i spy. let's play "hardball." good evening, i'm michael smerconish in new york for chris matthews. let's begin tonight with this classic american debate. it's the tug-of-war between the national security and personal privacy. but what makes this fight so unusual is that even as we learn that washington is keeping tabs on who has phoned whom and when, we're reminded that this is a government headed by a liberal democratic president who's made a virtue of transparency. today, the story got even richer.

today we learned that washington has been collecting information overseas on foreigners using web-based companies like google and facebook and apple. is the invasion of personal privacy too high a price to pay for the increased security against terrorism that it's supposed to bring? or is it all worth it? especially in a society where personal privacy is diminished every day? easy pass tags and metro cards track our every move. private companies know what cars we drive, what magazines we read, what websites we click upon. president obama gave a forceful defense of the program and that's where we begin tonight. michelle richardson is with the aclu. and michael o'hanlon, senior fellow at the brookings institution. the latest revelation courtesy of the "washington post" involves an nsa program known as prism. e-mails. americans were not directly targeted, the "post" reported, but while going after foreign targets the program did route teen routinely collect a great

deal of american content as well. the revelation about this new program comes a day after "the guardian" broke the news the nsa was collecting telephone information on domestic and international calls. today the president addressed criticism about these programs. he said that he came into office with a healthy skepticism about them, but after evaluating their effectiveness, he was convinced they were necessary. >> my assessment, and my team's assessment, was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. and the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or

duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on, you know, net it was worth us doing. some other folks may have a different assessment of that, but i think it's important to recognize that you can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. >> michelle richardson, of what significance to you that the president says, hey, it works? >> well, we would absolutely disagree that this is just a modest encroachment. the news this week confirmed that the nsa is daily getting downloads of every american's phone records from all the major companies in the united states. that is a significant encroachment and it really reflects our associations, where we go, what we do and who we know. >> michael o'hanlon, is this is

a significant encroachment where none of your phone conversations are being listened to? >> michael, you know, i agree with a lot of michelle's concerns, but i also agree with the president that we need to be able to look for associations. not the content being monitored. we need to know, frankly, who's talking to terrorists. and we need to be able to sift through a lot of data to establish those patterns. what i'm more concerned about is establishing clear oversight so you can't have political vendettas or other such things that happen out of this. for example, let's say in the tracking of all of this we find out that somebody goes to a porn sight. some married man or something. then the government decides they're going to use that against him because some future richard nixon decides that he doesn't like somebody and he's going to embarrass him publicly. that's the kind of thing that the personal infringement,

embarrassment, vendetta i think we need to figure out how to prevent. i'm less worried about just the very fact the government looks at who's talking to whom. i think we need to do that to stop terrorism. we need strong safeguards so there cannot be future abuses of power by a government that decides to target people and use potentially embarrassing information we should never. >> god forbid there was some kind of attack, that this metadata, had we analyzed it properly, could have prevented. that's what we're all seeking to stop, no? >> well, there's no evidence that these sorts of metadata collection programs actually work in the terrorism context. we've been collecting this information for over a decade now in the post-9/11 world. neither the past administration or this one has been able to give a single example of how this information has caught a terrorist attack before it happens. >> when you have disparate interests like mike rogers and dianne feinstein both telling the american people, in fact, i'll show it to you.

yesterday congressman mike rogers who's the chair of the house intelligence committee put it frankly. he said these programs are necessary and, in fact, are responsible for thwarting a terrorist attack. here it is. >> that within the last few years this program was used to stop a program, excuse me, stop a terrorist attack in the united states. we know that. it's important. it fills in a little seam that we have. >> so respectfully when you say that there's no evidence that they've been successful, you can listen to senator feinstein. you can listen to congressman rogers. these are the folks who are getting the information and they say it's worked it. >> right. you can also listen to senator wyden and senator udall who have said in the last couple of days that even though they sit on the senate intelligence committee, they haven't seen the evidence. you know, the other question is, could we also catch these sorts of terrorists threats through far less intrusive methods? this is really only one tool that the government has.

there are many ways for the government to get the same sort of information, but do it on a way that is suspicion-based. that goes through courts. that gets meaningful review and doesn't sweep up a lot of innocent americans in the meantime. really that's the problem here. not that the government is spying on suspected terrorists, but they're spying on the rest of us in the meantime. >> michael o'hanlon, is the concern where this might lead as compared to where we are with this particular program or this particular pair of programs? but, michelle, i was struck by this comment which was posted by a blogger on the "post" website. and it reads as follows, "shortly after watching those extraordinary people leap to their deaths on 9/11, i decided i was willing to forfeit my absolute rights to absolute privacy if it would help the government protect this country from any further disasters. so far, the federal government has been, for the most part, pretty effective in thwarting foreign terrorists on our soil. and the anti-terrorism brigade hasn't interfered with the quality of my life in any way. despite their efforts to collect and colate information from

