US president Barack Obama has defended top-secret US spying operations to collect information on phone calls of Americans and the internet activity of foreigners and suggested that "you can't have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy".
New revelations about the extent of US government surveillance programmes to prevent attacks on the United States have shaken confidence in the Obama administration. Leaked documents published on Wednesday and Thursday disclosed that the National Security Agency, the secretive US surveillance agency, ran programmes to gather vast amounts of information on the daily communications of Americans with people living both inside and outside the country.
A day after the Guardian newspaper reported that the administration was secretly collecting phone records held by telecoms company Verizon, the newspaper and the Washington Post reported that US intelligence was also searching the servers of the biggest US internet and social media companies to view emails, audio and video files, photos and documents.
In his first comments since the spying programmes were publicly revealed, Obama said safeguards were in place to protect US citizens – congressional lawmakers had been briefed on the programmes and federal judges oversee the programme.
Legal and limited
He said the surveillance programmes were legal and limited, that the targeting of internet activity was aimed at foreign nationals, not American citizens, and that the telephone surveillance did not involve eavesdropping on calls.
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this programme is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at the numbers and durations of calls. They’re not looking at names and they’re not looking at content.”
Obama said he believes the administration has “struck the right balance” between protecting Americans from security threats and respecting constitutional rights and civil liberties. He said he had an interest in making sure privacy was protected. He would be a private citizen after leaving office and would be “pretty high” on the list of people whose emails are targeted.
The security agency was reported to be scanning the databases of US service providers Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
The classified surveillance programme dated back six years to the end of the George W Bush administration and was part of the country's efforts to fight terrorism by secretly collecting information on foreigners living overseas to identify security threats to the US.
'Blarney'
The programme, known as Prism, was set up by the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2007 and operated alongside a parallel programme, "Blarney", that gathered "metadata" relating to technical information about communications traffic, the Post reported.
A report on the programmes obtained by the Post contained a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and leprechaun hat and described Blarney as a programme that "leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks".
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the programme to collect information from internet providers was "to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats". He condemned the leaks revealing the existence of the programmes, saying: "The unauthorised disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal programme is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans."
The Orwellian nature of the surveillance drew criticism from civil libertarian groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which said the collection of phone records was signed off by a court that publishes almost none of its opinions and has "never been an effective check on government."