“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama said.But the President also reminded Americans that in the age of terrorism, security comes at a cost.
“We have to make choices as a society. It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said.
Obama’s comments marked the first time a U.S. President publicly acknowledged the government’s electronic snooping on U.S. citizens.
Obama was responding to revelations this week detailing for the first time the scope of the government’s massive collection of phone and Internet communications that began with the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11.
When top officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations have been asked in recent years whether U.S. citizens’ communications were swept up as part of government surveillance, they’ve often responded with swift denials.
Obama spoke after the Guardian detailed how the National Security Agency examines phone records — but not the content of calls — under search warrants allowing it to collect data from major telecom companies.
A separate NSA program, detailed by the Washington Post, involves the collection of massive amounts of data from major Internet firms like Facebook and AOL, pulling in everything from emails to photos.
Speaking with reporters in California, Obama said the telephone surveillance was only “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”
“They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism,” Obama said.
He said if “the intelligence community actually wants to listen to a telephone call, they have to go back to a federal judge.”
He added that the program monitoring Internet use is not aimed at American citizens or people living in the U.S.
Obama argued that he has increased safeguards, which include approvals by federal judges and congressional oversight.
“If people can’t trust, not only the executive branch, but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”
CBS reporter John Miller, formerly deputy director of national intelligence, said Internet monitoring in 2009 smashed a plot to blow up the subways.
“An email comes from an IP address to another IP address. One of them is nothing we’re paying attention to. The other is one that’s been flagged as an Al Qaeda mail drop that is rarely used,” he said on “CBS This Morning.”
“And when they find out the other IP address on the other end is connected to Aurora, Colo., outside Denver ... it takes them to the plot to blow up the New York subways, it’s all prevented. That’s how a program like this is supposed to work.”
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