♪ i'm a hard, hard worker... ♪ membership rallied millions of us on small business saturday to make shopping small, huge. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. in 2002 less than a year after the 9/11 attacks a guy named mark klein was working at at&t in san francisco. he worked for the city for about 20 years at that point. he worked in new york city and white plains, new york. he transferred to california. he worked for at&t there. and a couple of different cities but by summer of 2002 he was in san francisco for at&t. he was a lifer at at&t. he was a trusted long time employee. then one day while at work he got a message. watch this. this is from "front line" on pbs. >> in 2002, i was sitting at my work station one day.

and some e-mail came in saying that somebody from the national security agency, nsa, was going to come visit for some business. and an nsa representative showed up. at the door. i happened to be the one who opened the door. i let him in. >> he was doing background check for security clearance for one of our field engineers. he was going to be working at the folsom street office and they were building a secure building there. >> i heard from our manager, don, that he is working on some new room that's being built. so people start speculating, oh, what's this new room being built? >> mark cline got suspicious when the workperson constructing the room treated it as hush-hush. how do you know it isn't something already established for security purposes elsewhere?

>> they wouldn't need the nsa for that purpose. >> the odd thing about the whole room, of course, was only this one guy who had clearance from nsa could get in there. so that changed the whole context of what this is about. >> when that guy, mark cline, long time employee of at&t, when he got the message about this new fangled room being built, he was working in san francisco a few blocks away from where that mysterious new room was going to be constructed. if you know san francisco at all, the office getting the secret new room was here. that's what we've marked on the map. south of market on folsom street. 611 folsome street. this is 2002. mark whine did not officially work at that office. but the following year in 2003 it so happened he got transferred to that office. so now this thing that he had been so curious about, he was working in the same building where that secret room was in

operation secretly. the room was about 24 feet long and about 48 feet wide labeled as room 641 a. they had keys to all of the whole at&t complex on folsome street but they did not have the key to 641a. only the one guy who had the nsa clearance, only one guy had a key to that room and only he was allowed in there. mark cline later testified that at a certain point the air conditioner in 641a started dripping. started dripping so much that water from the secret room started leaking through the floor on to some expensive company equipment on the next floor down. but that one guy with the nsa clearance who was allowed to go into room 641a, he wasn't around. so there was nobody to go in and fix the problem and so they just left the air conditioner dripping for days.

until that guy came back. mark klein worked on the internet side. of at&t, not on the phone side. he was high-tech guy for at&t. it turned out that even though he was not allowed into that secret room in the building with the leaky air conditioner right. turns out that secret room had something to do with the kind of work he did for at&t. >> klein's job was to maintain at&t's internet service for several million customers, domestic and international all mixed together. >> we're talking billions of bits of data going across every second, right. klein shows how the room was connected to the nas room, by a special device called a splitter. >> so what they do with a splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data and those copies go down on the cable to the secret

room. >> what this thing was was a very full-scale device to take all communication, voice and data, and sent it wherever it was supposed to go, but also send it off to a little listening room. >> so what exactly was going on in that listening room? cline found clues at work one day. >> i came across these three documents. i brought them back to my desk. when i started looking at it, i looked at it more and finally i -- it dawned on me sort of all at once and i almost fell out of my chair. >> those documents were requiring documents, wiring diagrams. mark klein would later tell the washington post, this was sweeping up everything, vacuum cleaner style. nsa is getting everything. these are major pipes, that carry not just at&t's customers but everybody's. he told "the post" that was my ah-ha moment. they're sending the entire internet to the secret room.

and mark klein blew the whistle when he figured out they were sending the entire internet to the secret room. he sued and joined a lawsuit to make at&t stop what it was doing in room 641a in that office. that was 2006. meanwhile, a bunch of other stuff like this started to be exposed. "the new york times" warranted on warrantless wire tapping in late 2005. brave windsor connecticut librarians came forward about the national security letters they got ordering them about how people were using the library. "usa today" reported a piece about widespread indiscriminate vacuuming up of massive amounts of internet communication, piece by piece, starting to come out. people getting upset about it piece by piece did not make it go away. the result of people getting upset about it was that it was codified into law. so it became no longer illegal spying on people. it was the same spying on

people, but now, legalized. that was the change that happened once people got upset. they kept doing it, they just made it legal. so if you care about lawlessness, some progress was made there in that the law was changed to now allow for what was previously illegal behavior. if you only care about lawlessness maybe that's progress. if you cared about the substance of the law breaking, spying itself, really no progress was made. none of that stuff was ever dialed back after it was exposed. ever. the guy who saw them setting up the room in 2002 to copy the whole internet, he's right, that's what they were doing. and nothing stopped them from doing that since. as far as we know. it seems to be illegal when the government was doing that in room 641 a starting a decade ago. it got less legal all the time. when congress and bush brought the information above board.

