Face the Nation transcripts November 3, 2013: Feinstein, Rogers, Hayden

(CBS News) Below is a transcript of "Face the Nation" on November 3, 2013, hosted by CBS News' Bob Schieffer. Guests include: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, Alexandra Zapruder, Dick Stolley, David Ignatius, David Sanger, and CBS News' John Dickerson and Jan Crawford.

SCHIEFFER: Today on Face the Nation, we're in news overload. And we'll talk today with two officials who are charged with sorting it all out: the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein. It's hard to know where to start. New outrage over NSA surveillance leaks, more problems with Obamacare, U.S. led drone strikes in Pakistan, target and kill the Taliban leader there, a group of senators threatens to block all administration nominees over the attacks in Benghazi, and a man walks into the Los Angeles Airport and opens fire with an assault weapon. We'll talk about all of it with Senator Feinstein and Congressman Rogers. Then we'll talk to General Michael Hayden who ran the National Security Agency when some of our allies phones were attacked. We'll get analysis from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, David Sanger of the New York Times, CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford and CBS News political director John Dickerson. And as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, we'll talk to former Life magazine editor Dick Stolen and the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man who shot the most important home movie of all time. It's a lot, but that's what we do at "Face the Nation."

ANNOUNCER: From CBS News in Washington, "Face the Nation" with Bob Schieffer.

SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. We welcome to the broadcast the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Thank you so much, senator, for coming. You have been a big defender from the beginning of the National Security Agency, but you were clearly upset with the revelation that we were tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone. You said it was a big problem that the president was apparently unaware of this. Do you believe that, that the president didn't know this was happening?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I can't answer that. I don't know. But I think where allies are close, tapping private phones of theirs, particularly of the leader, the leader is what I'm talking about, has much more political liability than probably intelligence viability. And I think we ought to look at it carefully. I believe the president is doing that and there are some exceptions.

SCHIEFFER: Well, do you think that the National Security Agency has gone too far?

FEINSTEIN: Well, let me say something about the NSA. I believe the NSA is filled with good patriotic people who want to do the right thing. They follow the orders they're given. The administration controls intelligence. The national intelligence framework is put together by the administration. It begins with the director of national intelligence, it goes to the White House, it's the president, it's the NSC, it's the cabinet and then the framework is formed. Now, what happens is, people add to it, State wants this, Department of State wants to know this, or somebody else wants to know that. Priorities are ranked. As I understand it, these are the priorities. One, terrorism. Two, support of our military abroad. Three, nuclear counter proliferation. Four, hard targets. And now cyber. And those are the main areas. So essentially the NSA is told to do certain things and it does it. What I think we need to do -- we work very well with the House committee and the leadership, Mike Rogers and Congressman Ruppersberger is review of the intelligence framework of how all this gets together. What the criteria for inclusion are. And then we ought to take a look at all the programs that fall under this because it's not just the metadata collection program which is section 1215 and 702 which is the e-mail program from afar. That's been the big news up to now. These are other programs that are formed in different ways under...

SCHIEFFER: But what you're saying is there needs to be a full review and then decide where we go from there.

FEINSTEIN: Yes. The White House is doing it. And we're going to begin it if we can get the appropriate staff.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you about this. A German politician actually visited with Edward Snowden, the defector, who dumped all of this information out in to the public arena, met with him last week in Russia. He said he would try to enlist his help to investigate the NSA and suggested that he be brought back to this country and given clemency. What would be your reaction to that?

FEINSTEIN: My reaction would be negative. First of all, this is an American, he was a contractor. He was trusted. He stripped our system. He had an opportunity, if what he was was a whistleblower to pick up the phone to call the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee and say, look, I have some information you ought to see. And we would certainly see him, maybe both together, maybe separately, but we would have seen him and we would have looked at that information. That didn't happen. And now he's done this enormous disservice to our country. And I think the answer is, no clemency.

SCHIEFFER: In other words, if the United States could get their hands on him you would suggest that he be prosecuted.

FEINSTEIN: That's correct.

SCHIEFFER: Let me shift to the roll out of Obamacare. I mean, this thing seems to be a disaster. It's nothing like the administration said it was going to be. So many things that were supposed to happen didn't happen. Where are we on this?

FEINSTEIN: I think where we are is the divide between policy and technology. It's pretty clear I think to those of us that have been watching this roll out that the technological base was not sufficient. And that the website didn't function. You know, I felt -- and I said this directly to the president's chief of staff, they ought to take down the website until it was right. They believe they need to keep it running that and they can sort out of difficulties that they brought in technological experts from a broad base of the private sector that by the end of November it can be sorted out and be functioning properly. I don't think there's ever been any website started to do what this website does in the size of this one. I don't make excuse, but I think that is pretty much fact of what's happened.

