today we might wonder what hath samuel morse without? practically all of us generate with computers, phones and other devices an almost continuous trail of electronic data. that information can be stored 40 knows where are analyzed by who knows whom for who knows what purpose. in recent days we learned how our government is tapping into a lot of that data phone records, e-mails and web postings often provided by private internet companies and individual yes feeds like in the wake of the boston marathon bombing. should i be creeped out or comforted? this hour we will try to sort some out for you. we begin with a visit to my home in atlanta. >> nice to meet you. >> great to meet you, too. >> come on in. >> in a prior life, frank ahern of new york stay made a living as a skip tracer. a sort of private investigator who tracks down people who have skipped town and don't want to be found. he would use the proverbial paper trail which back in the day was literally made of paper. phone bills. credit cards, receipts and so on. he agreed to come to my home out atlanta to follow me around to show how today's paperless paper trail makes it almost impossible to hide. >> so, are frank, just woke up. had a cup of coffee. pull out the laptop. >> the data gathering where does that begin? >> the about minute you turn it on. you are letting your ip company know that you are there and ready to rock. the ip knows about us. google knows about us. yahoo knows about us. the e-mail company knows about us. >> i will send an e-mail to a lawn is service company. >> he says he never had this kind of detailed information back in his skip tracing days. >> used to get phone records that said frank called ted at whatever hour. with e-mails it is frank e-mailed ted and this is what he wrote. >> let's pause her for a second. the words of caution hit close to home at fox news. we recently learned the government collected ehails from the g mail account of our chief washington correspondent james rosen in connection with a leaks investigation. who is sending. who is receiving. what they are saying and when. each e-mail generates a lot of raw you information about ourselves and according to the chipmaker intel we send more than 204 million per minute. every one ahearn says indelible. >> if we delete things from our account are they actually deleted. >> the only delete button is on the laptop. will is no delete button on the internet. >> the internet is forever. >> oh, yes. >> and, of course, it is not just e-mails that can last forever. on average every minute at least 6 million facebook pages and 1.3 million youtube videos are viewed. >> i just turned on the television set, frank, what are i done by doing that? >> you let the cable tv company know that one you are home and two you are changing the channel plus they know what you are watching. >> hit the pause button again. you probably figured the cable company knew that. we will tell you how data mining experts working for president obama's campaign drilled into that innocence as as part of an unresidented get out the vote in 2012. stay tuned. netflix analyzes when you pause, rewind, fast forward or dump out of a show early. in fact, netflix used this data to help develop its much talked about original hit series house of cards. frank ahearn says something similar is happening with me kindle. i do more and more of my reading on it. books and daily papers, too. >> from what i understand some of the e readers are reporting back to the company how quickly i'm reading and words i'm highlighting and sentences and paragraphs i'm highlighting. >> you buy a book online and then find out wow, they have been tracking me. >> so i have already left a fair early substantial digital trail so far and barely even left the house. now, go out and run some errands and see what other bread crumbs we drop. punch in the customer loyalty numbers here. >> read the terms of is service and know what they do with that information? >> i didn't. >> that is a problem. >> turns out many of the terms of service agreements are a way to learn more about you as a consumer. >> these are opt-in relationships where you are saying this is my identity. here are is my name. here is my address. >> brian kennedy is the ceo of epsilon a leading data driven marketing services firm. they build pro files on consumers to help businesses market to them more directly. >> you have information on 250 million people. area code plus telephone, bank card, bank card issue date, education level, income. child date of birth. dwelling type. would you be h comfortable givg up as much information about yourself as you have about a lot of people out there? >> yes, absolutely. no qualms. >> he says it will make your life as a consumer much more satisfying. which brings me to my next stop with frank ahearn, the pharmacy. >> so frank this is a pretty inokay with us. >> the credit card championship knows you have a child and the pharmacy as well have a record of you having a child. >> if i is send an e-mail and get gas stand go to the pharmacy and pick something up what can you learn about a person? >> traced and tracked all along but consolidating it is the big problem and the scary part. >> a quick stop by the atm where my picture is taken and my bank records the transaction. as i take off down the road, any number of traffic cameras record my route. >> frank, coming up to the toll booth here. what are we he watching for in this case? >> cameras, number one and taking pictures of your license