joining me here in washington to discuss the fallout, dana bash and jill dougherty, tom fuentes. tom, let me start with you. he is in transit in moscow. so he's officially not in russia since he's passing through the airport. the united states government has made clear it wants mr. snowden rushed. if the russian government wanted to cooperate, is there any question in your mind they could grab him and turn him over is this. >> the question is whether he's illegally in russia. if his passport wasn't revoked, there is no requirement for the russians to turn help back over to the u.s.. >> no requirement. >> no requirement to hold him -- well, there would be no legal authority to hold him. if in fact state department did revoke his passport last week which i heard they did, then he's traveling around unless wikileaks or someone has somehow arranged for him to have a passport from another country that none of us are aware of at this point, but if the u.s. passport was his only passport, then he's not traveling legally and even though he's technically not entered through his passport co

. >> and i want to bring in tom fuentes. m, in dealing with these countries, here you have a man who there aare espionage charge against him. we want him back in the u.s.. cuba, ecuador sounds like fertile territory. how you do you get him back in the u.s.? >> my understanding is his passport was revoked by state department last week. if that's true, he'll have difficulty flying around unless one of these organizations that's backing him such as wikileaks has made arrangements some hugh to get another country to give him a passport so that he has a lawful travel document. but normally if you'll enter a country especially if they require a visa, they also require a passport that will be valid for at least six months following the date of the entry. so if his passports has been revoked, he'll have problems flying around to wherever he wants to go. >> except for we do know that he flu from hong kong to moscow. >> he may have gotten out of there. they may not have known it at the time. we're not sure if the state department had a

. >>> cnn law enforcement analyst tom fuentes is joining us now. tom, this is pretty extraordinary. the u.s. tried a few things. it didn't work in terms of trying to get the cooperation of hong kong. but at this juncture, how concerned or worried are national security personnel about what kind of information he may provide to, say, russia while he is there waiting his next step? >> hi, fred. i'm not sure that they're too worried about how many secrets he has with him or in his possession. obviously, he can tell them a lot of information about how extensive the u.s. surveillance of other countries has become, including russia, but i think right now it's a political football or he's a political football for all of the countries that we're talking about. now, not so sure that a back channel deal wasn't struck with china and hong kong to say, look, you know, they're not going to grant him asylum and at the same time not going to deport him back to the u.s. so they'll just let him move on and let china off the hook for not having to decide whether or not to grant him asylum and make him

phil doherty, tom fuentes and patrick ottoman in havana, cuba. equador, why would edward snowden find safe haven there? >> well, you have to look at julien essange. there is a natural connection. in fact, he had advised snowden to go to some type of latin american country. relations between the u.s. and ecuador aren't that bad really, except there is that connection and the government, the president of ecuador is, you could call him in a sense a person who was tight with mr. chavez, now dead, who was the former president of venezuela. so there are connections there. we'll just have to see. i have to point out, this debate over how snowden got from hong kong to russia, et cetera, is still very open. in fact the department of justice saying that it is disappointed and disagrees. this just came out. disappointed and disagrees with the decision by hong kong to let him go and says they were in communication ever since the 10th and never heard any type of word back from the hong kong authorities that everything was not in order. that was the reason the

tom fuentes is cnn's law enforcement analyst and former fbi assistant director. s now through skype. tom, i really want to ask you first, unpack this for me. what is data mining? what are they doing with all of this information they are collecting? >> data mine something basically like coal mining. they are getting shovel fulls of information an putting it in a big bucket 57and it is sitting there until they need it to analyze in terms of a given phone number, who that number calls or is receiving calls from once there is a suspicion about that number or the person who subscribes to that number. right now we are talking about, it sounds like, the phone companies -- at least verizon in this case, is turning over probably 80 million to 100 million phone calls per day to nsa and they're going into nsa's computer system for storage. later if there is a particular number that comes up as suspicion or an individual that comes under investigation for a possible being involved with terrorism, let's say, then they can go to that number and analyze all of the calls to and f

