new this morning, two men in the u.s. have been charged with attempting to support isis, and the al-nusra front. the 19-year-old from harrisburg, pennsylvania, is accused of attempting to provide material support on social media, and 22-year-old adam shafy from tried to travel to help the ly - terror group. cnn s polo sandoval is following both ends for us. what do we know about these men? reporter: victor, they are the latest investigations conducted by counterterrorism officials. at this point, the reality is, the number of terror-related investigations continue to stack up. and that s happening in prosecutors offices across the country. the level of support for groups like isis in the u.s. seems to have reached an unprecedented
prevented it in the second place. we know the wife of farook had become radicalized and had officials been reading her personal direct messages online, they might have been able to see that. you deal with this all the time. is it time for counterterrorism officials to change the way they do business and investigations? well, they already are. i speak to senior u.s. intelligence officials about this and over the last couple of years there s been a huge move into monitoring social media from the united states intelligence points of view. this is almost as important now as all that clandestine intelligence or the eavesdropping that the nsa does, just reading people s social media, particularly overseas, looking for danger signs. the fbi does a lot of this already. they have sort of undercover agents on these radical social media sites befriending
law enforcement analyst, former fbi assistant director, analyst peter bergen, joining us from florida, retired general mark heardling. all of you well aware of what s going on. the president very specific in his words. we just heard him say no specific credible attack on the u.s. homeland. he did have the secretary of state. there are deep concerns about attacks around the world. this is an international issue for the president. the president s message today was one of reassurance. you ve heard from the white house, from counterterrorism officials and others. they re concerned the level of fear has gotten so great in the u.s. that they re worried about panic. there is a real threat. they know it. but they also don t want people to be hiding in their closets, right, particularly as the holidays come. but he also right after that gets to the specific challenge with terrorism today. which is that often with these
services or the belgium security services. so what they arrived at is that these apps they were using them in the run-up to the attack. and that could be why they have such a little trail. we should make clear here that they have found some unencrypted communications. they ve also found attackers used other means to try to hide their tracks. for instance they changed similar cards on some of their cell phones. and we know some snuck back in from syria back into the european union using fake passports and other travel documents. so there s plenty of ways that they use to try to obscure their tracks and to make sure the surveillance apparatus of both european countries and the americans was not on them. this is the realization of the fear you and i have heard from counterterrorism officials for weeks and months, terrorists going dark. it s interesting i interviewed the deputy director of the nsa and he hinted to me that there may be ways around encryption.
very deliberate decision. white house press secretary josh earnest got a number of questions about the location yesterday and he acknowledged yes, the location really aimed at sending a message. the president wants to be in the hub. it allows him to not only thank the counterterrorism officials who are involved in this fight every day, but also send that broader message to his critics who say he hasn t been tough enough against isis. kristen welker, you make a great point about what we saw monday. the president coming to us from a press briefing at the pentagon and now today coming to us from dhs. want to go to my colleague, pete williams. he is standing by in washington. as i was alluding to, you broke information about likely charges that could be filed as soon as today against the former neighbor of syed farook. that s enrique marquez, and it s been no secret that the possibility of these charges was always looming. he s been in kind of a two-track thing here for the government