Transcripts For CNNW CNN Newsroom With Carol Costello 201501

That. And someone you trust, youre right. Jim sciutto, thanks so much. The next hour of cnn newsroom starts now. Captions by vitac www. Vitac. Com good morning. Im carol costello. Thank you for joining me. We begin this hour with a failed 34r09 plot to attack the homeland and a would be terrorist in handcuffs. Chris cornell, a 20yearold man from the suburbs of cincinnati plachbd to travel to washington, d. C. Then set off pipe bombs at the capitol and gun down lawmakers and stach as they tried to escape. This morning his father is blasting the fbi accusing the agency of setting up his son. I spoke with john cornell a short time ago and asked him how his family is doing. My wife is just totally heartbroken. Ive gone from shock to heartbroken to almost having feelings of anger, and ill explain why. I know the fbi are saying they had an informant that christopher had supposedly made these statements on twitter. When you say informant, hes not an informant. What he was is a person that had criminal charges pending and is a snitch. He became a snitch for the fbi, and im telling you my son im not saying hes a saint. Hes 20 years old, going on 16. Hes a big kid. Hes never been outside of cincinnati other than to wrestle at some wrestling tournaments when he was a kid. Theres no way on the face of this earth that he plotted this by himself. Theres no way he could have came up with this. I know my son better than anyone. I believe that he met with this informant before the informant ever contacted the fbi. I believe this informant filled his head with a bunch of garbage. I believe he was tricked, tricked into correspondence afterwards. The informant supposedly came to my house and picked christopher up on a couple of occasions. He was probably wearing a wire. This guy, we never even really got a good look at him. Like i said my son christopher is 20 years old going on 16. John cornells son was arrested yesterday afternoon in the parking lot of a gun store near his home after he purchased semi automatic rifles and 600 rounds of ammunition. Alexandra field joins us from outside of that gun shop with more. Reporter carol, after months of watching Christopher Cornell authorities made their arrest two miles from his home in the parking lot of this gun shop. This is where they say he bought two weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. It was the final piece of evidence that they say led 24e78 to believe that his alleged talk about an attack wasnt just talk. An ohio man in custody for allegedly plotting an igs sis inspired attack. Of fushls say Christopher Lee cornell was planning to detonate pipe bombs around the building and shooting people as they fled. The 20yearold came to the fbis attention several months ago for alarming social media posts talking about violent jihad. In an undercover operation cornell told an informant he had contacts overseas he had aligned himself with isis and believed lawmakers were his enemy. A criminal complaint says cornell did not think he would receive authorization to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States but wanted to wage jihad on his own writing i believe we should meet up and make our own group in alliance with the Islamic State here and plan operations ourselves. He researched the targeted government buildings and the construction of pipe bombs. Wednesday cornell purchased two m15s and 600 rounds of ammunition from this gun store in cincinnati before fbi agents arrested him in the parking lot. Wkrc obtained this image of his arrest from a customer inside a nearby store. The Gun Store Owner who had been cooperating with authorities described cornells demeanor. There wasnt really anything about him that would have suggested he was involved in Something Like this. Reporter carol, Law Enforcement sources tell cnn because they were able to follow cornell for so many months as they did this investigation, lawmakers were never in any eminent danger. Carol . Alexandra field reporting. The fbi says Christopher Cornell under the name raheel ubaydah used social media to plot violence with a cocon spear tore who ended up being an fbi informant. Suspects like cornell using twitter has angered british Prime Minister David Cameron. Hell urge president obama to take tougher stands against it. Michelle kosinski cnn security and Intelligence Analyst robert bear and cnn social media expert samuel burke. Michelle mr. Cameron will try to get the president to pressure thighs americans companies. Thats a tall order, isnt it . It absolutely is. Its a tall order in america to get certain amounts of information from these companies. They protect privacy and make a big deal of doing so. In britain the government can simply ask certain telecoms to turn over information and records when needed. By law they have to do that. Im sure britain would love American Companies who do business in britain or have clients in britain to do the same. If those American Companies were to do that, they would be braking privacy laws in america. Right off the bat, thats really not going to happen. It did emerge just in the past year though that American