SCHIEFFER: The president said in the beginning that one thing was that if you like the health care program you had you could keep it. We now know there was debate within the administration before he said that as to whether that was actually a promise that could be kept. Should the president not have made that statement?

FEINSTEIN: Well, as I understand it you can keep it up to the time -- and I hope this is correct, but this is what I've been told -- up to the time the bill was enacted, then after that it's a different story. I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear. It is really very unclear right now exactly what the situation is. And, yes, that's a problem. But I think it has to be said, this is a very large major priority. And if it can get up and running, it can be, I think, a very positive thing. The big problem here is there are so many destroyers -- in the House, in the public, in the private health care sector that just want to destroy. That's not helpful.

SCHIEFFER: I take your point, but the fact is the thing doesn't work.

FEINSTEIN: The fact is there's a problem with the startup. I won't go so far right now as to say the plan isn't going to work once it gets started up.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you one other thing, quickly, a man walked in to the Los Angeles airport Friday, opened fire on TSA officials with an assault weapon. Does this put more pressure on you to revive your efforts to get another assault weapons ban for congress or is that dead?

FEINSTEIN: Well, let me just first of all say, because this happened in California, and it happened in my constituents. And I have some wounded and dead constituents, let me just pay tribute to TSA agent Hernandez, a father of two children, with a wife, shot point blank at his station doing work he believed in and to me is a very, very special person. So to all of those, my deepest sorrow. Having said that, the weapon was a .223 MP15, the MP stands for military and police, clearly designed not for general consumption, but through practice now general consumption. Same gun that was used at Aurora. Would I do a bill? Sure I would do a bill. I mean I believe this down deep in my soul.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think there is any way that such a bill could pass?

FEINSTEIN: No, I don't. I think there's a hammer lock on the congress by the gun owners and gun people and it doesn't matter. Now, it's going to be interesting to see whether this weapon was outlawed in California and whether it was purchased in California.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, Senator, thank you so much.

FEINSTEIN: You're very welcome, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: We want to go now to Lansing, Michigan, and the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Mike Rogers. Congressman, what about this idea? You heard what Senator Feinstein said about granting clemency to Edward Snowden and bringing him back to help investigate the National Security Agency?

ROGERS: Well, the only investigation here is to what extent he knew about the material that he stole and who else he worked with. Certainly, the Russians are not allowing him to stay in the country of Russia because they think he's just a nice guy there. There's clearly more to this story. So I think that is a terrible idea. If he wants to come back and own up to the responsibility of the fact that he took and stole information, he violated his oath, he disclosed classified information, that, by the way, has allowed three different terrorist organizations, affiliates of al Qaeda, to change the way they communicate, I'd be happy to have that discussion with him. But he does need to own up with what he's done. And if he wants to talk through why he did it and those things, that would be the appropriate time and the appropriate way to do it.

SCHIEFFER: You would not be willing to give him any kind of clemency, I take it?

ROGERS: No. I don't see any reason. You know, we -- I wouldn't do that. He needs to come back and own up. We can have those conversations. If he believes there's vulnerabilities in the systems he'd like to disclose, you don't do it by committing a crime that actually puts soldiers' lives at risk in places like Afghanistan. You just don't do that. SCHIEFFER: With the...

ROGERS: And to say that there's somehow a higher standard here I think would be inappropriate.

SCHIEFFER: You know, with every revelation, there's been more pressure to rein in the NSA. Do you think that needs to be done?

ROGERS: You know, this is -- this -- this is the whole problem. We've focused a lot on the NSA, Bob, but not a lot about what the threat is. I mean, you think about these programs, all of which we've deceased, all of which are legal, all of which have the most oversight of any programs in the United States government. And it's happened under -- when the Democrats controlled the Congress, when the Republicans controlled the Congress, when a Republican controlled the White House, when a Democrat controlled the White House. So the question now isn't how you rein in the NSA. The object is, listen, are they following the law, are they protecting civil liberties? That's what the Oversight Committees do. I work well with Diane Feinstein in that function of oversight. The question is, what are the threats to the United States? Who is using U.S. networks right now to steal intellectual property, like the Chinese, the Russians and others? We've had cyber attacks against the United States this year from a nation state that exceeds over 300 different attempts to destroy some financial services networks that affects every American. We haven't talked about those things. We've got al Qaeda spreading around the world in a way that is frightening. Think about it. Last year alone, some 15,000 terrorist- related deaths. It is the NSA, the CIA and others' charge to make sure that zero of them happen here. Zero. That's our standard. And so what we've asked them to do is go out and collect information that protects America. So every politician in Washington, both Republican and Democrat, are seized up by this hyper partisanship and can't wait to put out a press release how terrible our intelligence services are. And the president seems to be caught in the -- like a deer caught in the headlights about how he deals with what all of us have done very careful work, both Republicans and Democrats, to oversee...

