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| FILE - This June 9, 2013 photo provided by The Guardian newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the U.S. National Security Agency, in Hong Kong. The Guardian newspaper says that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats' phones and emails when the U.K. hosted international conferences, even going so far as to set up a bugged Internet café in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations. The Guardian cites more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ's intelligence operations. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- President Barack Obama defended top secret National Security
Agency spying programs as legal in a lengthy interview Monday, and
called them transparent - even though they are authorized in secret.
"It
is transparent," Obama told PBS's Charlie Rose in an interview to be
broadcast Monday. "That's why we set up the FISA court," he added,
referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one
that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track
the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links
to terrorism.
The location of FISA courts is
secret. The sessions are closed. The orders that result from hearings in
which only government lawyers are present are classified.
"We're
going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there
are checks and balances in place ... that their phone calls aren't
being listened into; their text messages aren't being monitored, their
emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere," Obama said.
Obama
is in Northern Ireland for a meeting of leaders of allied countries. As
Obama arrived, the latest series of Guardian articles drawing on the
leaks claims that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked
into foreign diplomats' phones and emails with U.S. help, in an effort
to get an edge in such high-stakes negotiations.
Obama's
announcement follows an online chat Monday by Edward Snowden, the man
who leaked documents revealing the scope of the two programs to The
Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers.
He accused members of
Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims
about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to
the arrest of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009.
Snowden
said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance
programs - a point Obama conceded in his Monday interview without
mentioning Snowden.
"We might have caught him
some other way," Obama said. "We might have disrupted it because a New
York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent
and the bomb didn't go off. But at the margins we are increasing our
chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,"
he said.
Obama also told Rose he wanted to
encourage a national debate on the balance between privacy and national
security - a topic renewed by Snowden's disclosures.
Obama,
who repeated earlier assertions that the programs were a legitimate
counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people
with no terror ties, said he has created a privacy and civil liberties
oversight board.
"I'll be meeting with them.
And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national
conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general
problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be
restricted to government entities," he said.
Congressional
leaders have said Snowden's disclosures have led terrorists to change
their behavior, which may make them harder to stop - a charge Snowden
discounted as an effort to silence him.
"The
U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or
murdering me," he said. He added the government "immediately and
predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home," by
labeling him a traitor, and indicated he would not return to the U.S.
voluntarily.
Congressional leaders have
accused Snowden of treason for revealing once-secret surveillance
programs two weeks ago in the Guardian and The Washington Post. The
National Security Agency programs collect records of millions of
Americans' telephone calls and Internet usage as a counterterror tool.
The disclosures revealed the scope of the collections, which surprised
many Americans and have sparked debate about how much privacy the
government can take away in the name of national security.
"It
would be foolish to volunteer yourself to" possible arrest and criminal
charges "if you can do more good outside of prison than in it," he
said.
Snowden dismissed being called a traitor
by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who made the allegations in an
interview this week on Fox News Sunday. Cheney was echoing the comments
of both Democrats and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, including
Senate Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.
"Being
called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an
American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him,
Feinstein ... the better off we all are," Snowden said.
The
Guardian announced that its website was hosting an online chat with
Snowden, in hiding in Hong Kong, with reporter Glenn Greenwald receiving
and posting his questions. The Associated Press couldn't independently
verify that Snowden was the man who posted 19 replies to questions.
In
answer to the question of whether he fled to Hong Kong because he was
spying for China, Snowden wrote, "Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy,
why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a
palace petting a phoenix by now."
He added later, "I have had no contact with the Chinese government."
Snowden
was working as a systems analyst contractor for NSA at the time he had
access to the then-secret programs. He defended his actions and said he
considered what to reveal and what not to, saying he did not reveal any
U.S. operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but
instead showed that the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like
universities and private businesses.
"These
nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not
only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation
operation, critical systems crash," he said, though he gave no examples
of what systems have crashed or in which countries.
"Congress
hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our
allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running
network operations against them that affect millions of innocent
people," he said. "And for what? So we can have secret access to a
computer in a country we're not even fighting?"
Snowden
was referring to Prism, one of the programs he disclosed. The program
sweeps up Internet usage data from all over the world that goes through
nine major U.S.-based Internet providers. The NSA can look at foreign
usage without any warrants, and says the program doesn't target
Americans.
U.S. officials say the data-gathering programs are legal and operated under secret court supervision.
Snowden
explained his claim that from his desk, he could "wiretap" any phone
call or email - a claim top intelligence officials have denied. "If an
NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT (signals
intelligence) databases, they can enter and get results for anything
they want," he wrote in the answer posted on the Guardian site. "Phone
number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's
all the same."
The NSA did not immediately
respond to an email seeking comment. But Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper has said that the kind of data that can be
accessed and who can access it is severely limited.
