[Whitfield:] All right. Leaders of both Facebook and Google deny the government has access to their servers. They are reacting to the U.S. admitting that it tracks the online movement of some foreigners. The government also said this week its national security agency tracks the data of millions of phone calls and one senator said it's been doing so for the last seven years. How is the government tracking your information? CNN's Laurie Seagal joins us now live from New York. Good to see you, Laurie.
[Laurie Segall, Cnn Tech Reporter:] Nice to see you.
[Whitfield:] OK. So help us understand this surveillance program by the National Security Adviser.
[Segall:] You know what? It's very complicated. I will tell you this. We keep hearing about moving parts and the thing that's interesting about this is there is what we know and what we don't know. We keep finding out more information about what we don't know. It comes down to is your data, your privacy and what you are sharing on a regular basis. We broke it down for you. Check it out.
[Matthew Green, Encryption Expert:] What we learned is that there is a program. The program is basically designed to get information from Silicon Valley companies.
[Segall:] Major tech companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft deny any knowledge of a program called PRISM run by the National Security Agency. According to classified documents obtained by the "Washington Post," PRISM collected data from nine major tech companies. At the heart of the matter, data mining.
[Green:] Data mining is the process of taking huge sets of data, information about what you have done, what you bought, all of this information that by itself would be very hard for a person to make any sense of. But then applying modern computer algorithms to it to basically pull out information out. You can see how that would be useful for National Security Agency, for example.
[Segall:] It's a common practice, but one users were shocked to hear about when these leaked slides give an inside look at how far the NSA was able to go.
[Green:] The slides mention e-mail, they may have other information, things like photos, for example, that you upload or took on your phone and were uploaded to, for example, Apple servers.
[Segall:] All of the companies mentioned have denied granting the government sweeping access saying that they took their users' privacy seriously and they will only share information when there is a court order. How could the NSA gather that information without the company's knowledge?
[Green:] One of the conjectures people are making is that they are actually tapping into the data that goes over the wire.
[Segall:] The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, says the law covering such surveillance, "cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States." [on camera]: When you have a privacy scare like this the next step is people say, "Hey, how do we prevent this from happening?" Well, there is no easy answer. In short it's very difficult. But there are alternatives.
[Chris Soghoian, Privacy Researcher:] There are a bunch of tools that people can use. There is one that's been actually developed with State Department money for use in Arab Spring countries called a red phone. It's supported by the State Department and other NGOs.
[Segall:] As users try to understand how to protect themselves, Silicon Valley is under fire.
[Soghian:] I think these companies may be held accountable. I also think some subset of the population are maybe going to think twice before they store certain private files with these companies.
[Segall:] And Fredricka, I should mention just now we have a note from James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence and he's declassifying some information. Because he says there's a lot of information out there that people just don't seem to understand. He says PRISM is used to facilitate the collection of data. He said it's not data mining. So we are hearing from all sides. But, you know, the reason it's got a lot of hype was the "Washington Post" had initially said the government is going directly to the servers. Well, that may not be the case. And from what we're hearing it isn't necessarily the case. They have to have a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. So that's what we are hearing right now. We'll keep you updated with anything coming in on this. Because when it comes down to it, it's our privacy. You know, you look at this kind of stuff and we say we need more transparency. You got a big scare factor here.
[Whitfield:] All right. Laurie Seagal. Thanks so much. In New York.
[Segall:] Thank you.
[Whitfield:] And this just in to the CNN "Newsroom." A grim sign possibly in the search for a missing teacher in Louisiana. Police in