SCHIEFFER: He...

ROGERS: -- is engaging in the activities that protect American interests.

SCHIEFFER: Did you take him at his word when he says that -- we're told that he didn't know about, for example, that we were eavesdropping on the German chancellor's cellphone? Can that that be true?

ROGERS: Well...

SCHIEFFER: Can that be right?

ROGERS: You know, I will tell you that I think there's going to be some best actor awards coming out of the White House this year and best supporting actor awards coming out of the European Union. This is just a bit shocking to me, that folks who are actively engaged in espionage efforts around the world -- and, by the way, espionage is a French word, after all -- and some notion that there's this big mystery under all of these years that some people just didn't have an understanding about how we collect information to protect the United States, to me, is wrong. And, unfortunately, that -- all of this is that victim of this hyper partisanship, where people can't wait to get out in front of the cameras and say, boy, I sure don't like those intelligence services. And here's the problem, Bob. We did this in the 1930s. We turned it off. In 1929, secretary of State at that time, where they were collecting information to protect America said, you know, we shouldn't do this. This is unseemly. They turned it off. Well, that led to a whole bunch of misunderstanding that led to World War II, that killed millions and millions of people. We did the same darned thing leading up to the Osama bin Laden effort, where we didn't want to talk to each other, we didn't coordinate intelligence activities, we didn't want to get certain things. And it led to 9/11, that took the lives of 3,000 Americans.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you...

ROGERS: We've learned a valuable lesson, but we -- we need to focus on who the bad guys are. And the bad guys, candidly, are not U.S. intelligence agencies. they're the good guys, at the end of the day.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you about one of the alleged bad guys, which we apparently killed last week during a drone strike in Pakistan. Was this -- was this a big deal?

ROGERS: It was a big deal. And I'll tell you why it happened. And by the way, all of those intelligence agencies -- and I do mean all of them that people are -- of both parties have decided are bad, contributed to leading up to what is a very difficult, long-term collection of all the sources of intelligence to make sure you can find an individual and do something about it. And the reason this guy is a bad guy, he, in 2007, kind of brought together all of the Pakistan Taliban. And they wanted to focus on, at that time, the Pakistani military. But they've also made threats to the United States, especially Hakimullah Mehsud, who said, hey, listen, we're going to conduct operations in the United States. And there is a relationship between the gentleman that showed up in Times Square and the individual that was taken off the battlefield here very short -- not a long time ago. This is the guy that's trying to create the problems both for Pakistan -- he relates with Afghanistan Taliban. These are the folks that cut -- closed 500 schools, most of them girls' schools in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan. He's part of the Haqqani network, which is basically a giant organized crime group operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan, who have been involved in supporting al Qaeda, Taliban and others. I mean this was a bad guy. And, by the way, there's some information Recently that concerned us about the safety of our troops. I feel a little safe -- a little better for our troops today than I did before this event happened. And, remember, this is the world we live in, Bob. That's what's so frustrating, I think, for Diane and myself. We deal these threats every single day. And they are big. They are real. They affect real people. And I'll tell you, we should protect our soldiers in the field and we should also protect their families, who are here back in the United States. And we should use every means that is legal, protects civil liberties and gets the job done. I think that's exactly what we're doing. That's the conversation I think we should be having.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you one final question about the rollout of ObamaCare. You came down very hard on HHS Secretary Sebelius when she came before Congress last week. And you said that what disturbed you most of all was that people were feeding into this Web site vital information about themselves. And you were very concerned about the security of that information, that it was now just out there for people to take. Are you satisfied yet that this has been corrected or will be corrected?

ROGERS: Well, no. And what was really shocking to me is even by their own words, they admitted that there was a high degree of risk when they were offering the Web site to go public. They never told anybody about that. They said that they think the risk was acceptable. But their information wasn't at risk, the American people's information was at risk. Here's the problem. They're trying to change a tire on a car going 75 miles an hour down the expressway. That's not the way cyber security works. And unfortunately, both Diane and I both know the real threats to these systems when you have nation states, organized crime groups and criminals trying to get information that is now available on these Web sites. They need to take the site down, stabilize it -- meaning they can't continue to add code...

SCHIEFFER: All right...

ROGERS: -- every week. And then they need to stress test the system. Unfortunately, Bob, none of that has happened

SCHIEFFER: All right...

ROGERS: -- and they admit it's going to take six months. That is unacceptable for the protection of privacy of Americans' information.

SCHIEFFER: All right. I'm sorry, we have to leave it there. But thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.

