i spy. let's play "hardball." good evening. 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 learned that washington is keeping tabs on who has phoned whom and when, we're reminded this is a government headed by a liberal democratic president who has 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, 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, ez pass tags and metro cards track our every move and private companies know what cars we drive, what magazines reread, what websites we click upon. president obama gave you a forceful defense of the program and that's where we begin tonight. michelle richardson is with the aclu and michael owe han lan is a senior foreign policy fellow at the brookings institution. the latest revelation courtesy of "the washington post" involves an nsa program known as prism. it collected online data including video chats, photographs, and e-mails. americans were not directly targeted, "the post" reported,

but while going after foreign targets it did routinely collect a great deal of american content as well. a revelation about this new program comes a day after "the guardian" broke the news that 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 encrotchments on the privacy involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name atachld 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 of the major companies it 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. >> is it significant encroachment where none of your phone conversations are being listened to? >> michael, i agree with a lot of michelle's concern, but i also agree with the president that we need to be able to look for associations not the content monitored. we need to know, frankly, who is talking to terrorists and 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 that you can't have political vendettas or other things that happen out of this. for example, let's say that in the tracking of all of this we find out somebody goes to a porn site, some married man or something, and then the government decides 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 the personal infringement, embarrassment, vendetta, that i think we need to figure out how to prevent. i'm less worried about the very fact government looks at who is talking to whom.

i think we need to do that to stop terrorism. but we need strong safeguards so there can't be future abuses of power by government that decides to look at people and use potentially embarrassing information in ways that it never should have been able to do. >> michelle, you can understand the conversation we have tonight. god forbid there were an attack, had we analyze d it properly, could have prevented. that's what we're all seeking to stop, no? >> well, there's no evidence that these sorts of 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 and neither the past administration or this one has been able to give a single example how this information has caught a terrorist attack before it happens. >> but when you have disparate interests like mike richards and dianne feinstein both telling the american people -- in fact, i'll show it to you. yesterday congressman mike rogers put it frankly. he said these programs are necessary and, in fact, are

responsible for thwarting a terrorist attack. here it is. >> 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 there's no evidence they've been successful, you can listen to senator feinstein, to congressman rogers. these are the folks getting the information and they say it's worked. >> right, and you can listen to other senators who have said even though they sit on the senate intelligence committee, they haven't seen the evidence. the other question is, could we also catch these sorts of terrorist threats through far less intrusive methods? had 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 in 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. >> "the washington post" today quotes a career intelligence officer who provided them with information about the program. the officer said the program was a gross intrusion on privacy, quote. they quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type. but, michelle, i was sfrtruck b this comment posted on the website. 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 collate information from phone calls and the internet, just pass a law, pronto, that 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 bloggers' observation that up until this moment in time there's been no disruption of any american's day-to-day life by surrendering any privacy we're talking about? >> i don't think so and i don't think many people would assert these programs are directly preventing these sorts of attacks. look, that commenter absolutely can forfeit his privacy, but he's not in a place to forfeit mine or yours or anybody else's. that's the butte qui of our constitution. our rights are our rights. and people don't get to waive them for each other. >> michael, do you evaluate this debate in the context of what transpired on september 11 like

the blogger with an image in your head of folks jumping out of the twin towers? >> well, to some extent, but i think more how we found terrorists largely around the world. michelle is right. there probably haven't been that many plots stopped here. a lot of the ways we found terrorists around the world have been by establishing connections, by listening, by looking at who is talking to whom, by trying to see what the phone records are. and these are often cases in which the same civil liberties don't apply. of course, they aren't necessarily americans but 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 the things we've done since 9/11 where we've had a lot of success over the years in trying to find some of the al qaeda

operatives and others in places like afghanistan, iraq, pakistan, and so forth. bringing the debate back home, aga 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 abusive 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. >> thank you both very much. coming up, where is the outrage over all this government snooping? this is an unusual political story. republicans are praising the program as are most democrats and 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, that temple of journalism in washington, is honoring the most famous anchorman, ron, in honor

of the movie "the legend continues." sorry to see michele bachmann go? don't worry. the republican running for her seat is pretty entertaining himself. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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welcome back to "hardball." politics makes strange bedfellows sometimes that axiom