Companies like google and like facebook do comply with nsa schemes that are private to turn over certain information when its asked for. Its not as if the nsa has direct access to a giant pool of information from these companies, but they do comply with it. Thats all kept very secret though. So its not as if theres a lot of detail out there or that these companies themselves are even talking about it. The other issue is encryption. Even with court orders when companies turn over information to Law Enforcement, often its encrypted form and Law Enforcement has had off the time get together the bottom of that. The british would like that encryption to also be curtailed. Again, its going to be very difficult to do this. Its this big battle between privacy and Law Enforcement needs, carol. And i want to pose the next question to samuel then. We hear all the time that extremists get ideas to become can be radicalized through social media. What does facebook and twitter do to prevent that . The problem is they have this huge pool to look at. Its becoming very difficult for them to look at that because they have so many use irs. Literally over a billion users in some cases. The other thing we have to think about is because of what the nsa does a lot of Technology Companies are trying to make it so that even if the gofrlt comes to them and says we have a warrant, we can look at this theyre making it so the information isnt there anymore, so it disappears after a certain amount of time or so its there but only the user themselves can decrypt that information, not them. Ill pose this question to robert bare. They slammed facebook for creating a safe haven for terrorists. Is that fair . Its something of a safe haven. But look at it from the Intelligence Officers perspective. If British Intelligence gchq couldnt monitor facebook and twitter accounts a lot of these people would come under the radar. Most cases in this country and britain are broken thanks to monitoring these social media sites. If you simply close these people down theyre going to find other ways to communicate and youd loose sight of them. If the cow of chi brothers had been up on twitter describing what they were going to do the french would have caught them. The fact s they went off social media. They were able to communicate and thats how the attack occurred without being stopped in advance. Michelle the british Prime Minister is saying sometimes facebook and twitter doesnt share information. You hear from samuel why. Hes even talking about possibly banning facebook and twitter if they dont turn over pert meant information. There is that argument on the other side that there are certain restrictions in place that if pedophiles or child pornography, if thats flagged, that that can be stopped. Its not like theres something that similar that goes into an alert for terrorist activity. Its extremely difficult to monitor. Its free speech also. There was a case about that recently if someone is saying something that looks like its leading to violence well that could be considered freedom of expression up and to a point. Who is really to determine that . So when you start digging in a little bit more and encroaching more on privacy, youre opening up a whole other can of worms as to how someone is going to interpret what someone said. This is going to be an argument that goes on for a very long time. Its hard to imagine that David Cameron is going to get what he wants. It is possible that the u. S. Will agree to work more closely with british Law Enforcement and ask these companies for information and maybe make a more clear case, put on a little bit more pressure that this information case by case is critical and important and could prevent violence on an imminent basis. I see samuel nodding his head. Two different sides going on. On the one hand the governments want us to store more information, want the companies to store information. On the other hand people like me reporting on Cyber Security hear from the cyber experts, we go on cnn and tell people we should start moving to new forms of communication where everything is deleted, that way we dont see hacks like sony. Imagine if those emails from sony had all been deleted once they were sent we had this erasable internet maybe one day and if somebody tried to hack you, there would be no information to be hacked. You have these two conflicting interests going on in Cyber Security experts really pushing for that socalled irascible internet. I hear what you say, bob,. At what point does it become dangerous . I dont think its dangerous. Isis has moved to mobile wifi. They simply drive along the road, take a shot satellite shot download their message on the internet. 