SAN JOSE, Calif., (Reuters) – President Barack Obama yesterday staunchly defended the sweeping U.S. government surveillance of Americans’ phone and Internet activity, calling it a “modest encroachment” on privacy that was necessary to defend the United States from attack.
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about,” Obama told reporters during a visit to California’s Silicon Valley. He emphasized that the secret surveillance programs were supervised by federal judges and authorized by Congress, which had been briefed on the details. Obama’s comments came after reports this week in Britain’s Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post revealed that the National Security Agency and the FBI secretly have conducted surveillance of Americans’ telephone and internet communications activities far beyond what had been made public.
The two reports launched a broad debate about privacy rights and the proper limits of government surveillance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. They also have White House officials and congressional leaders scrambling to explain why the government needs to collect information about trillions of phone calls and Internet communications.
“In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance,” Obama said, noting that a secret federal court reviews requests for surveillance, and that Congress is briefed on such activity.
He acknowledged having “a healthy skepticism” about the programs before he was first elected in 2008, but that he had since come to the conclusion that such “modest encroachments on privacy” were worth it.
“You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society … There are trade-offs involved.”
TAPPING INTERNET
TRAFFIC
The Post reported late on Thursday that U.S. authorities have been tapping into the central servers of nine internet companies – including Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook – to gain access to emails, photographs and other documents and files that would allow analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts.
Hours earlier, the Guardian had reported that the NSA had been mining phone records from millions of customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications. The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported that the monitoring also included AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp. customers, and that the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions.
The relationship between the government’s surveillance program and the internet companies remained murky yesterday.
Some of the companies named by the Post – Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook – denied that the government was able to tap directly into their central servers, as the newspaper reported.
Microsoft, for example, said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies “with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.” That seemed to suggest that the government had gone to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain orders to force cooperation from some or all of the internet companies. U.S. officials described the government’s collection of trillions of pieces of “metadata” as an effort to build a giant database of communications that can be used as a research tool for investigators when they receive a tip that a foreign terrorism suspect is plotting to attack America.
Such data can be used to track suspects and their communications with others, analysts said.
But if investigators want to track people more closely – such as by listening to their phone calls or reading their emails – another court warrant is required.
Obama emphasized that point in describing how his administration had instituted audits of the programs and expanded safeguards designed to ensure they did not overstep their authority.
The programs “do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court that is entirely consistent with what we would do, for example, in a criminal investigation,” he said.