plate. and if you have the pass you have a record of where you are going. >> and where you came from. >> i finally arrive at the office. inside i can hardly make a move that isn't recorded in some form. like most big companies, fox news uses security cameras around warns us that our online activity may be monitored. but it is a personal device my smartphone that concerns ahearn the most. >> that is the goldmine of information. i mean your phone calls. your texts. your physical location. the apps you use. the e-mails. it is near unlimited. >> by now, you are surely thinking that all that digital information has made the job of the skip tracer the tracking and finding of people who would much rather stay lost a lot easier and you're right. but as we said at the we beginning back in new york city ahearn he is no longer in that line of business. it turns out big data has opened up a more profitable line of work. he is now helping people disappear. >> people who are victims of stalkers. people who are high end business want to make sure the homes can't be located and personal things about them family wise. >> but he says he gives his clients the same warning he gives me. >> is it really possible to eraise your digital footprint? >> absolutely not. >> coming up, datamining for political goals. is that how president obama won a second term? have aood night. here you go. you, too. 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[ male announcer ] but we still need your signature. volkswagen sign then drive is back. and it's never been easier to get a passat. that's the power of german engineering. get $0 down, $0 due at signing, $0 deposit, and $0 first month's payment on any new volkswagen. visit vwdealer.com today. on any new volkswagen. ♪ chances are, you're not made of money, so don't overpay for boat insurance. geico, see how much you could save. the reasons given? security. efficiency. and some suggest political gain. one thing we do know from last fall's election. this president and his team understand the political power of big data. >> i so wish that i had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction. but the nation chose another leader. >> to nearly half of america, mitt romney's half, election night 2012 came as a shock. with a terrible economy at home and new dangers abroad, president obama seemed so beatable. but romney didn't know what obama knew. >> all right. listen. let's use this one. >> obama's team had use the advantages of incumbency, time and money to create something new in politics. >> sort of created the perfect political corporation. >> sasha eisen berg literally wrote the book. by char nsa programmin nsacha a campaign made a profile of every single persuadable voter in the country and then with experiments borrowed from behavioral psychology they targeted people with personalized messages and coaxed them to the polls. >> voters are the guinea pigs. >> this was developed in this plain looking washington, d.c. office building home to the labor giant the afl-cio. inside a secret entity called the analyst institute. >> a consortium of liberal groups, parties, campaign and consultants designed to do science and help democrats win the election. >> a political manhattan project with the goal of developing superweapons. it was first seen in a michigan governor race six years guy. a couple of researchers were testing identity salients. >> they assigned voters to get one of several election get out the vote reminders and one said something here is your history as a voter and here are the neighbors vote histories and then there was a threat. >> they threatened to tell your neighbors you didn't vote. >> this increased turnout among the people that received it by 20%. >> the team recognized behavioral technology could help them shape what voters thought and influence how they behaved. a consortium of psychologists helped obama it define mitt romney and the campaign embedded several people from the analyst institute into the rereelection headquarters in chicago. carol davidson was director of integration and media targeting for the obama campaign. >> the hardcore analysts were in the room for multiple reasons. this was our like more top secret work so you don't want press coming by to like see what was on the screens of everyone and we actually during the election didn't even want people to know the group even exist. >> tech team worked its algo he algorithms. carol davidson figured out how to get the message to the specific voter and developed the optimizer showing what television shows the persuadables were watching and when. this information was sold by some of our cable companies. >> we were able to get the data from the vendor and in guest it into the system and pair that data to the voter file data. >> people find something creepy about this much data out there about them and used in a political campaign. >> at the end of the day you get e-mails sent to your house all the time. you didn't know the person that sent them to you and they still know he your name. if i say hi pete they are is barack obama that might be jarring. freak you out. just a difference? or are concern about them enveteran's stadiuming your life. >> give me an scam of a program. >> we aired stuff on like judge judy. >> they were running shows on 60 different cable stations and romney was running them on 15 different cable stations. >> patrick is a republican consultant preaching to his party for years about the political power of data. >> i