40 minutes later they took it off. Theres nothing that National Security agency or gchg can do about it. We can talk about going after these big sites, its a drop in the bucket and these people are very sophisticated and they can manipulate the airwaves and get around our surveillance. There are black holes that we just cant see into. All right. I have to leave it there. Thanks to all of you, Michelle Kosinski samuel burke, bob baer. Still to come french investigators say they have new leads emerging from the days before the deadly siege on that Kosher Grocery store. Cnns jim sciutto is in paris. Reporter carol, the more investigators look the more the leads take them outside of france to other countries in europe the middle east syria, yemen. Well have more after this break. If you dont think beat con men at their own game when you think aarp, you dont know aarp. The Aarp Fraud Watch Network helps everyone protect themselves and their families against scams and identity theft. Find more real possibilities at aarp. Org possibilities. When the flu hits, its a really big deal. The aches. 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Reporter no question carol. The more they look the probe keeps expanding, not just beyond paris but into europe, into the middle east. Today add belgium to the list of countries under the microscope. Federal prosecutors tell us a man is under arrest in connection with arms trafficking and he could have ties to the killer inside that Kosher Grocery store. He recently bought a car from that terrorists girlfriend. Secretary of state john kerry will arrive in paris later today and will meet with the french president. Tomorrow kerry, the highest ranking u. S. Official to visit france since the attacks. There are funerals for two more victims today, both killed here at the Charlie Hebdo offices, one a cartoonist the second a Police Officer who was providing security for the staff of the magazine. We want to focus more on the investigation and we have cnns International Correspondent frederik pleitgen. The more investigators look at this you hear this and watch this web expanding beyond france belgium today and others. How far have raters traced this so far . Reporter they seem to be trying to follow the trace of the money and the weapons as well. If we go and try to create a timeline of what seems to have happened it seems Amedy Coulibaly seems to have gone to the border between france and belgium, taken out a loan for 7,000 and gone across the order to charleroi. On tuesday he acquired at least two weapons there. Then he seems to have gone back to paris. Sometime before the attack apparently on new years day, he went down with Hyatt Boumediene down to mad drin. There was a third person she took the flight to istanbul he went back to paris and perpetrated those attacks. We do not know whether the third person that they had with them in madrid might be the man that we saw on that Surveillance Video at istanbul airport when she arrived there or whether or not it might be this fourth suspect that investigators are looking for, some believe that a man linked to some scooter keys that were found in coulibalys apartment might be a man who might have driven him to the kosher supermarket when he perpetrated the attacks. This is spanning more and more countries and getion more and more complicated, this web of jihadists that perpetrated these attacks. Reporter its interesting, fred the accused arms seller there turned himself in gives the impression that he did not know what the attackers were going to do with those weapons, turning himself after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Reporter thats certainly possible. But from some media reports that im reading, it appears that this man is a known arms dealer. He seems to sell arms on the black market possibly to mafia organizations. Belgium has a big black market forearms. He apparently and this is according to media reports again, got quite afraid when he found out that couple bali was a jihadist and fearing for his own life as well but also learned of the attacks and turned himself in right afterward. Did he know who he was selling the arms to did he know what cowell bali had planned . We certainly dont know. He certainly went to the authorities himself, obviously at some point realizing that he was part of a very very large investigation into arguably the worst terror attack in frances modern day history. Reporter selling arms regardless for the reason bad enough. Thanks very much, frederik pleitgen. Carol, as you look at, this you had a lot of travel going on in the leadup to this attack. It seems people involved in this plat were making preparations to get out of dodge, get out of the country before the attack was under way so they could make it away from france possibly into syria and elsewhere before authorities could track them down. Jim sciutto, well check back with you in minutes. Ill be right back. Being my hero and my dad. Military families are thankful for many things. The legacy of usaa Auto Insurance could be one of them. Our worldclass service earned usaa the top spot in a study of the most recommended Large Companies in america. If youre current or former military, or their family, see if youre eligible to get an Auto Insurance quote. Thanks. [ male announcer ] fedex® has solutions to enable Global Commerce that can help your company grow steadily and quickly. Great job. mandarin cut it out. See you tomorrow. [meow mix jingle slowly and quietly plucks] right on cue. [cat meows] meow, meow, meow, meow. Its more than just a meal its meow mix mealtime. 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