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Process of difficult anguished searches for them. we have nbc news anchor lester holt. thank you for joining us. i'm a big fan and greg fife, ntsb investigator and michael lighter. i'll start with you, mike, this story has been a reminder of how precarious international travel security can be. what are the specific vulnerabilities that are revealed here? >> one thing i would stress, ronan, we don't know if any of those vulenerabilities led to the result that we have but clearly highlighted weaknesses in how lost and stolen passports are reported and the extent to which that information is real...

They were heading towards the andaman islands, is there any possibility they could have landed? >> greg and i were speaking with and michael as well. i think as a journalist, i say getting too far into this whole speculation thing. but we've got nothing after a week here. we crossed into far fetched land. everything is on the table, including that possibility. it's a big jet. what would you figure, greg, 7,000, 8,000 feet of runway? >> easily. >> assuming he's burned off his fuel -- >> that's not present on the andaman islands? >> no. one of the things that has searchers moving in the area, on...

Of his not being afforded legitimate channels due to his status as a contractor. pulling back, 1.1 million u.s. government contractors have some kind of security clearance and access to see kret. are they all fertile ground for these leaks? i'm joined by william binny, long before edward snowden rocked headlines, and michael lighter, former director of the national intelligence center and can give a different take on this. william, you approve of what edward snowden did, correct by going to the media. but you think he went too far. why is that? >> i don't necessarily condone any kind of impl...

Of these kinds of decisions are actually better positioned to make that judgment. >> joining me now is michael lighter, nbc terror analyst and national director of the counter-terrorism center and an attorney. >> and an attorney. >> you're credentialed on all front. how does the administration maintain this posture that the nsa should just vacuum up everything, all these records. not content but records. one's fix is to let the phone company keep the records and dip in when you have the equivalent of probable cause, but the phone companies don't want that responsibility? >> they don't. and the...

Where they got the totality of the gunpowder that they used for this bomb making? but the different state laws making different things easier to obtain here than there are part of what this story is about. >> yeah, and the difficulty of tracking. you know, you talked on the show about the tagging issue and not being able necessarily to trace where gunpowder comes from and just the mundane items they were able to put together, apparently, just by going on line and figuring out how to make such deadly destructive weapons. they didn't have to obtain sophisticated equipment. a lot of this was stuf...