is never truer when it comes to security issues. when "the wall street journal" editorial defends him, you can be excused for what's going on. "the times" today wrote, quote, the administration has now lost all credibility 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 0 banks that constantly run the same kinds of data analysis. meanwhile, here is frequent obama critic senator lindsey graham defending the nsa programs. >> i'm a verizon customer. it doesn't bother me one bit are 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. >> elijah cummings told politico, quote, 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. when i was reading those first stories that came out, the impression was created the government was listening in on phone conversations. we now have established that's not the case. what they have are when calls are 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 guardianses, how do we produce and create a

government that's strong enough to protect us but not so strong that it can abuse us. >> thank you for your observations senator angus king. david corn is the washington bureau chief of mother jones and an msnbc political analyst. i need a scorecard to keep track of who is on what side. there are some unusual alliances. break it down for me. >> you sure do. on issues like this we often see it not fitting into the typical left/right mode. you have karl rove saying he's all in favor of these surveillance programs but yet glenn beck thinks the black helicopters are coming next. on the democratic side, democrats who are supportive of the president and others like ron wyden of oregon and the senator from colorado who 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 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, 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 i don't think people are confident that's what's happening and thus we're not sure whether any of this stuff 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 is the response from facebook, quote, 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 agencies requesting customer data must get a court order. and then yahoo! response. yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. what's with the semantics of this direct access? >> it depend on what the meaning of "is" is and direct access is. they use a third party go-between. i don't know. in a lot of these cases when the government comes to these companies with national security letters, other court orders, it often prohibits the companies from talking about it and in some cases has been written about in the last day or two, allows the companies to lie. so ultimately, you know, i don't hold them at fault here. if the government comes in and says you must do this, maybe you can fight it in the secret courts and so on. it is a matter of policy and it's the action from the government, from the executive branch here, that should get the attention and should get the

scrutiny and the oversight that we need. >> thank you for your observations. you can catch me every day on sirius xm's radio 124 weekdays at 9:00 eastern. up next, michele bachmann brags that she's the champion of repealing obama care. could someone tell her obama care is still around. that's in the sideshow which is next. this is "hardball," the place for politics. todd. i did? when visa signature asked everybody what upgraded experiences really mattered... you suggested luxury car service instead of "strength training with patrick willis." come on todd! flap them chicken wings. [ grunts ] well, i travel a lot and umm... [ male announcer ] at visa signature, every upgraded experience comes from listening to our cardholders. visa signature. your idea of what a card should be.

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back to "hardball." now to the sideshow. first, stephen colbert's 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 i've been there. i was a very strong voice taking on my own party.

i pushed back on the bailout. i was the champion of 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 with the rise of is am lalamic jihad. 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 found out republican tom emmer will run to fill bachmann's seat f. you were hoping for someone more progressive than bachmann on things like gay marriage, don't look to him. he's no stranger to crazy moments on the campaign trail. during his run for governor in 2012 he 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? it turns out people in several 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 we'll call extreme, maybe aggressive, and i would

say absolutely. i think extreme times call for extreme actions. >> what i would say to those folks in denver, this doesn't have any chance, we're not going to take this seriously, beware. >> if it did come to fruition, though, it would be the least populated state in the country and among the red edest. next, the republican nominee for virginia's lieutenant governor has been a sideshow regular these past couple of weeks. bischoff e.w. jackson compares planned parenthood to the kkk calling gay people icky and it was comments from his 2008 book that took the cake. the subject? yoga. quote, the purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. 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 the 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 danger, so i can attest for them and for me that satan is not in the vacuum of their soul. that's "hardball" for now. coming up next "your business" with j.j. ramberg. [ male announcer ] this is kevin. to prove to you that aleve is the better choice for him, he's agreed to give it up. that's today? [ male announcer ] we'll be with him all day as he goes back to taking tylenol. i was okay, but after lunch my knee started to hurt again. and now i've got to take more pills.

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small business owners confused and frustrated over health care choices under obama care. and how do you know when it's time to get rid of outdated inventory and restock? small business solutions to help turn profit coming up next on "your business."