don't think it as question of behind. i think it is a question of almost on two different planets. karl rove is a fox news contributor and former deputy white house chief of staff who was also close to the romney campaign. >> the democrats have a big advantage on this. both sides microtargetted. the democrats, however, took it to the next level. >> rove insists that republicans can compete and will even win the new political arms race. that will excite many gop partisans who just want a victory. will the new way of poll techs just the give us better manipulators rather than better leaders. >> what happened to old style political gut and leadership where you are trying to sell an idea he to people and convince voters the idea is worth voting for. in. >> you put your finger on a good thing. if you rely on the data to dictate everything to you you make no room for leadership. the responsibility of leadership is not sim yum to follow but to mold public opinion in the right direction. >> as we very just seen, data is power. how would you feel about a new government data center big enough to collect and store every phone call, e-mail, surveillance video and internet search from around the world? 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[ male announcer ] go pro with crest pro-health. my dentist was so proud of my teeth today. after using crest pro-health for a few weeks, i just feel brighter, fresher, cleaner. after using crest pro-health for a few weeks, every day we're working to and to keep our commitments. and we've made a big commitment to america. bp supports nearly 250,000 jobs here. through all of our energy operations, we invest more in the u.s. than any other place in the world. in fact, we've invested over $55 billion here in the last five years - making bp america's largest energy investor. our commitment has never been stronger. even electrons take up space, though not much. i just bought this memory card. 59 bucks. 46 gigabytes. this can hold almost 30,000 copies of this book, "war and peace." staggering. what is even more staggering is an nsa data center five times the size much the capitol behind me he filled with memory cards and computer chips. you may not know about it but as catherine herridge reports, it may soon know about you. bluff dale utah. 25 miles due south of salt lake city and just west of the middle of no where a massive construction project is nearing completion. the heavily secured site belonged to the national security agent. >> i people call it the spy center. >> the spy center. that is what jasmin and amy told me he last summer. >> do you know what they are going to do there? >> collect data. >> as good a guess as any for the gargantuan facility. >> a lot of rumors fly around it is monitoring. but no one knows. >> we were approached a couple of years ago about possibly bringing water. >> mark reed is the bluffdale city manager. he was asked to figure out how to supply the center with its extraordinary water requirements. >> we built a large pump station and then wil built a te million gallon tank to store the water. >> a three million gallon water tank just to run the air conditioning to cool the computers. the nsa will neither confirm nor deny the specifics but some estimate the facility will be capability of storing five zeta bytes of data. think of it this one. one iphone 5 has 16 gigabytes of storage and this would be 52 iphones. stacked 19 inks high. that would be more than 62,000 iphones would which reach higher than the empire state building. this would be more than 62 million iphones reaching higher than the international space station and just one zeta byte would be more than 62 million iphones and stacked would reach past the moon. the data center could in theory store every e-mail, cell phone call, google search and surveillance camera video in america for a very long time. >> what are they going to do at the data sen he territory. in. >> i don't know he. it is classify. >> gary herbert is utah's republican governor. >> you have even the reports. e-mails. phone records. banking records. all of that. >> i have been on a tour and seen the facilities and given me a general overview of what they are going to be doing but the specifics and details you need to get from them. >> all they would tell us is that the utah data center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major foe he cuss on cyber security. >> we are going to take off. >> we weren't given access to we took to the sky. >> i want you look real close because right now we are 500 feet over the utah data center and this is as close as you will get without a security clearance. >> actually see the cranes right now at 12:00. >> from the sky it is huge. >> it is gigantic. >> two weeks after our aerial filming the fbi questioned the pilot about who o he flue over the sensitive government site. >> it raises the most soarous questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place from many, many different sources. >> tom drake was a senior official at the nsa from august of 2001 to 2008 before rehe signed for reasons we will tell you about in a second. >> where does the data come from? e-mail traffic? facebook postings? telephone calls? travel itineraries? >> i don't know presizely. nsa is not saying. the speculation is just about any of that and perhaps even more. >> drake says americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the tame of security. >> the only way for perfect security is perfect surveillance. >> that