one of the most contentious issue is what was happen to the companies who illegally company to illegal spying. could companies get sued for that, could they get in trouble for having done that when the government acted illegally. after much lobbying from the white house congress voted in 2008 to retroactively grant immunity to the telecom, phone companies, all the companies who acted illegally in helping the bush administration do what was only now being declared a legal thing. it appears they had done something illegal but congress made it so the companies couldn't be sued for it or prosecuted for it. now here we are. 2013 with yet more details exposed about them secretly copying the whole internet. everyday. this time, not just a secret room at at&t in san francisco. from "the guardian" on wednesday night. it's verizon. wall street journal says it is also at&t and sprint and unnamed internet service providers. and credit card companies.

from the guardian and washington post we have ideas of the prism program. sweeping up internet everything. your e-mails, your videos, your photos, your chats. for most of the big, famous internet companies, google, yahoo! microsoft, facebook, aol, youtube, apple. here is the thing though, this is -- this is the question of the day. the companies are all basically denying it. i mean, back in the day that at&t story, at&t just no commented on everything. we don't comment on matters of national security. when the initial leak this week was just verizon, they started off with no comment. take that with a grain of salt because we know from the leaked court ruling about verizon the source of the whole story, we know from that court ruling verizon is not allowed to tell anybody they're doing this thing that the government is telling them to do. so they're sworn to secrecy. they couldn't confirm it even if

they wanted to. that's verizon so far. for the internet companies, the prism program thing, it's not no comment, it's not we don't want to talk about this, it's not we can neither confirm nor deny this. for the internet companies it's no, we are not doing this. it's weird, right? the statement from the internet companies are weird. "the guardian" following on their reporting, with the tech companies talking on and off the record, executives said they never heard of prism until contacted by "the guardian" for comment on it. senior officials admitted being confused by the nsa revelations and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without the company's knowledge. without their knowledge? yahoo! says we do not provide the government with dissect -- direct access to our servers, systems or network. apple says we have never heard of prisp.

we do not provide government agencies with direct access to our servers. mark zuckerberg said, i want to respond personally to the outrageous reports of prism. facebook is not and has never given access to our servers. we have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or data in bulk like the one verizon reportedly received. and if we did, he says, we would fight it aggressively. we haven't heard of prism before yesterday. microsoft is the company that is described by the nsa in these documents as having been first into this program and the microsoft denial is really, really specific. maybe they thought they had to be specific since their whole ad campaign is about how much they love your privacy. check out the way and with the specificity of which microsoft denied it. microsoft said -- we provide

customer data only when we receive a subpoena to do so and never on a voluntary basis. we only do it when we're forced to. fine. if they're forcing you, who cares. there's more, they say, quote, in addition, we only ever comply for orders with requests about specific accounts or identifiers. if the government has a broader national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it. we're not doing that. the companies are responding to the leak saying not us, we're not doing it. it is happening against our will. we would have said no, given the chance to say no. here is the problem of understanding how that could be so. why is twitter not on the list of companies? why is twitter not on the list of companies that the nsa says it's gotten this thing. this is the slide that leaked, this april 2013 slide which

shows supposedly all of the companies the nsa says are in this program. yahoo, google, facebook, all the rest of them. twitter is just as big a company as all of those companies. twitter handled just as much as private information. including geo locating information as any of those companies. nsa and fbi want all of those other companies' data in the system but not twitter data? are they not interested in twitter data or did they ask twitter for access and twitter said no. they would not let them have it and they're not on the list but the other companies are. apple held on and apparently didn't get into the system until five years after microsoft got into the system. had apple been resisting? had apple been saying no before and stopped saying no and finally got brought in? did the nsa figure out a way to go around their saying no and get their data without them? the nsa presentation reported bragged that drop box was next. drop box would have its data in the program soon.