ROGERS: Yes. Thanks.

SCHIEFFER: Back in a minute.

ROGERS: OK. Thanks, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with the former head of both the National Security Agency and the CIA, General Michael Hayden. General, thanks for coming.

HAYDEN: Good morning.

SCHIEFFER: I'll just ask you the question, did you spy on Angela Merkel?

HAYDEN: I can't comment on any specific activities. But leadership intentions were a very high intelligence priority for the life of the National Security Agency. It's nothing special, and it's certainly nothing new.

SCHIEFFER: Could it be possible that the president didn't know about it if we were listening in on her cell phone?

HAYDEN: I take the president's statement at face value. And I can actually imagine circumstances, Bob, where he wouldn't. It's impossible for me to imagine that the NSC, the administration, the White House didn't know. And the fact that they didn't rush in to tell the president this was going on points out what I think is a fundamental fact.

SCHIEFFER: And that is?

HAYDEN: This wasn't exceptional. This is what we were expected to do.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me ask you this, if we stop spying on Angela Merkel, do you think that the Chinese and the Russians will also stand down their efforts?

HAYDEN: No, I don't think so. And I know the chancellor is embarrassed, and we're a friend. And this revelation has put her in a very difficult political spot. But, Bob, frankly in the world of espionage, the fact that the United States may have been intercepting her text messages is the least of their espionage worries in Berlin right now.

SCHIEFFER: Are they spying on us?

HAYDEN: Who, the Germans?

SCHIEFFER: Mm-hmm.

HAYDEN: I would just assume that almost all other nations in the world conduct espionage. And what we do as a prudent measure is defend ourselves. Remember, we had a grand debate about President Obama's BlackBerry. The most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth in his national capital was told, don't use your BlackBerry. There are a lot of intelligence services out there who are going to try to intercept it.

SCHIEFFER: The Germans seem to think that Edward Snowden should be brought back to this country, or either that or taken to Germany and given a chance to help investigate the National Security Agency. What is your reaction to that?

HAYDEN: Well, first of all, I would welcome Edward Snowden being brought back to this country. But I know one German parliamentarian is suggesting that Germany give Mr. Snowden a platform from which he could reveal even more American secrets. And my view on that, that would kind of tend to moot the whole debate here about whether or not we're spying on a friend. SCHIEFFER: I take it you do not, and I've asked you this question before, if you thought he was a hero, I believe you said you thought he was a defector.

HAYDEN: Yes.

SCHIEFFER: How much harm -- or do you think that there has been harm to not just our intelligence gathering but also our influence by these revelations?

HAYDEN: Absolutely, absolutely, Bob. Look, I understand the situation in Germany now that the chancellor is embarrassed, all right? But let's assume that this was discovered not through press accounts but through German counterintelligence. The last thing the Germans would have done would -- to have been to have made this public. They would have come to us privately and we would have solved this problem. What this has done has destroyed -- threatened, important relationships we have.

SCHIEFFER: General, I'm sorry but we have to leave it there.

HAYDEN: Thank you.

SCHIEFFER: Thanks so much. We'll be back in a moment. I'll have some personal thoughts.

SCHIEFFER: Maybe I was thinking about that movie "Dumb and Dumber," but as I watched the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, coming as it did on the heels of the Republican shutdown of the government, the phrase that kept running through my mind was "worse and worser." Is "worser" a word? Well, actually, it is. We looked it up. The shutdown was the worst but this thing is worser. If we thought the partisan blather couldn't get thicker or sillier than it got during the shutdown, well, we now know. By now we have heard from all the people whose fault it wasn't. We've heard all the talking points and some of the critics were all but foaming at the mouth. It was the Washington we have come to know. All talk, all the time, but at the end of the day just another example of how government seems incapable of making things better and it never seems to learn. Does anyone believe that successful start-ups like Amazon or Google would risk launching their programs before they were properly tested? There may be a lesson there if those involved could spend less time refining the talking points and more time actually trying to make things work. The way this thing is going, it is a good thing we have a word like "worser." Back in a minute.

SCHIEFFER: And we'll be right back at you with more FACE THE NATION.

SCHIEFFER: And welcome back now to FACE THE NATION. For some analysis on all this news, and there is a lot of news: David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post; David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times; our CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford; and our own John Dickerson. Let's just -- I don't know where to start, so I'm just going to pull something out of the air here and say we'll start with NSA surveillance. David, I guess nobody is surprised to find out that great powers spy on one another. But is anyone surprised that the president and the White House denied that he was aware of this? Can that be?