is george kaufman. that is what that would look like. >> drake is not alone in feeling that way. >> whatever you did electronically they could capture. >> bill worked at the nsa for nearly four decades starting as a data analyst in the days before desktop computers. after 9/11 the nsa fee bega bea warrantless surveillance program started by president bush. >> the telcoms providing billing data records of people in the united states calling people in the united states. my estimate was they were collecting on the order of 3 billion a day. >> 3 billion phone records. >> just internal to the country. >> in simple terms nsa is spying on americans inseidenberg of this country. >> that's correct. >> binney thought it was wrong and quit in protest. someone leaked the sore storery to the "new york times" which exposed it in 2005. in 2007 the nsa officially discontinued the program. the same year suspecting he was a source for the new york times leaks the fbi raided bill binney's home. >> my son answered the door and they he pushed him back at sun point and they came upstairs and i was in the shower and one guy came in and pointed the gun at my head and said come out. >> he ultimately was not charged with any crimes but a fell le whistle blower was. remember tom drake? his house was searched and he was indicted on five counts of espionage. the government dropped the charges for him to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor of misusing a government computer. >> i continue to believe it was effective. it was lawful and it was appropriate. >> as the director of the nsa from 1999 to 2005 general michael hayden was drake and binney's boss. >> they may have a different view, god bless them, this is america, have a different view. i think it made america safe during a period of great danger. >> hayden says binney and drake were wrong, uninformed when they said the program was illegal. apparently congress amended the foreign intelligence surveillance act legalizing much of the surveillance going on and president obama agreed. that makes drake as worried as ever. he believes president obama has used that power even more aggressively than the man democrats accuse much shredding the constitution, george w. bush. >> i had private conversations people that used to work in the bush administration and their reaction is we he couldn't have gotten away with half of what the obama administration is now doing. the secretive regime has been expanded. >> far less transparent than the bush administration? >> yes. >> that is another reason why they he have become mass critics of the outside data center saying it would have a limitless capacity to pry into americans' digital lives. >> what is the government going to do with it and what could they do with it? what do the roles or oversights mean? >> the current director of the national security agency general keith alexander. when decline declined requestst down with us for an interview we stopped by the office of a washington think tank where he was speaking at an event. >> will it hold the data of american citizens? >> no, we don't hold data on u.s. citizens. the people there at nsa. they take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing they do in securing this nation. and so when people just throw out they will have all this stuff at utah data center that is baloney. i will not say here is what we are doing at utah. that would be ridiculous, too, because it would give our adversaries a tremendous advantage and we are not going to do that. >> binney says this is not about the character of the former nsa colleagues. it the about the possibility of the government's stunning encompass at this time collect store and analyze data will tempt less than noble leaders if not know than in the future. >> really a turnkey situation where it could be turned quickly and become a totalitarian state quickly. the capacity to do that is being set up. if we get the wrong person in office or are in government they could make that happen quickly. life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. we balance the three virtues all the time. the question people like me ask the american people is so how much more do you want me to do? >> what is in a government computer snow and how can this know it? with the nsa number we go to silly -- mum we go to silicon valley for answers. how many you have an iphone or eye pad or galaxy? put up your hands. put up your hands. latinoer, meet the newest member of the quicken loans family: j.d. power and associates has ranked quicken loans highest in the nation in customer satisfaction... i say "family," because we've been blessed with this honor for 3 years in a row... rest assured we'll treat all of your mortgage needs with tender loving care. amazing client satisfaction: it's a quicken loans family value. call 800-quicken or go to quickenloans.com to experience it for yourself. c i don't know.n ohow did you get here?com [ speaking in russian ] look, look, look... you probably want to get away as much as we do. with priceline express deals, you can get a fabulous hotel without bidding. think of the rubles you'll save. with one touch, fun in the sun. i like fun. well, that went exactly i as planned.. really? ruthless people. risky business. the man who knew too much. these are all videos the recently deceased judge robert bork once rented. how do we know? because when was nominated to the supreme court his rental history was leaked to the press. this privacy violation so