phone calls and the internet. just pass a law, pronto, that explicitly limits the use of such eavesdropping to anti-terrorism prosecutions and nothing else. beyond that, if cyber monitoring and telephone snooping is the price i have to pay in the fight against jihadists, so be it." would you disagree with the blogger that up until this moment in time there's been no disruption of any americans' day-to-day life by virtue of surrendering any of the privacy that we're talking about? >> i don't think so, and i don't think many people would actually assert these programs are directly preventing these sorts of attacks. look, that commenter absolutely can forfeit his privacy, but he's not in the place to forfeit mine or yours or anybody else's. that's the beauty of our constitution. our rights are our rights, and people don't get to waive them for each other. >> michael o'hanlon, do you evaluate this debate in the context of what transpired on september 11th, like the blogger, with an image in your head of the folks jumping out of

the twin towers? >> to some extent. more how we found terrorists largely around the world. michelle is right, there may not have been many plots stopped here, may have been a couple. the way we've found terrorists around the world is by establishing connections, listening, looking at who's talk to whom. trying to see what the phone records are. these are often cases in which the same civil liberties protections don't apply, of course. they're not necessarily american citizens or there may be probable cause. this is how we have established a knowledge base on who is a terrorist or who might be a terrorist. it's by seeing who talks with whom. who associates with known terrorists. you have to be able to do this in a world of huge amounts of data and huge numbers of potential threats from all sorts of different directions that you can't see coming. so i think of it more in terms of all the stuff we've done since 9/11 where we've had a lot

of success over the years if trying to find some of the al qaeda operatives and others if places like afghanistan, iraq, pakistan and so forth. bringing the debate back home, again, we're talking about american citizens, i do agree strongly with michelle on at least one point. we need to protect people's rights from abuse of government. i don't think the abuses have happened yet, but i think they could. the safeguards are not yet clear enough. the rules are not yet clear enough. that's where the obama administration has to direct its attention. >> michael o'hanlon, michelle richardson. thank you both very much. coming up, where's the outrage over all this government snooping? this is an unusual republican story. republicans are praising the program as are most democrats. that has some on the left frustrated. also, republicans are trying to kill obama care in the crib. in fact, its limited popularity is slipping under an assault of negative ads. today president obama made his case for the law and argued it's already working. and you stay classy, newseum. yes, newseum, honoring the most famous anchorman since ted baxter. ron burgundy. it's in anticipation of the new movie, "anchorman 2: the legend

continues." sorry to see michele bachmann go? don't worry. the republican running for her seat is proving to be pretty entertaining, himself. this is "hardball." the place for politics. well, we can't say we didn't [ male announcer ] running out of steam?

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welcome back to "hardball." politics makes strange bedfellows, sometimes. that axiom is never truer than

when it comes to national security issues. when "the new york times" editorial bashes the president, and the "wall street journal" editorial defends him, you can be excused for wondering what's going on. the "times" today, wrote, "the administration has now lost all correct on this issue. mr. obama is proving that truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it." the "wall street journal," no friend of the president wrote this. "there seems to be little here that is scandalous. the critics nonetheless say the nsa program is a violation of privacy or illegal or unconstitutional or all of the above. but nobody's civil liberties are violated by tech companies or banks that constantly run the same kinds of data analysis." meanwhile, here's frequent obama critic, senator lindsey graham, defending the nsa programs. >> i'm a verizon customer. it doesn't bother me one bit for the national security administration to have my phone number because what they're trying to do is find out what

terrorist groups we know about and individuals and who the hell they're calling. >> democratic congressman elijah cummings, however, told "politico," "the president said i must return to my authentic self, and i think the president needs to go back and read his own speeches." so what does it mean that some of the strongest criticism of the president is coming from the left? i'm joined by senator angus king of maine. senator, what do you say to people who fear their privacy is being violated with this intelligence gathering? >> well, i think it's important, first, to understand exactly what the program is, and when i was reading those first stories that came out, the impression was created that the government was listening in on phone conversations. we now have established that's not the case. what they have are when calls were made, who they were made to. michael, this is a classic argument that's been going on for thousands of years. who will guard the guardians? how do we produce and create a government that's strong enough

to protect us, but not so strong that it can abuse us? i think there's some areas here where we need to ask some hard questions and say, are there ways to achieve the same level of security with less intrusion? for example, it makes me nervous that the government has this huge database of all the phone numbers. david corn is the washington bureau chief of "mother jones" and an msnbc political analyst. i need a scorecard to keep track of who's on what side because there are some unusual alliances. break it down for me, david. >> well, you sure do. on issues like this, we often see it not fitting into the typical "d," "r," left/right mode. on the right, you have karl rove saying he's in favor of these surveillance programs, but you have glenn beck thinks the black helicopters are coming next. and on the democratic side, you have democrats who support the president, and then others like ron wyden, senator from oregon, and mark udall, senator from colorado, for years have been talking about this stuff the best they can saying there's a program out there, it's