DAVID IGNATIUS, COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, we'll find out. I think there will be careful examination of this. He gets his President's Daily Briefing every morning. And they go through precisely the information NSA collects. That's the prize trophy in the briefing every morning. I think it's likely that the president wouldn't drill down on the precise individuals except in the cases where they involve U.S. war- fighters overseas, I'm sure he knows it's Karzai saying to his chief of staff something, whether he knew it was Angela Merkel talking on her cell phone, I don't know. What we've seen is that the NSA is just one of those organizations that if it can do it, it will do it. You know, these are young, technophiles, you know, they're like hackers. They solve these puzzles just for the challenge, and they got out of control. I liken them to "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," if you remember the character in "Fantasia" who suddenly all the buckets of water are flowing. It just got out of control.

SCHIEFFER: Well, it does kind of make you wonder, doesn't it, David, I mean, maybe just because we're reporters, but I'm sitting here reading this or getting this intelligence brief, wouldn't you say, how do you know that?

DAVID SANGER, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, you know, in the first year of a presidency I could image in a president not knowing it. By year five you have to say that at some point he's likely to have asked that question. If he didn't, it's almost certain that many of his national security aides would have. Because while the president gets, as David indicated, this Presidential Daily Brief, it's an analytical product. What his aides get are the analytical product and the annex beneath it of the raw intelligence. So, that then raises the question of oversight which is, Angela Merkel was not a high priority target, nobody was worried about terrorism from Germany other than al Qaeda cells that are located there, or nuclear proliferation, or so forth emanating from there. So she is part of what David describes, I think quite rightly, as a system that was mostly on autopilot. And they have collected this kind of thing from allies back to the days of the Cold War.

SCHIEFFER: But isn't this -- I mean, the level of hypocrisy here on the part of our allies, I mean, I'm just aghast to find this out. Everybody has known about this. This is just sort of the way it was. I mean, those of us in Washington know these kinds of things are going on.

IGNATIUS: Congressman Mike Rogers said it in a humorous way, espionage is a French word. I mean, you know, everybody does do this and this has just been part of the conduct of foreign policy since U.S. Revolutionary War times, since the beginning of history you have had spies. What is different now is the technology, the capability to listen in to everything. And I think that that is what the administration is reckoning with, is that the technology is so different, we're going to have to think about new rules of the road.

SCHIEFFER: And -- John.

JOHN DICKERSON, CBS POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, I was just going to say, in this question of running amok and being on autopilot, David, you used that word "autopilot," that's what Secretary of State Kerry talked about, something being in autopilot. If you add this technological capability, if it's running on autopilot and the people who are overseeing don't even know what it's doing, then it has this control and the overseers don't know what it's doing, and one of the amazing things is what the NSA was doing with Google and Yahoo!, scraping all of their data out of the air. And that ability really does make it seem like the NSA has found new powers for itself that the people who were supposed to oversee, who were supposed to keep this delicate balance between safety and civil liberties, they just don't know what is going on.

SCHIEFFER: You know -- go ahead.

SANGER: I was just going to say, the mystery here is the between what John rightly says they can do, and what they actually are doing. So in the case of Google and Yahoo!, or even in the case of Angela Merkel, we know that they can get at the cloud, we know that they can get at her cell phone. The mystery that we don't know, as a reporting target for us these days, is, how much are they actually pulling down? And on that they have been extremely quiet.

SCHIEFFER: Let me -- you know, as I'm listening to you, it brings me to Jan, and I'm thinking, I guess it's a little unfortunately they didn't let the NSA put together the Web site...

JAN CRAWFORD, CBS LEGAL CORRESPONDENT: Do the Web site.

SCHIEFFER: ... for Obamacare. Because if we talk about on this side of the table how wonderful and these great capabilities, I mean, I have never seen anything that flopped the way this thing did.

CRAWFORD: You know, and the thing is, when you hear all these technological advances that are leading to this surveillance, people just assume in their daily lives, technology at some point is going to work. So I think that was, you know, going in to the Web site something nobody -- Americans would not have expected, people in the White House and -- that were not testing this were getting some clues leading up to the launch. But now you have got even David Axelrod saying, this Web site is a debacle. And I think the problem now for the White House is that, you know, you can fix a broken Web site. But this is more than a broken Web site, because for a lot of Americans, this isn't just an introduction to a Web site, it's their introduction to the Affordable Care Act. If you go back and look, Gallup did a really interesting poll at the beginning of this month, 71 percent of uninsured Americans didn't know, weren't familiar with the Affordable Care Act. And now, what are they seeing? What have they seen this month? Broken Web site, cancellation letters going out to millions of Americans saying, they're going to lose their existing coverage, something no one expected because the president repeatedly said, if you like your plan, you can keep it, notices that their new premiums might be higher in some cases. So all of this kind of goes in to play and they can't get on the Web site to find out more information. So it's kind of this perfect storm of a lack of information, information they're getting that they didn't expect, and a president who made promises that it appears, at least a lot of people in the White House knew, he wouldn't be able to keep.

