sponsored by idaho senator larry craig of wide stance fame, co-sponsored by an illinois senator named barack obama. again, that one failed, too. never went anywhere. none of those amendments ever went anywhere. no effort to curtail this kind of power has ever gone anywhere in congress since they killed the total information awareness office but none of the associated programs. that was a long time ago. the patriot act was not only authorized in 2001, re-authorized in 2006, re-authorized in 2011. fisa oversighted this mass vacuuming up of american data and for those not accused of wrongdoing approved by congress in 2007 and reapproved in 2027

-- 2012, this past december. remember the controversy? no, you don't because it didn't happen. even the specifics being authorized by these votes every once in a while rises up and horrifies us what it means for our privacy. in the abstract the broad authorities for government to keep doing it keep getting okayed. we have new specific data last night about the nsa directing the mass seizure of verizon's phone data. tonight, as we said at the top of the show, "the "washington post"" and "the guardian" added more and prism established in 2007 apparently running ever since in which the nsa and fbi tap directly into the central servers of nine top internet companies grabbing en masse not just e-mails, information about when you log-on or off, documents, videos, audios, chats, skype chat, photos. it is not for people suspected

of crimes, it is, at least it seems, for all of us, everything that goes through microsoft, yahoo! google, aol, skype, google and paltalk, according to classified documents by "the "washington post"," dropbox is soon to be coming to this program.

new details are breaking about widespread government

surveillance of americans. it seems like every time you picked up the phone, the government has known what number you were dialing. a secret surveillance program is detecting the phone calls of every single one of us. >> late last night, breaking news of the giant news story in the u.s., secret court orders never been seen before showing the nsa telling verizon that the nsa was going to collect en masse verizon's telephone data. that was the big story of the day until we learned late tonight of a similar program they have the ability to say to tap directly into these central servers of nine top american internet companies grabbing not just e-mails but documents and videos and audio files and photos and chats. joining us now is the deputy legal director of the aclu. thank you for being here tonight. >> thank you.

>> part of me feels like, wow, these are huge new revelations. part of me feels like didn't we already know they were doing this stuff from revelations in 2005 and 2006? >> some of it certainly went on before under the bush administration before there was this new fisa amendment act created by congress in 2008. when it was done by the bush administration it was lawless in that there was no statute the government was relying on. in some cases the government was acting in violation of statute. now, the obama administration is pointing to statutes to justify its surveillance. in some cases, the administration is right. the statutes are so broad that the kind of surveillance the administration is engaged in is exactly what was contemplated by congress. in other cases, yesterday's order, verizon order is an example of this the administration's interpretation of the law essentially guts the law. it's so extreme it goes even beyond the very permissive boundaries set by congress in the patriot act and fisa

amendment act. >> publishing an angry editorial denouncing these revelations today in which they have to pause in the middle of their anger how upset they are to say we recognize it's legal. >> i don't think that's what the "new york times" said either. i think the "new york times" said there is a statute the government is pointing to to justify the surveillance. that's different than saying it's a constitutional statute. >> okay. >> ultimately, i think here there is blame to go around. it's a target rich environment in terms of villains here. there's the congress that gave the administration this power. there's the administration which exercised all of that power and more and there's the court, the secret court that signed off on this incredibly broad order that allows the government to sweep up information about everybody. every phone call you make.

every -- how long is that phone call? who are you calling? maybe even the location information associated with the phone call. that's a lot of data. it's not just about suspected terrorists, it's about everybody. >> let me ask you about a statement that's come out tonight from an unnamed official because it's always an unnamed official. unnamed senior administration official telling reuters tonight the prism program that's been disclosed by the "washington post" and the guardian tonight, communications collection program referred to in "the guardian" and "washington post" stories does not allow targeting of any u.s. citizen or any person in the united states. it's only targeting non-u.s. persons outside the u.s. would that be a definitive legal -- would that definitively change your assessment of the legality of what they're doing here? >> no. i know what they're doing here, a game they've been playing for a while with this particular statute. this particular statute allows the government to engage in surveillance directed at people

outside the united states. the government points to that to try to reassure americans this isn't about them. in fact in the course of surveillance directed outside the united states the government routinely collects international phone calls americans make to those people or calls that those people make to americans inside the united states. so while the program is nominally directed at people outside it's collecting all sorts of information americans have an interest in. this program, even if you sort of accept we shouldn't care at all about privacy of people outside the united states this program is something people ought to care about. it's a program that results in the government building huge databases of americans' communications. >> deputy legal director of the aclu, i have a feeling we will be hearing from the aclu in some official capacity shortly. >> you might. >> i will not ask you to tip your hand. thank you for being here. much more to come including a

best new thing in the world.

pat sajak has been the host of the wheel of fortune for 30

years and it has been very good to him because he looks almost the same as he did when he first started. it's also good for folks to know where he stands politically, which is on the right. last summer he wrote this essay about president obama's you didn't build that line to explain the importance of infrastructure and education spending. at the time republicans thought you didn't build that was a huge gaffe that might turn the election. those republicans included pat sajak. here, if you pay close attention, pat sajak make ac joke on wheel of fortune about the "you didn't build that" line. >> john. >> b! >> there's b. what do we have? >> a thriving business. >> yeah. we can build that. >> a thriving business, pat sajak says, we can build that.

kind of subversive, right? if you like political subversiveness in your hosts, pat sajak is chicken feed. you have to stay tuned for the best thing in the world. cash, game prices and civil dis obedience 70 times like you've never seen before coming up.