outraged people that in 1988 congress made it a federal crime to disclose someone about's video he rental records. now, seems numerous rebound sights don't merely know he what you watched but what you want to watch next. most people assume the government can know a lot more than that. can they? claudia cowan reports. after the boston marathon bombings of april 15 where three were killed and hundreds injured americans were asking why hadn't the authorities flagged the suspects, earlier? turns out russian authorities warned the u.s. about tamerlan about's links. they looked into his personal associations but didn't find enough to consider him a terrorist threat. then when took a trip to are you sha in 2012 to meet with underground groups the fbi missed that. the reason? his name was misspelled on the passenger list. perhaps intentionally. another chance lost to connect the dots. the point is it is one thing to have the data, it is another to understand its significance. >> when we data mine we are teaching the computer how to go through large amounts of data. >> gary angel founded sim phonic one of the most experienced players in the data mining game it was recently acquired by ernst and young. >> i'm using a listening tool that collects information on things like at this time. a big part of what angel does deals with scanning the web and analyzing data. not unlike what government agencies try to do. sift through the noise of all of the world's electronic communications and isolate the fragments of troubling data and then connect the dots before a threat materializes. and recent revealations show they are pushing to expand their capacity to do it. >> what do you think would surprise people most about data mining? what don't they know? >> i think how clumsy it is and how much work goes into getting even the simplest conclusions out of the date. i think there is a sense that computers can do far moor than they actually can. >> the biggest challenge isn't collecting and storing the information. it is making sense of it all. >> i picked a selection of terms that a national security person might be interested in. radio active or nuclear power or bridges or stations or airports. here is the tricky part. if we miss stuff we don't know it. that is really bad. on the other hand if you turn up lots and lots of things that you say might be threats and none of them are people lose confidence in the data and the old crying wolf syndrome, right? >> according to angel even big brother faces road blocks. if the government wants to track you, its ability to gather all sorts of private data and to analyze it at massive facilities like this nsa data center still under construction in utah will allow them to do it. >> there is no human reading going through and looking at your e-mails. it is possible. it is only going to look at things the computer throws out as interesting or important. >> it is the interaction between cold data and live humans where the synergy takes place. if the failure to connect the dots before the boston bombings was a case where the investigators misread the data it was a different story when the investigators had a more specific idea what to look for. they combed through countless photographs and hours of footage not only allowing them to zero in on the bombers but to avoid false leads that can waste valuable time and the turning point came when they released the information on april 18 asking the public to help identify the is discuss spents. the suspects were captured by the next day. they were allegedly planning to go to new york and set off more ex-plowive j., who knows how many more might have died if not tore what could be seen as an ultimately successful data mining operation. >> when we return. growing up in an age where all of the stupid things you do can hi, i'm terry and i have diabetic nerve pain. it's hard to describe, because you have a numbness, but yet you have the pain like thousands of needles sticking in your foot. it was progressively getting worse, and at that point i knew i had to do something. once i started taking the lyrica the pain started subsiding. [ male announcer ] it's known that diabetes damages nerves. lyrica is fda approved to treat diabetic nerve pain. lyrica is not for everyone. it may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, changes in eyesight including blurry vision, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or skin sores from diabetes. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don'drink alcohol while taking lyrica. don't drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. ask your doctor about lyrica today. it's specific treatment for diabetic nerve pain. in the late 1800s, future supreme court justice worried about a new phenomenon, snapshot photography. if newspapers could snap and print any he one's picture, what would happen to our privacy? year hes later on phenomenon, snapshot photography. if newspapers could snap and print any one's picture, what would happen to our privacy? years later on the bench he wrote that the right free people value most is the right to be left alone. if that's still through, why are so many people putting so much out there on-line? >> what do you think are some of the thing you need to think about before you put a photo on-line? >> welcome to the elementary school in southampton. kevin is steeching his 6th grade class how not to ruin their lives with their iphones or whatever gets them on-line. >> we have been doing it for about