is that because nsa figured out how to wrangle drop box's data against their will or convinced drop box to say yes or are the companies going along with this or not? are they legally allowed to say if they are? are they lying? are they immune from any legal liability for lying about it? are they immune from legal liability in terms of how they treated their customers, how they behaved as a business because of that blanket immuneny that congress gave the industry back in 2008. you know, we know more today than we did at the beginning of this week but some of what has been told to us about the program and the businesses through which the government is getting all the private information that we thought was private, some of the story still does not make sense even at the most basic level. let's say you have a google account and you use gmail, right? if you are feeling mad this week about the fact that you just found out that all of your gmail is in a military computer somewhere, your government is

holding your gmail in a military computer somewhere and you want to know google is one of the people you should be mad at about that. i can't tell you. seems like google must have gone along with this for them to get that data, but google is saying not it, not our fault, we never said okay to this. objectively i have to tell you it is not clear. also not clear or at least still contested at this point is whether or not congress did sign off on all of this. some members of congress are saying, this is no big deal, we've known about this forever. this program has been going on for years. we knew about it. totally authorized. nothing to see here. the president took that line as well. this has been authorized by congress, every member of congress knew about this the president said today. but some of the people who supposedly knew about this, who supposedly were briefed on it and who authorized it and all the rest are now contesting that too. joining us is a mesh of the

united states senate outspoken on this issues, the senator from oregon, jeff merckly. >> great to be with us. >> so the white house and some members of congress and senate saying everybody in congress knew about this internet surveillan surveillance. everybody had been briefed on it. were you briefed on this prism program? >> no. i never heard of the prism program. i doubt that very many people outside the intelligence committee know anything about it. >> is it the sort of thing that should be briefed to the intelligence committee or other senators not on that committee should be told about? >> well it's deeply troubling. i can draw a parallel to the cell phone side and that's in a different section of the law under records. section 215. i had heard stories that were mentioned that there were shenanigans going on so i asked for a briefing on that program because we were talking about the extension of the patriot act, the extension of the fisa

authorization and so i went and got a briefing and the briefing suggested to me much what has been revealed through this document, it that there was a large vacuum cleaner at work. now i couldn't say that because i was now in a classified realm, but what i could do is interdeuce legislation to say, essentially, there appears to be some secret law and let's make that law public. let me explain more of what i mean. you have in the law, it has a provision that says that the government can collect a tangible things related to an investigation and says facts have to be shown and reasonable cause and so forth. very consistent with what you would see in the fourth amendment. but how is it possible? how is it possible that the authorization with those barriers gets translated not into specific searches but into a vast dragnet and so that's

what i wanted to understand. and what i found out, i said okay, there appears to be a court interpretation changing the common meaning of these words into something entirely different, let's get the court interpretation into the common realm. i proposed the secret law amendment that said these interpretations by a secret court will be declassified so we can have a debate in america about privacy and security. >> how much support did you get for that proposal. >> we had 30 plus members vote for the amendment but we also had the chair of the committee say that she supported the idea i was presenting and she would join me in lobbying for these secret opinions to be declassified. and that was senator feinstein. she joined with me and senator widen and udall as well and we wrote a letter in this case to the fisa court asking for declassification. and we didn't get back a yes.

>> i imagine that some of those types of proposals may be revisited now with public outcry with leaks this week. you may get more support from those proposals from fellow members in the senate. i don't know. i have to ask about the big picture here which is whether or not there can be effective oversight of secret programs? how can you effectively make the case for legislation when you can't explain the need for it because the need for it is classified? >> absolutely. that was the problem i was trying to tackle. by saying these opinions need to be declassified. i can't imagine how it is that there is -- that my cell phone information or your cell phone information is related to an investigation. a specific authorized investigation. i can't imagine how that is the case. but how can we contest it if we can't discuss publicly if we

can't know it is going on. certainly what the president said today stretched several things. he said congress had approved this program. well, if congress approved something with very specific standards, and those standards were secretly eviscerated, the guts were torn out of them so they were meaningless, then congress really hasn't approved the program at all. so i disagree with the president on that. when he said members had been briefed, well i was one of i think the few who sought a briefing on the cell phone side because of what i heard if the public press. but i don't think many others outside of the intelligence committee got that briefing. if the president believes a hundred members of congress knew the details of that program under section 215, i think he's wrong. i think few outside of the intelligence committee and in terms of the prism program which i don't -- i think very few ever heard of, i certainly never heard of it, i

