0 you can follow us on twitter. outfront starts right now. the nsa caught again spying on people it says it wasn't spying on. plus an investigation. how you can protect your e-mail. and then we were told the threat was contained but now japan admits radiation leaking fukushima plant is a quote house of horrors. good evening. i am erin burnett. the government is illegally watching you. today we learn that the national security agency collected as many as 58,000 e-mails per year over the past three years in the united states. e-mails that had nothing to do with terrorism. and the agency misrepresented the scope of this effort to the secret court that is supposed to oversee and regulate it. evan perez joins us now. how did this program work? >> well, the way the program works is the nsa works with essentially pretty much most of the telecommunication companies in the united states, at&t, verizon. it works with them to essentially under these court orders it is supposed to get foreign communications, things that might have something to do with terrorism. what happened apparently despite the fact they had court orders that said you can't look at domestic communications the computers they use to separate the stuff weren't doing the job they thought it was doing. what the nsa had come up with is much more complicated that computers could do. >> what amazes me when i hear it and as the revelations keep happening to me incompetence is more frightening. now they are collecting e-mails. last year we were trying to watch egypt country code 20 and we typed in code 202 and watched washington, d.c. and didn't realize it. the only thing worse is being competent. how is the nsa defending this? >> they say none of this was intentional. that is always the defense that they have. they say the volume of data that they are collecting, millions and millions of e-mails and internet traffic that goes through these fiber optic wires that they are monitoring. and they say when you are collecting this volume of data looking for so to speak the needles in the hay stack that there will be mistakes made. that is what their defense is. we screwed up but we didn't intend to. and this is what this judge was so upset about. he said essentially in october 2011 he came down very hard on them and said you have been misrepresenting what you said you were going to be doing. >> and before you go "wall street journal" today says the nsa can reach about 75% of domestic internet traffic. forget whether they should be doing it, shouldn't they be able to watch 100%? >> that does raise the question. this is basically because of the relationships that they built with these companies. so these radcompanies agrees to help the nsa. >> covering this and breaking that story for us today. >> second story out front how to stop the government and, say, google from watching you. someone is watching you reading every word you type. tom foreman has this investigation. >> reporter: every day people around the globe send or receive about 180 billion e-mails. and much of it in the united states goes through free e-mail services like g mail, yahoo, hot mail. across the ocean in london information and privacy activist says hold on. some of the free service ises may be costing us dearly. >> if you are not paying for the product you're not the customer. you are the product itself. >> reporter: what he means is this. for generations americans thought of letters of private and many of us still see e-mails as kind of like that. but they're actually much more like post cards easily read by anyone or any company between you or the person you are sending the message to. and huge e-mail companies with millions of users do just that. with powerful computers they scan every word for clues to help them sell precisely targeted ads. if you write kayak in several messages soon you see ads for river trips. mention cars and you see models burning across the desktop. google attorneys cited a supreme court decision stating users should have no legitimate expectation of privacy. so in terms of mining data. >> these services are honey pots. >> reporter: mccarthy argues we should all seek out more obscure providers. or better yet he says use an e-mail program that lives in your computer by passing the middle man. and he says we should all start looking at encryption software that will garble every message. it is all very technical and a lot of big e-mail providers insist they do protect their user's privacy. mccarthy is developing mail pile offering alternative with lots of protection soon. >> over the next month or so technical people will be able to start using it. and by january we are hoping to launch a public release. >> he believes if we want e-mail security that is the future we must move towards no matter where it is at. >> what amazes me is that google -- and god bless them. they admit it. you use our stuff and we are watching you. mail pile isn't ready until next summer. what can you do if you don't want them reading about the private things. >> this is mainly being done by computers. it is computers scanning for information. unless you are a real tech geek, unless you know your way around encryption programs it is kind of hard. i would say the best thing you can do is keep your eyes open because there are many companies who see a nation waking up to this and being concerned about it and already i'm starting to see ads trickling in of companies saying i can sell you something that will give you encryption and will get you around the corner. i think we are going to see an awful lot more of that. >> thanks to tom as his investigation continues for us this week. radiation at the fukushima plant is not contained. the alarming admission by officials about a house of horrors next. why would the family of a man who allegedly kidnapped hannah anderson want her to take a dna test. and then a question and then it was quickly deleted. some people think the tweet condoned a horrible act. jerry springer is our guest. and for football fans the way you watch the great american past time may be about to change forever. 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