. >> tom fuentes is joining us from florida and elise. how is the government going to handle this. talk to me about the extradition to hong kong. >> it raises a lot of questions as to why he chose hong kong. he said that he chose the city because they have what he called a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent and he thought this was one of the few places that he could resist, you know, the extradition of the u.s. government. the u.s. does have an extradition treaty with hong kong. it was signed in 1996 before the handover from the british back to the chinese, but the chinese did stipulate when the treaty was signed. they were a party to the treaty. the hong kong government, the government, it belongs to china will decide whether to extradite it. certainly it is interesting. what is going to happen with the chinese? this could provide a lot of intelligence to the chinese. there are all right calls for his extradition. likely this gentleman will face extradition to the united states and that's a unpredictable process for washington. it remains to be s

let's bring in tom fuentes fr former assistant director with the fbi. tom, first of all, why get these records? huge numbers of phone records talking about who made the calls, where they are made, and the duration. how is this helpful to intelligence? >> good morning, john. i think the reason they want to have that is if a phone number comes up being connected to someone of suspicion they can go back and look at all of the number that is the phone number called or was called by, how long the calls were, what location the calls were made from, that copy of information. it's not that someone or some group of analysts can sit there and monitor 50 million phone calls going through the computers. but it would create the ability to go back and see if you could connect phone calls. in the case of the boston bombing, for example, to go back to tamerlan's phone records, tamerlan tsarnaev and look at who he called, who called him even locally this within the united states and go back for a certain period of time. te normally the phone companies wouldn't maintain t

>> i want to bring in tom fuentes now. a former assistant director of the fbi and now cnn's law enforcement analyst. so, sources tell us that there is no evidence that snowden has any ties to foreign governments or that he tried to sell secrets. what is your take? do you see anything different than that? >> morning, brianna. i think right now we don't know if he does or doesn't. it's still going it be a mystery. i think the intelligence community is still trying to figure out what exactly he may have taken. you know, we know what kind of accesses he had as a technician to keep these systems running, but what exactly could he have had access to. could he have removed from the system somehow the documents relating to the program, to the court order. so, i think there's kind of several mysteries here. how much damage could he have done or is he still in the process of doing based on what he took, what he could have taken and who he has given it to since he took it. >> one of the things he now revealed is the u.s. hacking chin

thank you, tom fuentes. you're welcome, don. >>> coming up, a realty tv show taping a police raid when the officer shoot and kills a 7-year-old girl. >>> a new twist involving the deaths in room 225. three people found dead inside the same hotel room weeks apart. we found out it was because of carbon monoxide. but now we're learning the medical examiner knew about the problem with room 225. about howe money on car insurance with geico... yeah, a little bit more of the lime green love yeah... or letting them know they can reach geico 24/7 using the latest technology. go on, slather it all over. don't hold back, go on... it's these high-definition televisions, i'll tell ya, they show every wrinkle. geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. where over seventy-five percent of store management started as i'm the next american success story. working for a company hourly associates. there's opportunity here. i can use walmart's education benefits to get a degree, maybe work in

tom fuentes, the advisor for cnn, one of the experts on cnn in these legal matters says it might be that the united states and china agreed on the side, behind the scenes, that they should simply let him go because the chinese would be put in a difficult situation of having to, you know, stop him and that would be bad for china. it is really complex. and it is bad for certainly the image of the united states politically in many other ways internationally. >> the state department correspondent, jill doherty, joining us from washington. appreciate that. we're talking about a real diplomatic nightmare as well as major security concerns over this. let's check in with dan lothian from the white house. clearly, the white house must be very frustrated and must be quite embarrassed as well that the attempts were made to try to get edward snowden to stay in hong kong until united states authorities could somehow retrieve him and then this would happen. >> reporter: certainly, this is a diplomatic headache for the white house. you are correct in saying that the administration seemed fairly confide