when the story broke about the irs and the political key words they were using to scrutinize applications for tax-exempt status, that story broke because an inspector general report was coming out about it and an irs official decided she would apologize for that practice ahead of that inspector general report coming out. that's how we all came to know that that thing was happening. the department of justice collecting phone records for all those phone lines of the "associated press," that story broke because the justice department sent a letter to the ap, telling them that that surveillance had happened and then the ap decided to make it public. the story about the justice department getting access to the phone records and e-mails of that fox news reporter, that other leak investigation, that one broke at the same time as all those other ones but the timing on the fox reporter story was by accident. the fbi getting into that reporters' e-mails and phone calls.

was supposed to been made public a year and a half ago but apparently accidentally left sealed in a court filing by accident until a court reporter in washington noticed it a couple weeks ago and that's how that one came to be known. this is turning out to be a big summer of big news about the obama administration. how all these stories are coming to light is getting to be an important part of the news itself and nowhere more clear than the national security stories breaking right now. the "washington post" story broken by barton gelman about prism, this mass collection of data from internet sources. that story was born from a slide show intended for internal use at the nsa, kind of a training powerpoint slide show, and that was leaked to the "washington post" and to "the guardian" by a career intelligence officer. according to "the post" firsthand experience with these systems and horror at their capabilities is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide powerpoint slides about prism and supporting materials to the "washington post."

in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. the source even gave "the post" a quote explaining his motivation for the leak. quote, they quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type them. the "guardian" scoop that broke last night is thus far more opaque in terms of that story came from. what leaked in the "guardian" story last night is a secret court ruling that directs verizon to hand over data about all of the phone calls on its system to the nsa. glen greenwald's piece for the "guardian" said the secret court ruling had been obtained but not how or from whom. the "new york times" says it was marked top secret/si/no foreign, which would make it, quote, mock the most closely held secrets within the federal government. and that court order is what the "guardian" released last night. and tonight released their own

version of the prism story also in things with "washington post" including their own chunk of the actual slides from the secret powerpoint presentation. nbc news reporting tonight that us intelligence officials are reeling tonight after all of these leaks. piercing the most sensitive secrets in the counter terror data collection operation. and this all follows the nbc report last night on this, the internal u.s. government tally and a kind of spreadsheet on a program on drone strikes in pakistan. richard engel reporting last night on "nbc nightly news" and on this show that over the year and a half long period, a quarter of the people the u.s. says it killed in drone strikes were not only not known by name, they were not even known by affiliation with any specific bad guy militant group, even though the u.s. insists they must definitely have been militants of some kind. 26% of the people said to be killed in these drone strikes

over a year-and-a-half are just simply listed by the u.s. in this document as, quote, other militants, or foreign fighters. that's in the u.s. government's own accounting. the mcclatchy news agency published an account of similar drone data in april. i should have noted that last night in my introduction to richard and i'm sorry about that. but nbc says that its drone data is actually different from what mcclatchy reported on back in april. and that means that it's not the same classified document circulating to different news agencies. which means, if you think about it in terms of thinking about where the leaks are coming from, it means the drone data is also leakier than we first thought, right? the court secret ruling leaked to one source. what is apparently the nsa's biggest and most secret surveillance operation, prism, leaked to two separate sources. the covert drone program after action report spreadsheet was leaked to two sources in two slightly different forms. where are all these leaks coming from?

when it rains, it pours. and right now national security leaks are pouring down like a flood.

best new thing in the world. ready? so it terse turns out that the turkish word for gas mask is gas maskike, the reason i know that is because not i speak turkey. there have been big protests going on in turkey, tens of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets for almost a week now, started as an effort to save a park in downtown istanbul has now turned into a big, sustained, anti-government maelstrom at how authorities have reacted with tear gas and violence and also fueled by long, simmering grievances

against the government there. around the world, we have had access to a lot of dramatic images from the protests. but inside turkey, the government has censored the coverage for domestic consumption. that said, tv game shows are one of the things that do still go on. without new trouble, even in times of civil unrest. even under a censorious government. in turkey, a tv game show called "the word game" and it's kind of like "wheel of fortune", maybe closer to "password." you ever see "password" on for about a zillion years, a zilion years ago, i'm on old person. this show is called "word game". the host gives the contestants a clue and they have to guess what the secret word is. on monday night, the host of the word game in turkey decided to use the game show to subvert the censorship in his country. he made the whole game -- the whole game show about the thing that nobody is allowed to talk about on tv.

for example, one clue to the contestants was, "democracy breather." democracy breather? i'm stumped. but the contestant was not stumped. [ speaking in turkish ] >> gas mask! democracy breather, as the government has been tear gassing the protesters, right? how about this one. a person that concentrates all political power. that's the clue. hmmm. [ speaking in turkish ] >> dictator! good clue. the next clue was, the social network site that has been described as a curse. answer? [ speaking in turkish ] >> if you missed that one in america, it's just twitter. in turkey on the morning of the word game, prime minister called

it a menace to society. the host brought up the anti-government protest that nobody is allowed to mention 70 different times. among the 70 secret words he put into the game were "police" and "violence" and "silence" and "resistance" and censorship. some of the picked up coverage, the last two clues were pretty direct messages to the government. the second to last clue was, to voluntarily give up a position. the answer was, resign. and the last clue was, the act that makes a person bigger by asking to be forgiven for wrong actions. the answer, of course, to that was apologize. the host has not been back on tv for a live show since doing this on monday night. so we do not know what his act of bravery will cost him. whether or not knew that bravery would be what was needed of him,

he has shown he has got what it takes. amid another night of all-night protests tonight in istanbul. protests tonight in istanbul. "first look" is up next. good friday morning. right now on "first look," tropical cyclone andrea is bringing heavy rain up the east coast today. dianne feinstein says the phone records plot foiled things in the us. internet companies are also involved. investors are anxiously awaiting jobs reports. plus, prince phillip is undergoing surgery. >> brian williams channelling snoop dogg with the help of