Obama Does Not Think US Violated Americans’ Privacy With Spy Programme – Chief Of Staff White House Chief of Staff Deni President Barack Obama’s chief of staff has said the American president does not believe the recently disclosed top-secret National Security Agency surveillance of phone records and Internet data has violated Americans’ privacy rights. Denis McDonough, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday, also said he did not know the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who said he was the source of reports in Britain’s Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post about the agency’s monitoring of phone and Internet data at big companies such as Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc and Facebook Inc. The administration has said the top-secret collection of massive amounts of “metadata” from phone calls – raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers, was legal and authorized by Congress in the interests of thwarting militant attacks. It has said the agencies did not monitor calls. Asked whether Obama feels he has violated the privacy of Americans, McDonough said, “He does not.” While he defended the surveillance, McDonough said “the existence of these programs obviously have unnerved many people.” He said Obama “welcomes a public debate on this question because he does say and he will say in the days ahead that we have to find the right balance, and we will not keep ourselves on a perpetual war footing.” Revelations of the NSA’s broad monitoring of phone and Internet data has drawn criticism that the Obama administration has extended, or even expanded, the security apparatus the George W. Bush administration built after the September 11, 2001, attacks. “We owe it to the American people to have a fulsome debate in the open about the extent of these programs,” Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat a long-time critic of the surveillance programs, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Describing the surveillance overseen by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Udall said, “I just don’t think this is an American approach to a world in which we have great threats. My number one goal is to protect the American people, but we can do it in a way that also respects our civil liberties.”
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:21:42 +0000
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