SCHIEFFER: Well, and you base that on what -- well, there's story this morning in The Washington Post that details before the president made those statements, that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it, that they were debating in the White House whether he should say something...

(CROSSTALK)

CRAWFORD: The Journal had a great piece yesterday talking about that as well. I mean, the kind of internal debate suggesting this was a little more than the president, as The New York Times put it this morning, misspeaking here. Because there was, apparently, now it's being reported, this extensive debate on whether he should say that. And policy advisers knew that wasn't going to happen, that these plans will have to change to meet the new minimum requirement of Obamacare, including ones before March of 2010 which is where they're trying to draw this line now. Those plans also have to change.

SCHIEFFER: So, John, what happens here? Are they going to have to postpone this thing? Because basically what you've got here now, you have got a deadline where people don't get their health insurance by a certain time, they're going to get fined, but you have a Web site that they can't get on to get their health care.

DICKERSON: Right. And so the problem is there could have been -- there could be some delays in different ways to delay it, but the problem with delay is that while it might help out those people who are desperate to get on to the Obamacare program, the insurance companies don't want that because they want mechanisms to force people to sign up because of these risk pools. They need lots of healthy people getting in these risk pools to keep the prices down, premiums. So you want some things to force people in. If you elongate the period that they can come in or you take away the fine for not signing up, it reduces the pressure. And that creates a policy problem. What you have now is you have some political problems and some bad PR problems. But this would create potentially a policy problem. The problem though is that lot of Democrats who have defended the Affordable Care Act, those who are up for reelection in 2014, now see a real problem. It's more than just a Web site, as Jan has detailed. It's now a problem both with the overall health care but then it's also a government problem. There's a story in The Washington Post today that is really amazing about a memo that was written by David Cutler to the White House, a White House health care adviser in 2010, saying, you're not ready to roll this thing out. So then you get into a very big problem that Democrats are going to have to defend, which is, can a government handle a question like this? And Republicans have all along argued, no, it can't. So that gets to be a very big problem that can really spin out of control into next year's election.

SCHIEFFER: Yes, but you know, I think this goes beyond politics and the fallout for Republicans and Democrats. This is about health care. And a law has been passed that people are going to have to have it. And now it's difficult to figure out how they're going to get it. What happens here, David?

IGNATIUS: Well, I think the reality is that we're going to stumble through a period of trial and error. And the only thing I'd say is that there's no technology success in the world, especially in America, that doesn't have a kind of rough break-in period. I mean, we have a zero defect culture for Washington. Anything in Washington has to be perfect the first time out because it's so political. But, you know, in the real world, companies have beta products that crash all the time and don't work. You know, when Microsoft began, every one of us have had error messages that drove us crazy, and it gets better. And that's what will happen here. I think people should just think, well, this is sort of -- it's more like maybe what they experienced dealing with technology companies than it is like what they get from government, which is usually kind of basically...

(CROSSTALK)

SCHIEFFER: But, you know, David, it occurs to me as you look -- if you step back from this and look at how other countries are looking at the United States right now, it's just one more case of how we can't seem to get out of our own way. And, I mean, we have the government in constant gridlock. We're not making decisions the way that great powers traditionally do. And now this is just one more thing for people to say, what is going on over there? What are you guys doing to yourselves?

SANGER: Right, the decision -- the government gridlock raises a question of whether or not we can make the policy decisions we need to be to be a global leader. The health care computer system issues raise the question of whether we can execute. And execution has been, as one senior member of the Obama administration said to me this week, because they were dealing with all of this, their real Achilles heel throughout. And just for exactly the reason that David laid out, that we have all seen computer systems that roll out badly, that we're always getting Microsoft updates to our operating systems and so forth, that would have argued in favor of the Obama administration making sure that this system was being test run for six months or a year before it came out, which is what most technology companies will tell you a large, complex piece of software requires. And instead they gave this weeks. And that's actually, I think, where -- where the investigative focus should be, why they tried to go do this so fast and so on the fly.

CRAWFORD: Well, and not only -- I mean, they gave, in some cases, days. There were companies that were going to be working and needing these systems to tap into. Some online insurance, private insurance companies -- they tell us they got the information from the White House two days before the site went live, so they weren't able to get in and do the testing that they would have required. I mean, yes, I mean, this website is going to get fixed. And they're saying, by the end of November, it will be fixed. They brought in Jeff Zients, a management consultant; they brought in a tech surge, people from Google now working at it. But October 1 was the launch date for the president's signature achievement. And with great fanfare they pointed to that date. They had health care clinics across the country signing people up for appointments that day to get people in for this promise of affordable health care. And on day one, six people were able to sign up. I mean, that suggests, when you're talking about a confidence of the American people in execution of what government can do, that does not inspire a lot of confidence.

