Fewer than 300 phones under lens in 2012: US
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During an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," McDonough was asked if Obama had privacy concerns relating to the NSA's analysis of the phone metadata of millions of Americans.
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| 300 Phones under lens |
WASHINGTON: The US government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.
The unclassified paper was circulated on Saturday within the government by US intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots.
The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both US based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans.
The paper circulated on Saturday said that data from the NSA phone and email collections programmes not only led US investigators to the ringleader of a plot to attack New York's subway system in 2009, but also to one of his co-conspirators in the United States.
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Obama Thinks It Violates Customer Privacy
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama doesn't think the National Security Agency's collection of phone records violates customer privacy and he will defend that view in the coming days, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said Sunday.
During an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," McDonough was asked if Obama had privacy concerns relating to the NSA's analysis of the phone metadata of millions of Americans.
"He does not," said McDonough, emphasizing that all three branches of government play a role in overseeing the agency's surveillance programs.
"The president is not saying, 'Trust me,'" he continued. "The president is saying, 'I want every member of Congress, on whose authority we are running this program, to be briefed on it, to come to the administration with questions and to also be accountable for it.'"
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