three years. partly because i was noticing my students talking about their lives on facebook and it was clear they weren't quite sure how to navigate through that. >> you should ask yourself do you really need to put this up there. >> do you really need to put this up there. >> one of the things i notice with 11-year-olds they are fearless of technology they will dive in whatever it is and figure out the ramifications. >> what can be the harmful effects be. >> talking about developing a digital personality right now that will impact going to jobs in the future and colleges. hard for a kid to grasp. >> i tell my kids you can't do things or say things a certain way it will follow you. >> stacy's son anthony is in his class. she also has a tenth grade daughter francesca both have laptops and i pads. >> what are your concerns about that? >> i want them to go to college some day. i want them to not have the admissions office come and say, well, this is happening when you were in high school or in 7th grade or things like that. >> of course it wouldn't be -- or things like this, teenage girls defended him on facebook and twitter and posting, too pretty to be guilty. comments that were picked up by a number of news sites and condemned. at the same time however, think about all the people that got rich and famous thanks to many a parents worst nightmare in the internet age. kim kardashian sex tape was up loaded on the internet. soon she was a reality show star and the center of a multi million dollar empire. paris hilton was a local new york socialite hoping for a reality show hit. her sex tape on the internet helped make that happen. >> charlie sheen's career was teetering on the brink. he began tweeting all sorts of embarrassing messages and posting videos that in an earlier day would have finished him. as it happens, these days you can dig yourself out of a hole by shoveling deeper. >> they would rather have the fame and celebrity than have i guess i would call it a sense of self-respect. >> daniel hettinger of the editorial page calls it the world of indiscretion. >> do you keep that in the back of your mind that your son out daughter may do something outrageous just to get known. >> i didn't until you were telling me. i am thinking oh my goodness. >> it is scary for me to think that way. >> he captures one of the great paradoxes of the digital age. novelist george other well managed our society in which every movement is monitored by an all seeing figure called big brother. today big data has far more ability than even orwell imaged to see, record, analyze everything we do. to even know much of what we think. but one thing would surely surprise orwell. instead of citizens demanding their privacy they can't wait to give it away. >> if the root end is behaving like a moron a lot of people are willing to give up their privacy, give up their sense of shame, give up their embarrassment. >> the problem is there's not enough fame or fortune for everyone with a digital camera and a broadband connection. the capacity to screw up your life does seem lime mittless. >> dominos pizza employee fired and criminally charged after posting a video of themselves doing gross things to food they were repairing: >> a high school -- this taco bell employee was fired after posting this picture. >> today i am announcing my resignation from congress. >> who can forget married new york congressman anthony weiner forced to resign in disgrace after a tweeted picture of his privates went viral. >> there was a point in the past if you were about to do something like that there woulden a voice in the back of your head saying, i don't think you should do this. >> how many of you have an iphone or an android or a galaxy or ipad? put up your hand. which brings us back to the massachusetts classroom. with all of the mixed messages out there, which choices will these kids make? first, insist your kids friend, follow or link you in. no exceptions. second, master and use the privacy settings of every site your kids are on. third, you must keep up with the newest social sites and apps. make sure you are not focusing on facebook when your kid has already moved on to another site. >> think of a year ago, i don't think that i heard of instagram, the hardest part is keeping up with the changes. >> as a parent, what do you? you trust? you have blind faith? >> yes. i hate to admit it, but yes. and try to keep the conversation open. >> two generations ago gordon moore the founder of intel predicted computers would double their capacity about every two years. this proved so accurate it has become known as mooers law. modern data collected has expanded with breath taking velocity. the question is whether our social political legal solutions can keep up to ensure big data doesn't turn into big brother. ultimately it is only as aware informed citizens in other words by carefully watching for ourselves what's going on around us that we will get and keep the country we want, one that is efficient, one is that safe, but also one that doesn't always have us looking over our shoulders. that's our show. thanks for watching. the verizon share everything plan for small busines lets you connect up to 25 devices on one easy to manage plan. that means your smartphone, her blackberry, his laptop, mark's smartphone... but i'm still on vacation... ...stilln the plan. nice! so is his tablet, that guy's hotspot, thentern's tablet. the intern gets a tablet? 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