SCHIEFFER: Well, what happens now, Jan?

CRAWFORD: Right now, I think what John pointed out is you're going to see more calls for delay, and that raises its own problem. Because you're going to have the sick people who have been so anxious for this insurance because they have been denied coverage because they have these preexisting conditions. They are the ones who are going to get it. But what has to happen is that the young healthiest, as they call them in the insurance industry -- they're the ones who have to sign up to make this whole thing work. And if they don't sign up -- and they have no incentive in year one to sign up because there's not a penalty; the hammer's been taken off the table -- then you get in this concern about the death spiral, as the industry calls it.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think they -- will they delay the day when people have to sign up for this?

CRAWFORD: As John says, it's a political problem now for Democrats in 2014, but I think that the concerns, the real concerns the White House can point to, the valid concerns the insurance industry can point to, if they do have a delay causing the program, the entire program, to almost potentially collapse if you get this death spiral with only sick people signing up is going to really push against any delay. I think Democrats are going to start noticing that. John, what does -- I mean, that's what I'm hearing.

SCHIEFFER: And back to the David, what happens now on this NSA, as these revelations continue to come out?

SANGER: Well, there are two reviews that are under way. One is internal to the White House. The White House has said very little about it. Then there's an external one of five former members of the intel community, some legal scholars who are supposed to report by the middle of December and say that report will be quite public. But I think what you're discovering right now is that the White House is standing firm on the domestic collection of this bulk data about all the phone calls we all make. I think, in the foreign arena, the Angela Merkel kind of interceptions, you're going to see far more oversight. And I think that's, sort of, what you were hearing when you heard Senator Feinstein today issue those complaints. I don't know how widespread her view is. But my guess is it's going to be increasingly difficult to justify doing this kind of surveillance on allies who you need as partners in not only intelligence collection but making sure that our cybersystems are safe.

SCHIEFFER: A friend of mine said to me, David, we'll fix the intelligence, the damage that's been done to our intelligence gathering. But, he said, what is going to be harder to fix is how damaged our influence has been.

IGNATIUS: I think this has really hurt U.S. national security. President Obama came in hoping to repair our relations with allies. This has shattered whatever progress was made. One thing that I've heard people in the White House talking about in the last few days fascinates me. People in the intelligence world always say, "Look, the fourth amendment doesn't apply to foreigners. You know, we may have privacy issues at home, but overseas, it's a different thing." They are beginning to ask whether there should be procedures for foreign nationals that minimize their personal data when the metadata about who they call is collected so that there's not the same -- there's something closer to the way we treat our own citizens. That would be a huge change, and they're beginning to talk about it.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, it's something we're going to be talking about for awhile, both of these subjects, I think. We'll be back in a minute to talk about one of the most fascinating aspects and stories to come out of the assassination of John Kennedy, in just a minute.

SCHIEFFER: Finally today, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, we're going to talk about what could be the most important 26 seconds of film in our nation's archives. Our memory of the horrific events of November 22nd, 1963, would not be the same without the Zapruder film. Abraham Zapruder was a local businessman who was at Dealey Plaza that day to record the visit of President John Kennedy. It was through his camera that America saw the clearest moving pictures of the assassination of a president. The film was vital evidence to the Warren Commission's investigation and is now kept in a climate-controlled vault at the National Archives. The camera used by Zapruder is currently on display at the Newseum in Washington. America got its first look at the Zapruder film not on television but in print. Just after the assassination, Life magazine printed 31 frames from the film, possibly one of the biggest exclusives in history. And joining us now, Dick Stolley, then the editor of Life magazine, and Abraham Zapruder's granddaughter Alexandra. They are contributors to a new commemorative Life magazine book "The Day Kennedy Died." Thank you both for coming. Alexandra, your grandfather, Abe Zapruder, what, he manufactured women's clothing in Dallas?

ZAPRUDER: Yes, that's right.

SCHIEFFER: He loved President Kennedy. And he went down to Dealey Plaza that day to see him. Tell us how that came about.

ZAPRUDER: Well, I don't know if you know this, but he actually left his camera at home that morning because his offices were right next door to Dealey Plaza, and so he went, but it was an overcast day. And so he hadn't planned originally to film the president. And then he was persuaded by his long-time assistant, Lillian Rogers, to go home and get the camera, which he did, luckily for history. And he then went down to the plaza, and as I understand it, he took -- sort of tried out a number of spots and took some test shots and got ready and then got up on that parapet with Lillian -- with Marilyn behind him, who was his receptionist, and got ready to film the president.