doubt that -- that more than the intelligence community would have known about that. >> senator jeff merkley of oregon. thank you for explaining that. you have been more clear than anybody else commenting thus far and i think you made news here tonight by being so clear. thank you for being with us, sir. >> you're very welcome. thank you. earlier this week on this show, john stanton, from buzz feed, the guy with the big eyebrows and goatee, skull rings, he said one member of the united states senate was playing a jedi mind trick on the whole country. the evidence for that hypothesis is coming up. -whoo-hoo! [ sound fades ] at a moment like this, i'm glad i use tampax pearl. [ female announcer ] tampax pearl protects better. only tampax has a leakguard braid to help stop leaks before they happen. tampax pearl protects better.

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the sending angry letters stuffed with ricin community in america is apparently falling on hard times. a couple days ago the indictment of a martial art indictment in tupelo, mississippi, charged with sending ricin filled letters to president obama, to mississippi wicker and a state court judge. he is the guy who is inexplicably on-line rival is the elvis impersonator, who was originally suspected to be the letter sender. it seemed like he was set up to be the ricin lender center. -- ricin letter sender. and it wasn't him. >> i am a license certified reflexologist and i'm going to start with foot massage therapy

with christy, who will be my first client, and donate 100,000 hours to community service in northeast mississippi to you ladies who need foot massage therapy. >> so the elvis foot masseuse did not send the first round of ricin stuffed letters to president obama and other politicians. he was set up, allegedly, by a bitter on-line rival, the martial artist. the one who says he's in men sa. he has been charged, arrested and charged and he has pled not guilty to sending the ricin laced letters. that was yesterday. but today the second round of ricin letters. these ones sent again to president obama, also to new york mayor michael bloomberg, and to the office of his group, mayors against illegal guns. letters were postmarked from shreveport, louisiana. today in an arrest was made in connection with the second round of ricin letters but it is pretty much almost as weird as elvis impersonator foot massage martial artist internet rival one. maybe even weirder. the person arrested is shannon

rogers guest richardson of new boston, texas. held at the federal court in texarkana, texas. here's the weird part, the woman arrested today originally called the fbi about the ricin letters, called the fbi to blame her husband for them. she said she found something suspicious in her frige and found ricin searches on their shared computer so she called to nark out her husband. when she heard about the ricin laced letters. now the fbi said actually it was her. yes, if you must know, the woman arrested and charged is an actress whose most prominent in role was her turn in "the walking dead" where she played a brain eating blood thirst zombie. the actor with zombie on her resume who tried to blame her husband is under arrest. the elvis impersonator is free. the the martial artist who is supposedly in mensa is arrested. but pleading not guilty and hey

it turns out that stories about people who send the president angry letters stuffed with poison, tend to be a little -- yeah. who knew. what are you doing? oh, hey. using night-vision goggles to keep an eye on my spicy buffalo wheat thins to make sure nobody touches them. who's gonna take your wheat thins? um, i don't know. an intruder, the dog, bigfoot, ted from next door. hey, could you get the light? i love you. [ loud crash ] what is going on?! honey, i was close! it's a yeti!

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the '08 presidential campaign, barack obama, hillary clinton, john mccain, sarah palin, one of the most compelling news stories in the history of politics even through those involved. we will probably never see the likes of that again.

except that one of the most unexpected, most incredible stories from within that campaign, has just come to light now. at the most awkward possible moment in the course of the obama presidency. it is from the campaign we are learning about it tonight. you will not believe it. that's coming up. stay tuned. ♪ [ male announcer ] moving object detection. ♪ blind spot warning. ♪ lane departure warning. safety, down to an art. the nissan altima with safety shield technologies. nissan. innovation that excites.

