AP News in Brief
Before disclosures, Bush and Obama administrations long denied widespread NSA data trawling
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- For years, top officials of the Bush and Obama administrations dismissed fears about secret government data-mining by reassuring Congress that there were no secret nets trawling for Americans' phone and Internet records.
• "We do not vacuum up the contents of communications under the president's program and then use some sort of magic after the intercept to determine which of those we want to listen to, deal with or report on," then-CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2006.
• But on Friday, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged the existence of such programs even as he gave the government's standard rationale to ease fears that Americans' privacy rights are being violated.
• "By sifting through this so-called metadata, they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism," Obama said during an exchange with reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif.
• Obama's comments marked the first time a U.S. president publicly acknowledged the government's electronic sleuthing on its citizens. They came in response to media reports and published classified documents that detailed the government's secret mass collection of phone and Internet communications.
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Obama says Americans must 'make some choices' in balancing privacy rights against threats
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is urging Americans to "make some choices" in balancing privacy and security as he defends once-secret surveillance programs that sweep up an estimated 3 billion phone calls a day and amass Internet data from U.S. providers in an attempt to thwart terror attacks.
• Obama says it will be harder to detect threats against the U.S. now that the two top-secret tools to target terrorists have been so thoroughly publicized.
• At turns defensive and defiant while speaking to reporters on Friday, Obama stood by the spy programs revealed this week.
• The National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans each day, creating a database through which it can learn
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