Mounting a strong defence of his Government’s sweeping surveillance of phone and Internet communications, President Barack Obama has asked fellow-Americans to accept
this “modest encroachment” on privacy as a “tradeoff” to protect the nation from terrorist plots.
“You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said in response to the furore triggered by media revelations about the unprecedented sweep of phone calls and web traffic, adding: “We’re going to have make some choices as a society.” But Obama asserted that nobody is listening to the phone calls, asserting that safeguards were in place.
All that the sweep of phone calls involves is that the intelligence community would be looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.
As for the mining of Internet data, which targets people across the world, he confined himself to assuring the US citizens and residents that this surveillance activity does not involve reading their mails, except for ones relating to federal court action or criminal investigation.
“I think on balance, we have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about,” Obama said, without addressing the concerns triggered by web users in the world outside. Answering reporters’ questions during a visit to California, Obama said both the surveillance programmes have been authorized by the US Congress by broad bipartisan majorities since 2006.
“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.
That’s not what this programme is about,” he said, adding: “What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.
“But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.
If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.”
He stressed that this programme is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA Court that has been set up to make sure that it is being carried out in accordance with the Constitution and the rule of law without any abuse by executive branch or Government in general.