SCHIEFFER: Did he realize what he had when he...

ZAPRUDER: I think he did, yeah. I mean, I'm told that after -- right afterwards he was screaming and distraught and hysterical, and that he -- he definitely saw the president murdered through the lens of the camera.

SCHIEFFER: And -- and what did he do? Did he go develop the film immediately, or what?

ZAPRUDER: So what happened that day is so, kind of, amazing and involved, but he was apparently, sort of, wandering on the plaza a little bit, you know, still very much...

SCHIEFFER: Shock.

ZAPRUDER: In shock, right. And he was approached by a reporter from the "Dallas Morning News," Harry McCormack, who saw the camera and who said, you know, "What do you have there?"And he said, "I only want to talk to the federal authorities." And so it was Harry McCormack who went and found Forrest Sorrels, the head of the Secret Service in Dallas, and brought him to Jennifer Juniors, my grandfather's manufacturing company. And from there they went through what was a fairly long and involved process of getting the -- the pictures developed. It wasn't so easy to develop eight-millimeter, you know, in those days.

SCHIEFFER: And, Dick Stolley, you were out in Los Angeles with Life magazine. You heard about this. Your bosses told you to get to Dallas. How did you find out about this film? STOLLEY: We saw it on the AP ticker, which is the way we got news before the Internet, got the news, called New York. They said "How fast can you get to Dallas?" Within an hour, four of us were on a plane. Back then, no TSA, you could run for a plane almost as it was going -- taxiing out and get on, which is what we did. We landed in Dallas not long after Air Force One went back to Washington with the president's body.

SCHIEFFER: And when did you learn of this film?

STOLLEY: About two hours later I was in a hotel. Our stringer, part-time correspondent, called me to say she had heard from a fellow reporter who had heard from a cop, you know, from blah, blah, blah, that a businessman had been in Dealey Plaza with a movie camera. And I said, "Holy cow. What's his name?" And she said, "I don't know how to spell out, but I can pronounce it, "Za-pru-der." I looked in the phone book, never been in Dallas before. There it was, Zapruder, comma, Abraham. I called that number and, finally, at 11:00 that evening, I got a very weary and distressed Abraham Zapruder.

SCHIEFFER: And you made an appointment to come see him the next morning. He wouldn't see you that night. And -- and what happened after that?

STOLLEY: Well, he said, "Come to my office at 9:00." I got there at 8:00, which is a lesson for journalism students.

(LAUGHTER)

SCHIEFFER: In journalism, being early is being on time.

STOLLEY: Exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

And I got there first. And I saw the film with two Secret Service agents. We all knew the president had been assassinated. We had no idea what it looked like. And suddenly there's that film. And when that head shot comes, it was probably the most dramatic moment of my career.

SCHIEFFER: Yeah. And you -- you paid him for this. What did you pay for this?

STOLLEY: For print rights that day, we paid $50,000. I went back two days later, after New York had seen this incredible piece of film, bought all rights for $150,000.

SCHIEFFER: But I'm told later that his relatives told you the reason you got it, that others were willing to pay as much but you had been polite when you talked to him.

STOLLEY: I talked to his partner and wanted to get some more details, and we're speaking and suddenly he said, "Do you know why you got that film?" I said, "What do you mean, money?" We'd promised not to exploit it, which was very important to Mr. Zapruder. But he said, "Do you know why you got it and not those other people out in the hall?" I said, "I have no idea." He said, "Because you were a gentleman."

SCHIEFFER: Isn't that something? Now, Alexandra, your grandfather thought about this. This had an impact on his life from then on.

ZAPRUDER: Definitely. You know, I think it's just he really did love the president. All of our family were real Kennedy people. And, you know, my aunt had been down on Love Field that morning to greet the president. And my dad had just taken a job in the Justice Department under the Kennedy administration. And so, you know, it was very personal to him, I think. And he was devastated, as the rest of the nation was. But also, I think it was always very painful for him to be personally attached and associated with this -- you know, this very traumatic moment.

SCHIEFFER: He was so afraid that someone might exploit it. And that's why he was...

STOLLEY: Yes.

SCHIEFFER: ... agreed to give it to Life.

ZAPRUDER: Absolutely, right.

SCHIEFFER: Well, thank you all very much.

ZAPRUDER: Thank you.

SCHIEFFER: We'll be right back.

SCHIEFFER: Well, I want to tell you that's it for us today. There is a lot more information about the coming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in Life magazine's wonderful commemorative book. And we want to ask you to be sure and tune in tomorrow to "CBS This Morning." New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte will be joining Norah O'Donnell and Charlie Rose. Thanks for watching "Face the Nation."