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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 informat...

Up. now, in my opinion, he like bradley manning should face the consequences of what they're accused of doing. >> now, since this came out, all this information and information about edward snowden, i have since learned of the number of private contractors who have access in some form or fashion to government information. do you think that that's a big part of the problem here, that there are too many people who shouldn't have access to that information, that can get it in one way or another? >> well, look, i believe that the public discourse on these types of things with our government, our l...

9/11 commission report. where that pocket of the u.s. intelligence community had information derived from sensitive sources about two would-be plotters. in this case, though, it just wasn't shared with others such as i.n.s., state department or the ncis/fbi team conducting the cole investigation. >> well, it seems like a tremendous amount of information. we're talking about this phone records tracking. it's the phone records of everyone who is a verizon customer that we know about, and maybe there's more data. how do you take that huge amount of information and distill it into something that's...

Discussed, we really liked this kind of information because of the potential. and again, what's been discussed publicly about the program where you have the metadata that may represent an electronic footprint, somewhere, say, central asia to an unknown entity in north america. that's the kind of information that can produce leads and investigations and operations to disrupt acts. >> now, can you get that information in other ways that don't present these questions about breaches of privacy? >> absolutely. i mean, that's one aspect of the broader spectrum of information collection. intelligence...

Report for later use? >> the difference is that our constitution protects personal information. and the more personal the information, the greater the constitutional protections. and for hundreds of years we have had a standard in place in the united states, and that is probable cause to engage in an intrusive search. yet under this bill the standard would be much, much, much lower. essentially the standard would be little more than a hunch, which is not the right constitutional standard, and it would be incredibly intrusive. think about all the things you have in your cell phone. think about ...