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Don t know the background. they are willing it s interesting because of course they are the leaders of the right wing faction, the conservative faction of the republican party which today brought down the all important farm bill for the republicans thank you very much. but what they have done as leaders as of a conservative republican movement they have said we re setting that aside traditionally we stand for law and order. and we are danging the law and order institutions of the country in favor of simply defending the president. these guys are skating close i think to the letter of the law and to ethical behavior by demanding information from an ongoing investigation from the fbi. and they are certainly doing profound, profound damage to the ability of the fbi in the future to do its job and the ability of the cia to recruit human agents around the world, because it turns out that a couple of politically motivated congressman might be able to out you and it s game over and you re s ....
The election process. joining me now is nbc s intelligence and national security s correspondent ken dilanian. thank you for being here again. donald trump consistently questioned reports the russians are behind the hacks. how does intelligence prove it was, in fact, russia? we don t completely know the answer to that, melissa. it s probably a good thing we don t, because it involves sensitive sources and methods, but it was interesting to hear president obama say yesterday he expects the american public to take the intelligence community at its word about this. i can relate. i talk to these people a lot. they are patriotic americans and non-political bought whole cadre of people who aren t willing to accept this intelligence and at some point there has to be a measure of proof offered. it s difficult to do. we re talking sensitive sources and methods. again, human agents who risk their lives to give information to intelligence officers or communications intercepts. for example, if t ....
that s really what it s going to be about, people that know something, they tell something, they pass it along. let s speak about, because i know you know the french people well and we are watching what s happening in their version of congress and in the lower part of parliament today, they passed hollande s request to move on this three-month state of emergency. it will move on to the senate where it is widely expected to pass as well. but is that going to be enough? no. i think don touched on exactly the right thing. the state of emergency, all that is about more surveillance, more electronic surveillance, that kind of thing. but what you really need is people penetrating these organizations. that s a difficult thing to do but not impossible. if you think that they are recruiting hundreds or maybe even thousands of people every month, it ought to be possible to penetrate daesh, as we will call it, with a lot of human resources, a lot of human agents. that has been done but it s d ....
We have to chase these guys when they go to different channels and our hope is they don t go to others that are inaccessible to us. but the u.s. expected to see al qaeda react when they realized communication had been compromised. they know there s a breach somewhere. they have got to find it. they have got to close it down. reporter: cyberexpert jim lewis says it s not easy for the u.s. to access these systems. it can take a combination of sfilan surveillance, hacking and human agents. once you acquire them you milk them for all they are worth and when they switch it could take months to access it. reporter: he said, look. al qaeda go away from channels. sometimes other things happen in the world that force them back on to channels that the u.s. intelligence community has better access to. he says it s going to be at least six months before they know that al qaeda has lost ....
Puzzle palace. joining me now is journalist james bamford, author of three books on the nsa, including the most recent, the shadow factory: the nsa are from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on america. thanks so much for being here. my pleasure, mara. few people outside of the nsa understand the agency better than you. can you describe some of its operations, the scale of what happens there? sure. it s a mammoth agency. the largest intelligence agency on earth. and its job is to collect intelligence via electronics, whether it s telephone calls, e-mail, whatever kind of electronic information there is, nsa s job is basically to collect it, where the cia is basically assigned the job of developing human agents. nsa s job is eavesdropping. now, in a new profile of the nsa director general keith alexander you write, never before has anyone in america s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power. ....