“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said, delivering a 14-minute answer to two questions about the surveillance programs at an event that was initially supposed to be devoted to the health care law. “That’s not what this program is about.”
The president’s remarks, during a four-day trip to the West Coast, were his first since the revelations this week of programs to collect information about phone calls and Internet traffic. Mr. Obama said the programs help prevent terrorist attacks and they are kept in check by rigorous judicial and Congressional oversight.
He acknowledged that the public may be uncomfortable with the broad reach of the formerly secret programs, but he said he believed the government had struck the right balance between the need to fight terrorism and the need to protect privacy.
“You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Mr. Obama said, repeatedly stressing that the lawmakers from both parties and federal judges were aware of the efforts. “You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
Just hours after the president spoke, The Guardian newspaper in London published online a copy of a classified directive Mr. Obama signed last year that lays out the conditions under which the president can order cyberstrikes against another country — akin to the attacks on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant, the only known use of a cyberweapon by the United States. As previously reported, the document – called Presidential Decision Directive 20 – says that only the president can authorize offensive cyberaction, just as only he can authorize the use of nuclear weapons.
The directive also reserves the right to take “anticipatory action against imminent threats” to protect critical infrastructure in the United States, from power utilities to cellphone networks to financial markets. That raises the possibility that the United States could strike first if it feared a large attack from China or another country.
It also directs the government to “identify potential targets of national importance” where offensive cyberoperations “can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power.” That means, in essence, that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command and the intelligence agencies would maintain running lists of targets around the world that could be damaged more effectively — and perhaps more covertly — by a computer attack than a missile or bomber attack.
Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, defended the directive. She said it would “establish principles and processes that can enable more effective planning, development, and use of our capabilities.”
“It enables us to be flexible, while also exercising restraint in dealing with the threats we face,” Ms Hayden added. “It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as the preferred courses of action. The procedures outlined in this directive are consistent with the U.S. Constitution, including the president’s role as commander in chief, and other applicable law and policies.”
Mr. Obama had remained silent on Thursday as national security leaks revealed the secret programs for collecting the information, but on Friday he appeared eager to explain them at length. He dismissed what he called “some of the hype” from news reports and emphasized the limits on the programs.
“If the intelligence community actually wants to listen to a telephone call, they have to go back to a federal judge,” Mr. Obama said. He said the collection of information from Internet companies like Google and Apple does not apply to American citizens or people living in the United States.
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman, Mark Mazzetti, David Sanger and James Risen from Washington; Jackie Calmes from Palm Springs, Calif.; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; Nick Wingfield from Seattle; James Kanter from Brussels and Eric Pfanner from Serraval, France.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/national-security-agency-surveillance.html?partner=rss&emc=rss