Benton RSS Feed

President Barack Obama defended a pair of recently disclosed surveillance programs as striking the “right balance” between national security and civil liberties following a speech June 6 in California.

“You can't have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a government,” President Obama said. “You can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance.” Obama stressed that every member of Congress had been briefed on the phone monitoring program and that the relevant Intelligence committees were aware of PRISM — the code name of the NSA's secret program to monitor Internet traffic. He also noted that federal judges had to sign off on data-gathering requests. “If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, then we're going to have some problems here,” President Obama said.

The President went on to say that the White House believed the programs played an important role in preventing terror attacks. “My assessment and my team’s assent was they help us prevent terrorist attacks, and the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved … on net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment of that,” he said. On the collection of phone data, President Obama stressed that the government agency was only “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they're not looking at people.” He said that to listen in on calls, investigators would need to obtain new authorization from a federal court. “I want to be very clear: Some of the hype that we've been hearing over the last day or so, nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls,” President Obama said.

In regard to Internet data, the President noted the surveillance “does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the U.S.” The President also said he had a personal interest in the controversy because when he left office, he could be a prime target for surveillance. “I suspect that on a list of people who might be targeted so that someone could read their emails or listen to their phone calls, I'd probably be pretty high on that list,” President Obama said. But, the President said, he had confidence in the checks and balances installed in the system, and that those involved in the program were worried about the constitutional questions at hand.

When American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, e-mails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto (CA) company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of “Big Data.”

Today, a revolution in software technology that allows for the highly automated and instantaneous analysis of enormous volumes of digital information has transformed the N.S.A., turning it into the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike. The new technology has, for the first time, given America’s spies the ability to track the activities and movements of people almost anywhere in the world without actually watching them or listening to their conversations. New disclosures that the N.S.A. has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans and access to e-mails, videos and other data of foreigners from nine United States Internet companies have provided a rare glimpse into the growing reach of the nation’s largest spy agency. They have also alarmed the government: Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that “a crimes report has been filed by the N.S.A.”

The leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees said that the leaker who disclosed the National Security Agency’s phone and internet surveillance programs should be prosecuted.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the leak could endanger the security of Americans. “Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us, it's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took,” Chairman Rogers said. “I absolutely think they should be prosecuted,” he added. Chairman Feinstein said efforts were made to protect the privacy of American citizens, including relying on a secret intelligence court for authorization. “If there is strong suspicion that a terrorist outside of the country is trying to reach someone on the inside of the country, those numbers then can be obtained,” Chairman Feinstein said. “If you want to collect content on the American, then a court order is issued.” "Here's the rub, the instances where this has produced good -- has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks is all classified, that's what's so hard about this," Chairman Feinstein added. "So that we can't actually go in there and other than the two that have been released give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing."

When government officials came to Silicon Valley to demand easier ways for the world’s largest Internet companies to turn over user data as part of a secret surveillance program, the companies bristled. In the end, though, many cooperated at least a bit.

Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so. The negotiations shed a light on how Internet companies, increasingly at the center of people’s personal lives, interact with the spy agencies that look to their vast trove of information — e-mails, videos, online chats, photos and search queries — for intelligence. They illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions.