The Final Call

Obama on NSA surveillance: ‘Can’t have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy’

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Pres. Obama weighed in recently on an evolving series of scandals surrounding an apparent National Security Agency program designed to allow real-time online surveillance of U.S. citizens.

Mr. Obama was concluding remarks about his Affordable Health Care Act during an address in Northern California June 7 when he fielded a question about the NSA and the recently disclosed domestic spying programs.

“I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” the president told the crowd.

Civil liberties-focused lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian published a document disclosing that the NSA orders the phone records of millions of American subscribers on a regular basis, and that American telecom firms have been compelled to provide the U.S. government with numbers dialed, duration of call and other metadata.

One day later, The Guardian and the Washington Post nearly simultaneously disclosed a program named PRISM. According to Greenwald, PRISM allows the NSA to connect directly to data servers controlled by the biggest names on the Internt, essentially providing the U.S. with backdoor access to the bulk of the country’s communications.

“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian,” Mr. Greenwald wrote.

Pres. Obama dismissed allegations that both NSA programs have been spying on Americans, instead calling them critical aspects of the country’s continuously expanding counterterrorism efforts. He also rejected the notion that the programs are as vast in scope as has been reported, at the same time shifting blame away from his administration and towards the lawmakers he said have been privy to both operations every step of the way.

“The programs,” said Pres. Obama, “are secret in the sense that they are classified, but they are not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.”

“With respect to all of these programs, the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so I think at the onset it is important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing,” insisted Pres. Obama.

“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program was about. As indicated, 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 are 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,” he said.

In regards to PRISM, Pres. Obama also downplayed reports of a widespread domestic surveillance operation.

“With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States,” he said. “And again in this instance, not only is Congress fully appraised of it, but what is also true is that the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court has to authorize it.”

Congress reauthorized FISA last year, giving federal investigators another five-year window to wiretap the communications of Americans citizens if one of the parties involved is thought to be outside of the US. Google began publishing statistics about FISA’s court-penned requests for user data in recent months, but the actual scope of the government’s spying prowess has gone unreported. Last year, two members of Congress even wrote the NSA for a rough estimate of how many Americans were having their communications intercepted — a request which was refuted.  (RT.com)