attack that impacts thousands if not millions of americans. indeed we saw with hurricane sandy what happens when a major piece of critical infrastructure like your electricity grid goes down for a prolonged period. and our cyber infrastructure, our cyber networks, are ripe for those types of attacks. reporter: janet napolitano by the way is a member of the council on foreign relations. this attack was apparently detected relatively quickly but, jon, it may underscore the vulnerability a lot of computer networks face in this country. jon: well, so the website is working and it was, as you say, it was discovered fairly early. how does it work? what did they do? what did they accomplish? reporter: you described this as a drive-by attack. the idea wasn t really so much to target the website so much as the people that use it. we talk about high-profile membership within the council on foreign relations.
maybe they don t think it has a depressive effect on economic growth, and soaking up the credit markets, which women s businesses. that s exactly right. we don t have to wonder what this will go by. all we have to do is look over the pond and see what s happening in countries like greece and italy and spain and ireland have these massive debt. now we cannot repay them, massive interest-rate increases, you and i have talked about this before. but shame on us for not realizing that we stay on this path, we are in real financial trouble. gregg: stephen moore, economics writer for the wall street journal. on her way to the fiscal cliff. thank you very much. heather: russian president vladimir putin accused of playing politics with the lives of orphans. signing a bill banning americans from adopting russian children. bad news has left dozens of american families heartbroken.
opportunity to meet former president bush he is a terribly funny guy. it is his style to crack jokes with the hospital staff. they say he has been doing that, and he is now taking it a step further and he has been singing with the hospital staff. gregg, back to you. gregg: singing with the hospital staff. that makes my day. mike, good to see you. thanks very much. we ll get back to you with an update. heather: that is good news. secretary of state hillary clinton returning to the state department next week after three weeks of recovery from a stomach virus and concussion. that kept her from testifying on the terror attack in libya but republican lawmakers say they still want answers. the questions secretary clinton faces when she goes to the hill. gregg: a new study is revealing a frightening trend in the country. why more and more americans are not doing something that could actually save their lives. heather: plus when japan s nuclear plant began to melt down in the wake of the 2011
you re talking about former presidents. even current defense and intelligence officials that mavis it this site on a regular basis the idea here for hackers was to kind of get into this website and then get into the systems of people that visited this website. so there was potentially a lot of pretty important information that may have been vulnerable too this kind of attack. jon: they re i will still investigating? apparently the fbi is still looking into this and so is the council to make sure this type of thing doesn t happen again. jon: doug luzader in washington. some scary stuff there. thank you, doug. reporter: thank you, jon. harris: new information against a soldier accused of killing 16 afghans. his attorney calls it totally irresponsible. the u.s. senate renewing its attention to renewing a controversial surveillance law. they spent hours on this yesterday. some people say it violates the rights of americans. we ll look at the pros and the cons.
agreement. what we believe that they would ve been able to reach an agreement retroactively? congress is supposed to work well under the deadline. even if some of the fights we had last year, they ended up arguing. it is likely that a deal will get done on tax rates within a month or so. several republican senators are just talking with reporters about an hour ago. they said that most americans are going to get their tax rates they will stay low. whether it happens in last-minute deal now or part of tax reform next year. i think they are right about that. it can be a lot of pressure to take care of most americans and us. the question is if you go over the fiscal cliff immediately, next year you start with a lot more option for how to deal with it, rather than just a discussion of income levels.