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news. whether or not you live in the great state of new jersey, the weather in new jersey is suddenly national political news. here is the weather forecast for this coming weekend. rain, rain, rain, rain. at this point it is expected to rain a bunch. good for the garden state. and unless we are talking about some huge weather disaster, which this isn't, a rainy local weather forecast for the weekend usually doesn't carry any political consequences with it. but right now, new jersey's rainy weather forecast for this weekend matters. because this weekend is the last opportunity that new jersey residents have to get themselves on the ballot to become the state's next u.s. senator. monday's the deadline. monday's the filing deadline in new jersey to get on the ballot for the state's open senate seat. each potential candidate has to submit a petition by monday containing a thousand signatures in order to qualify for the

ballot. so everybody who wants to be on the ballot will be out there collecting their signatures in the rain. the senate seat is open because earlier this week long time new jersey senator frank lautenberg passed away at the age of 89. two of the state's democratic congressmen rush holt and frank pallone announced they intend to run for that seat. nbc news has confirmed that newark's popular mayor, corey booker will make his announcement he's getting in tomorrow. for anybody else planning to run, better hurry. signatures due on monday. please bring an umbrella. in terms of what is happening with the senate seat, chris christie picked his long time friend and the state's attorney general jeff chiesa to replace senator lautenberg. forgive me for saying so, i think governor christie did a respectable thing here, picked a guy to fill that seat who is going to be a placeholder. mr. chiesa says he will not run for that senate seat in the election this fall. he won't run. just a place holder to keep it

safe until the residents of new jersey can elect somebody new. the governor of massachusetts did a similar thing this year when he replaced john kerry in the senate with somebody who said he wouldn't run for the seat. same thing in delaware, the governor of delaware picking a place holder in 2009 when joe biden left the senate to become vice president, picking vice they president candidates. it is a decent thing to do, democracy wise. good for chris christie doing the same thing here. he did not have to do it that way but he did. that said, that quite honorable decision stands along side the embarrassing and decision the governor made here overall when he decided to order new jersey taxpayers to fork over $12 million they didn't have to spend to hold a special election for that this coming october. there's already an election scheduled to happen just a few weeks later. chris christie is on that one. ballot for reelection november 5. but rather than have that senate election the same day, saving the $12 million bucks it

costs to hold an election, rather than putting both elections on the same day on the same ballot, chris christie decided to have the senate election three weeks earlier on wednesday, october 16th, instead. why hold a whole separate election in october on a wednesday when you're about to do one anyway three weeks in november? because -- mayor christie's -- governor christie's advisers are conceding that adding that senate contest to his november 5th election would have risked energizing democrats. putting a popular democrat like say cory booker on the ballot could potentially bring lots of democrats to the polls which could hurt chris christie's re-election margin or chances of getting re-elected. let's make the taxpayers spend $12 million to not do that. it is a surprisingly chicken move by the supposed tough guy, chris christie. one that people probably won't forget in new jersey in the short term or in 2016 in the long-term.

until new jersey residents get a chance to vote in the random wednesday special october election, though, this will be new jersey's new senator and while not be in d.c. long term, jeff chiesa will be there long enough to vote on big stuff. just a few days before he arrives at the senate, senate today started debating immigration reform. frank lautenberg, the democrat, was a sure vote in favor of immigration reform. new jersey's brand new place holder republican senator on the other hand, for him he says the jury is still out. >> i think the first thing we have to do is make sure borders are secure because i come from a background of law enforcement. from there, this is new to me. so i will work with my colleagues and discuss with them the thing that makes the most stens for the people i represent. >> senator chiesa, says he is eager to speak to colleagues

about immigration reform. someone should tell him before he gets there, those colleagues, if they care about immigration reform, might be busy trying to save it from completely falling apart because it seems like it's falling apart. republicans have all sort of agreed in the months after the presidential election that they really, really need to do immigration reform and there is a pretty clear reason why they all feel that way. you're looking at it. republicans lost the latino vote in the 2012 election by 44 points. yeah, they need to do something. something, at least take a first step to try to win back those votes and maybe immigration reform will be the ticket. the guy who took the leads was the ambitious florida senators -- senator marco rubio. essentially his job to help craft an immigration gill that could be sold to his fellow republicans and conservative types across the country that like to make hay over issues like this. just as immigration reform is finally hitting the senate floor

marco rubio says he doesn't think he has the republican votes that needs to order to pass it in the senate, oh, by the way, he is saying maybe he won't even vote for it now. his own bill. senator rubio backed off from that stance but today his republican colleagues got the first chance to stop immigration reform from happening. over in the house this week on the issue of immigration, republicans were busy voting on mass, voting as a block yesterday, to deny young undocumented immy grants the opportunity to live and work in this country. the architect of that legislation that almost got universal republican support has been working for months to derail immigration reform in the senate overall. republicans all sort of agreed. at least most of them agreed that immigration reform was something they needed to do if only for their own electoral survival. but now, what happened? [ phil ]e joint pain and stiffness... accomplishing even little things can become major victories. i'm phil mickelson, pro golfer. when i was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, my rheumatologist prescribed enbrel