problematic, we just can't tell you the details. but now we can. so that's why i don't think this is really a political crisis for the president or a political controversy because it doesn't cut along political lines. it's a policy matter. a very important one. and i think, you know, senator king got into this a little bit. we have secret government. we have the cia, the nsa and 12 or 13 other intelligence agencies that do things supposedly to protect us. we allow this to happen under the assumption that there is really good oversight and judicial review. >> but, david -- >> i don't think people are confident that's what's happening and thus we're not sure whether any of this stuff really is being done properly. >> how about the role of the private sector? take a look at how some of the tech companies named in the report are responding to this thus far with their statements. for example, there seems to be an underlying theme here. here's the response from facebook. "we do not provide any government organization with direct access to facebook

servers." then apple said, "we do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order." then yahoo!'s response, "yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. we do not provide the government with direct access." what's with the semantics of this direct access? >> it depends on what the meaning of is is and meaning of direct access is. so they use a third party go-between. i don't know. in a lot of the cases when the government comes to the companies with national security letters or other court orders, it prohibits the companies from talking about it and in some cases, as written about in the last day or two, it allows the companies to lie. so ultimately, i don't hold them at fault here. if the government comes to you and says, you must do this, maybe they can fight it in secret courts and so on. but it really is a matter of policy, and it's really the action from the government from the executive branch here that should get the attention and which should get the scrutiny and the oversight that we need. and i think one thing that's --

you and i have talked about this in the past. >> thank you for your observations. you can catch me every day on sirius channel 124, weekdays at 9:00 eastern. up next, michelle bak says she's the champion of repealing obama care. that's in the side show that is next. this is hardball. the place for politics.

ha! >> back to "hardball." now to the sideshow. first, stephen colbert's in memoriam video about michele bachmann's time in politics might have been premature. here she is on fox last night reflecting on her time in congress and what's in store for the future. >> i feel like i've done a lot in the eight years that i've been there. redeemed the time.

i was a very strong voice. taking on my own party. i pushed back on the bailout. i was the champion of get repealing obama care. and also dealing with this issue of the irs, i've been involved in that as a former irs attorney. on issue after issue, dealing he with the rise of islamic jihad. i've been there. i'm not quitting my public involvement. in fact, i may run for another public office. that could happen. but for right now i think i'm going to find a different perch in order to be able to weigh in on these matters. >> is she really the champion of repealing obama care? if after 37 attempts at repeal, obama care is still on the books? we also found out this week republican tom emmer, former minnesota state rep will run to fill bachmann's seat. now, if you were hoping for someone a bit more progressive than bachmann on things like gay marriage, don't look to emmer. during his run for governor back in 2010, emmer pushed for legislation that would have lowered the minimum wage for waiters and waitresses.

someone stopped by one of his town halls with a tip. >> i played hockey for a lot of years and that guy actually got me to jump a little bit. i love that. >> the minnesota "star tribune" reported there were 2,000 pennies in that bag. this could get interesting. next, are we reaching the point where we might need to add a 51st star to the american flag? turns out people in several rural republican dominated counties in colorado aren't satisfied with recent laws passed in their state. things like gun control and new regulations on oil and gas production. some county officials are ready to split off entirely and form a new state, the state of north colorado. >> we said we've got some ideas, do you want to listen to them? a petition to create a new state. and that new state would be the state of northern colorado. >> some will call it extreme. maybe aggressive. i would say, absolutely.

i think extreme times call for extreme actions. >> what i would say to those folks in denver that say, oh this doesn't have any chance, we're not going to take this seriously, beware. >> north colorado seems like a long shot. if it did come to fruition, though, it would be the least populated state in the country and among the reddest. next the republican nominee for virginia's lieutenant governor has been a sideshow regular these past couple of weeks. bishop e.w. jackson has a history of controversial comments, to say the least. comparing planned parenthood to the kkk, calling gay people icky. this week, comments from his 2008 book that took the cake. the subject, yoga. "the purpose of such meditation is to empty one's self. satan is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. that's why people serve satan without ever knowing it or deciding to." that didn't sit so well with a founder of a yoga franchise in washington who responded, "we have over 30,000 students in the d.c. area. thousands of them are practicing

with us every day. they're very kind. they don't have a demonic nature. i can attest for them, and for me, that satan is not in the vacuum of their soul." that's all for now. [ lane ] do you ever feel like you're growing old

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she risked it all when she decided to change the company's direction, and where is the money? an update on washington's efforts to regulate crowd funding. that's coming up next on "your business."