martha: a lot riding on this. catherine herridge joins us now live from washington. what are lawmakers saying they expect will be revealed today, catherine? reporter: thank you, martha, and good morning. they expect the head of the nsa will make the case that the sweeping collection of phone records, the so-called metadata from millions of americans, is justified and a necessary tool to connect the dots. i think it s very important for the general to get out as much of the details as he can without compromising sources or methods. i believe that general alexander is going to actually talk about specific cases he mentioned last week that there s dozens. this is one of the most valuable tools we have, and don t forget, the tools are changing so rapidly because this data mining is occurring in every part of the globe. reporter: today it s crucial to listen to the language general alexander uses as he describes the role data mining has played disrupting
intelligence picture that we need. and once again we re talking about a global threat here, involves many countries, countries working together, the united states and britain as they mentioned with the zazi case. so i ve heard there may be dozens of cases, and there may be more than 20 countries involved. we won t know until the general tells us that, but very, very important for the american people. bill: peter, i m seeing a list of four witnesses, i ve been told there may be as many as six, we ll see in a moment, but general keith alexander has a long and storied history, and it is very credible with any of the members of the government that we speak to. peter, hang on one moment. this is mike rogers, he heads up the committee, the republican on that committee, let s listen. that congress has provided to the executive branch since the terrorist attacks of september 11th, 2001. i d also like to recognize the hard work of the men and women of the nsa and the rest of the intelligence
why this is an important counterterrorism tool, perhaps provide some examples. but being cautious about not telling too much that will undermine our national security. snowden has already done that for us, and the general certainly doesn t want to do it, and he wants to protect this very important program. bill: listen, this is your career, that s an excellent point, too, former cia guy, how concerned are you that too much can be given up and made public? i m very concerned. but i think we were expecting the general to speak yesterday, and i think they took an extra day to look and scrub these materials that they re going to talk about today. and, of course, he can t necessarily predict what the questions will be. he s going to make his presentation, but the members, i understand, will be able to ask questions. so, yes, intelligence sources and meds, bill, come methods, bill, come at great expense to the united states. sometimes there s a personal toll, sometimes there s a financia
i mean, the specifics are important because it goes to the credibility. so how far does he go in explaining this? because it appeared yesterday that this involved a lot of countries around the world and folks like general alexander had to talk to those governments to let them know what they were going public with. yeah, no, of course. that s very important as well. we heard there may be as many as 20 countries involved here. and another thing that s important to understand, bill, is intelligence also comes from an intelligence fact also comes from a number of different sources. there might be human intelligence involved, there might be signals intelligence involved, there might be other intelligence involved, so they kind of tip each other off. and what you try to do is take this information and corroborate it together to get to where it points you in a direction of where you need to go in terms of intelligence. it s a very difficult process here. so even though catherine pointed out
the intelligence communities the ability to direct the resources to the right places so they can exclude large numbers of contacted very quickly in the aftermath of the boston terror attacks. it s certainly not foolproof. we won t stop every terrorist attack. but we ll see general alexander and his team have a good plan in place. martha: it will be an interesting hearing at 10:00. bill: very interesting. top of the hour. in the meantime there is new controversy over a federal program that s reportedly plagued with fraud and abuse and it s costing taxpayers a whole lot of mannive. the examples of fraud in this federal disability program are egregious. this all put together by the washington examiner. let me give you examples of the