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or more people objecting than we're expected? >> you're seeing that play out in the senate right now. what you saw on the floor of the senate with sessionings objecting was a concession to jeff sessions leading the charge against immigration in the senate.

democrats agree to give him the floor for a few hours today. in exchange for being able to vote early next week to start the debate on the legislation itself. but what you're going to see next is a turn to the house of representatives where all eyes are going to be on speaker john boehner. who is going to have to decide that very question. he has a lot of control over what happens on the floor of the house. more so than in the senate for the leadership over there. and he's going to have to weigh, does he want to prioritize what national republican leaders think is best for the future of the party or does he need to prioritize his own survival as speaker of the house. which could have a revolt from all of these tea party and right wing conservatives that have been elected over the last two election cycles. >> casey, since the last election we've seen more than a handful of cases where things have been essentially allowed by the republicans, allowed by john baner to pass out of the house with all the democrats and almost all of the democrats and some minority of republicans.

there was an informal rule against the republicans letting anything like that happen for a long time and now they seem to have slipped and they sometimes let those things pass. is john boehner getting backlash against that as a tactic? are the hardliners telling him to stop doing things that way anymore? >> he's absolutely seen dbacklah and the post reported this week that, in fact, several of the conservative house republicans have proposed a resolution to essentially limit boehner's power to do that. it would say as part of the republican conference, he would have to have a majority of the majority in order to put a bill on the floor. and that's what, you know, he's made those decisions himself and that is something that could potentially have repercussions beyond the debate, with budget and fiscal grand bargain and variety of other things. >> debt ceiling and student loans and everything. well, on the issue of the

senate, obviously marco rubio has been tip of the spear here for the republicans in terms of trying to come up with a bill that republicans can support. early on that meant him going on conservative media and lobbying conservative media host. they should also support this, they should not whip this vote from the conservative side against republicans and hold it against them. in the last couple weeks we've seen marco rubio doing sun servetive media hits where he's talking the bill down, saying it's a bad bill, floating the idea he would vote against it himself. john stanton was here saying we should see what marco rubio is doing is a jedi mind trick and he still supporting immigration reform. do you know what's going on there? >> marco rubio has hung his political future on the success of immigration reform. what is going to be in the bill. no matter what that is, you're going to see marco rubio pushing as hard as he can to get a bill passed and that's what he told reporters on the hill earlier

this week. he said look, like, i signed up to be the person who was going to sell this to republicans and i still plan to do that. but i need this bill to be what they need it to be and their focused particularly right now on border security provisions and how the trigger would work. right now under the bill that passed out of the committee, the department of homeland security has to write a plan that says this is how we're going to secure the border and that's not good enough for some republicans who want to see either action taken, not just a plan written, or they want congress to be able to certify that the border has been secured before people are able to obtain legal status to allow them to apply for a green card. >> this is one of those things about which there has been so much punditry expended over the years, see the rubber hit the road on this in congress and on capitol hill next week will be fascinating. nbc political reporter casey hunt, thanks very much for being here. nice to have you here. >> thanks, rachel.