. >> tom fuentes, bob baer, jeffrey toobin. >>> coming up, i'm going to talk to daniel ellsberg, hisole in the pentagon papers leak. >>> plus more developments in the deadly mass shooting in california. the details right after this. like a milk-bone biscuit. ♪ say it with milk-bone. [ mom ] for big girl jobs there's bounty select-a-size. it's the smaller powerful sheet. one select-a-size sheet of bounty is 50% more absorbent than a full size sheet of the leading ordinary brand. use less with bounty select-a-size. ...and we inspected his brakes for free. -free is good. -free is very good. [ male announcer ] now get 50% off brake pads and shoes at meineke. >>> back to our breaking news in a moment. first other news. prayers across south africa today for former president nelson mandela. mandela is in the hospital with pneumonia. the 94-year-old was rushed there early yesterday. this is the fourth time he has been hospitalized since december. very little information has been released since yesterday when he learned, when we learned he was in serious but stable condition. >>> the death to

. >> tom fuentes, is the biggest problem here new technology in the sense this wouldn't have been evenn issue 15 years ago, because even if he wanted to, there wouldn't have been an internet or any of that kind of stuff available to invade. so it's kind of a symptom, really, of modern times, isn't it? >> well, that's absolutely true, you would not have had this capability. i know during my career with the fbi, we didn't have this ability to get such huge quantities of data so quickly. but don't forget also, piers, these companies have the data so whether or not it ends up in an nsa data base somewhere so that it can be reviewed at a future time if an issue comes up, all of these companies have that. >> good point. >> they're tracking your spending every day. they're tracking everything, where you go, what you do now. when you get on your computer tonight, when you get home on your personal computer, those popup ads come up for you. they're geared toward the way you've spent money on the internet, the way you've shopped, the sites that you've visited. these companies already have that.

tom fuentes, laurie segall, the white house is doing damage control. the obama administration is pushing back against criticism of the government snooping on people's phone calls and internet use. they say americans' safety has been put at risk by the leaks. i want to bring in cnn's renee marsh right now. she's in washington. good morning to you. >> good morning, alison. >> first, i was going to ask you at this point what's the reaction from the white house about these facebook revelations? >> well, so far at this point no reaction from the obama administration about this particular issue, but to be honest it would seem the administration is okay with the release of this information because in the statements that we received from these tech companies, they say that they essentially got the green light from the government to release this information, but there are still limits to what the federal government is allowing companies like facebook and microsoft to reveal to its users. now, the thousands of requests that they've received for data information,

let's bring in cnn's law enforcement analyst tom fuentes in washington.d have been great in english. we know what it meant. it just meant you have to have specific guidelines in order to get this information. >> right. >> is the intelligence community trying to do damage control here? >> i think they are trying to clarify to help people better understand what the real issue is. the data mining we're talking about is like taking a hundred million records a day from the phone company and putting them in a warehouse. if some issue comes up, go to the particular file, pull it off the shelf, and take a look at someone, some particular number to do an investigation. so, you know, no one is in a position to be monitoring the volume that we're talking about. if you add the other phone companies under the assumption they're probably also providing similar data you could be looking at close to a billion records a day being transmitted to nsa, of storage by nsa for a future look. there are not enough analysts in the world much less the u.s. government to analyze a b

about what's going on with jeffrey toobin, senior legal analyst, former federal prosecutor, and tom 15 to fuentenforcement january lift. you suggested two weeks ago that the u.s. should revoke his passport, putting enormous pressure on thok prevent him from leaving -- hong kong to prevent him from leaving. >> i don't know if they were having back channel discussions and didn't want to force the chinese to make that decision. again, if they had brought the charges immediately -- here's a guy on public television telling the world that he committed felonies. so they could have charged based on the comments that me made, admissions he made, and then immediately notify the state -- >> why did they have to put it under seal and then spend another week before they released him? >> yeah. ten billion people in the world know he's committed these felonies and the charges were sealed. i have no question, no idea why -- why seal them, what the benefit. normally you seal charges because you don't want the bad guy to know you're looking for him and to escape. this is clear, he's beyond that when he was maki