San Jose:
US President Barack Obama defended sweeping secret surveillance into America's phone records and foreigners' Internet use, declaring "we have to make choices as a society."
Taking questions today from reporters at a health care event in San Jose, California, Mr Obama said, "It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience."
It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of US phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon's land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too.
Another secret program revealed on Thursday scours the Internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine US-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.
In his first comments since the programs were publicly revealed this week, Mr Obama said safeguards are in place.
"They help us prevent terrorist attacks," Mr Obama said. He said he has concluded that prevention is worth the "modest encroachments on privacy."
Mr Obama's defence of the two programs came as members of Congress were vowing to change a program they voted to authorise. Civil liberties advocates were crying foul, questioning how Mr Obama, a former constitutional scholar who sought privacy protections as a US senator, could embrace policies with strong echoes of President George W Bush, whose approach to national security he had vowed to leave behind.
The disclosures have triggered a fierce debate that cuts across party lines and could overshadow a two-day visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. They come at a particularly inopportune time for Mr Obama, whose administration already faces questions over the federal tax agency's improper targeting of conservative groups and the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media.
Mr Obama said he came into office with a "healthy skepticism" of the program and increased some of the "safeguards" on the programs. He said Congress and federal judges have oversight on the program, and a judge would have to approve monitoring of the content of a call and it's not a "program run amok."
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he said. "That's not what this program's about."
He said government officials are "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 might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism," Mr Obama said.
His remarks followed an unusual late-night statement on Thursday from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who denounced the leaks of highly classified documents that revealed the programs and warned that America's security will suffer. He called the disclosure of a program that targets foreigners' Internet use "reprehensible," and said the leak of another program that lets the government collect Americans' phone records would change US enemies' behaviour and make it harder to understand their intentions.
A top-secret court order, first disclosed by the Guardian, requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the US and between the US and other countries. Experts said it's likely the program extends to other phone companies as well.
Another secret program came to light when The Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the NSA and FBI can scour America's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, emails and other documents to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple were all included. Most denied giving the government direct access.
Senior administration officials defended the programs as critical tools and said the intelligence they yield is among the most valuable data the US collects. Mr Clapper said the Internet program, known as PRISM, can't be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the US. He said a special court, Congress and the executive branch all oversee the program and that data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum.
The possibility of a third secret program letting the NSA tap into credit card transaction records emerged late on Thursday in a report in The Wall Street Journal. The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry about that program.
The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, The Guardian reported.
It does not authorise snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyse them for patterns, spot unusual behaviour and identify "communities of interest" - networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.
Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.
Republican House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers said that once the data has been collected, officials still must follow "a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number."
The steps are shrouded in government secrecy, which some lawmakers say should change.