Obama defends surveillance programs
SAN JOSE, California, June 7, 2013 (AFP) - US President Barack Obama mounted a staunch defense Friday of just exposed spy agency surveillance programmes, telling Americans “nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”
Obama also said there was a tradeoff to be made between national security and people's privacy, though he said it was right that the exact balance between the two should be publicly debated.
He argued that a National Security Agency (NSA) pro- gramme to sweep up telephone numbers and data on calls -- but not conversations themselves -had been repeatedly authorized by Congress and were overseen by a special court.
He also hit out what he said was the “hype” over the programmes revealed in a dizzying 24 hours of revelations in newspaper reports over the last two days. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.
That's not what this programme's about,” Obama said, noting that intelligence agents who did want to listen to content of calls had to go back to a federal judge for authorization.
Obama also said that a separate programme, known as PRISM, targeting foreign terrorists and tapping into the servers of nine top Internet firms was not aimed at anybody in the United States.
“This does not apply to US citizens. And it does not apply to people living in the United States,” Obama said.