>> the unbelievable true story of the 2008 presidential election you have not heard before is coming up next. this is a crazy story. stick around. we went out and asked people a simple question: how old is the oldest person you've known? we gave people a sticker and had them show us. we learned a lot of us have known someone who's lived well into their 90s. and that's a great thing. but even though we're living longer, one thing that hasn't changed much is the official retirement age. ♪ the question is how do you make sure you have the money you need to enjoy all of these years. ♪ where we've switched their fruits and veggies with produce from walmart. it's a fresh-over. that's great. tastes like you just picked them. so far, it's about the best strawberry i've had this year. walmart works directly with growers to get you

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♪ tell jokes 'til we got hiccups? ♪ ♪ or read or draw or dance or just sit still ♪ ♪ ♪ it could be wonderfilled ♪ this is a crazy story. in the middle of the presidential campaign in 2008, mccain versus obama, that summer, the mccain campaign was contacted by a senior chinese diplomat, top mccain policy adviser working on the campaign got a call from a senior chinese diplomat in washington. the diplomat was calling to complain about a letter that john mccain had written to the newly elected president of taiwan. taiwan and china are like this. john mccain, presidential candidate, had written a friendly letter to the newly elected president of taiwan. china thought the tone of the letter was way to friendly and called the mccain campaign to

complain. here's the problem. the letter hadn't been sent yet! the letter existed only in draft form on one of the mccain campaign's computers. so how did china know what the letter said. nbc news obtained the letter. this is what it looks like, but who cares what's in the letter. the question is, how did the official in the chinese government get any internal, unsent document from the mccain campaign! turns out it wasn't just the mccain campaign, it was obama campaign, too. david plouffe, the campaign manager in 2008, he got a phone call from the white house that summer telling him that something bad was going on. watch. >> josh bolden calls, i assume to talk about transition matters. he says we have reason to believe your campaign systems have been penetrated. we think by a foreign entity. he did not name countries at that time, if i recall, and said we need to get the fbi and law

enforcement officials involved in investigating this. he did say it's not just your campaign, we have reason to believe and we'll tell the mccain campaign the same thing, they tried to penetrate their systems as well. >> story of the obama campaign and mccain campaigns being hacked into during the campaign in 2008. that overall story was known before, but we didn't know the extent nor did we know who did the hacking. now we do. u.s. officials tell michael isikoff it was definitely the chinese government. michael isikoff getting this news last night from a u.s. official on the eve of the new leader of china visiting the united states today to meet one on one with president obama. this is going to be their first meeting since the new chinese president got that job back in march. the one-on-one meetings are scheduled for five hours over the course of two days happening at a giant california desert estate near palm springs called sunnylands. the estate has hosted seven

previous presidents, including richard nixon who visited sunnylands shortly after he resigned the presidency because of watergate scandal. nixon signed the sunnilands guest book, when you're down, you find out who your real friends are. but in terms of friendship, imagine the trust level between president obama and the head of the government that hacked into his campaign computers even before he was president. maybe because of that, president obama will be spending the night at the sunnylands estate tonight, but the chinese president will not. the chinese president will be staying the night at a nearby hotel, maybe less buggy there, you know what i mean? here, the u.s. government officials timed the tip to michael isikoff it was the chinese government that hacked campaigns in 2008, they timed that tip to coincide with the first meeting of the new chinese president with president obama. meanwhile, in china, the marvelously coincidental timing there was for something different. the chinese government on the occasion of the visit to the u.s. decided to give passports to the family members of this high profile chinese dissident

who took refuge in our country from chinese persecution. and his mother and brother can visit him here, all of a sudden because of this, this meeting. this was the scene in palm springs. just about 90 minutes ago. president obama greeting the chinese president and then they sat down for the first of their big, important meetings. and this is kind of how these things are supposed to go on the sidelines of meetings, right? on the occasion of a high profile meeting with the president of the united states, on that occasion, you know what, kindnesses towards dissidents should suddenly become possible. other countries should think we expect that. contact with us, desire for good relations with us should turn other countries towards better civil rights policies, because that's what we are supposed to stand for. so the timing is tough now, right? we like to think of ourselves as the good guys, the international cost of doing business with the united states of america is that you have to be less evil. it would be a lot easier for the united states to pull off the attempted embarrassment over the

chinese government over them hacking our politicians were it not for the revelations flooding the media this week about our own government mercilessly hacking us. "weekends with alex witt" starts now. flash flooding and torrential rains, the remnants of tropical storm andrea up and down the east coast. in minutes a live update. the truth about the u.s. government's snooping. what do they know and what are they looking for? a report that may open your eyes on the spying. two days away, the george zimmerman trial begins monday but a pretrial hearing is not over, it's on again today. what's the hangup? super power summit, a late night meeting between president obama and chinese leader one key topic stood out there. good morning, everyone. welcome to "weekends with alex witt."