WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama defended top secret National Security Agency spying programs as legal in a lengthy interview Monday, calling them transparent – even though they are authorized in secret.
“It is transparent,” Obama told PBS’s Charlie Rose in an interview. “That’s why we set up the FISA court,” he added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: One that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.
The location of FISA courts is secret. The sessions are closed. The orders that result from hearings in which only government lawyers are present are classified.
“We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place … that their phone calls aren’t being listened in to; their text messages aren’t being monitored; their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere,” Obama said.
Obama is in Northern Ireland for a meeting of leaders of allied countries. As Obama arrived, the latest Guardian articles drawing on the leaks claim that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and emails with U.S. help in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.
Obama’s announcement follows an online chat Monday by Edward Snowden, the man who leaked documents revealing the scope of the two programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers. He accused members of Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data-gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009.
Snowden said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs – a point Obama conceded in his Monday interview without mentioning Snowden. “We might have caught him some other way,” Obama said. “We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. But at the margins we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” he said.
Obama also told Rose he wanted to encourage a national debate on the balance between privacy and national security – a topic renewed by Snowden’s disclosures. Obama also repeated earlier assertions that the programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties, adding that he has created a privacy and civil liberties oversight board.
Source: AP
