奥巴马承诺审视NSA监控项目或把电话数据交由运营商保存_BEC初级作文

奥巴马承诺审视NSA监控项目或把电话数据交由运营商保存

An independent White House panel released a report this week questioning whether the NSA’s sweeping collection of personal data had played any meaningful role in preventing terrorist attacks. A federal judge also ruled that the data collection was probably unconstitutional.

Obama acknowledged that the United States needs to provide “more confidence” to the international community amid widespread outrage over revelations of U.S. spying on many foreign allies.

“What has been more challenging is the fact that we do have a lot of laws and checks and balances and safeguards and audits when it comes to making sure that the NSA and other intelligence communities are not spying on Americans,” Obama said. “We’ve had less legal constraint in terms of what we’re doing internationally.”

He added, “In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter anymore.”

Obama defended the NSA, saying that he has seen no evidence that the agency “acted inappropriately” with the billions of call records it has assembled in a secret database, a claim that is at odds with compliance reports and other documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Obama all but endorsed one of the White House panel’s proposals, which would require phone companies to hold the data that the NSA has been collecting.

“It is possible that some of the same information . . . can be obtained by having private phone companies keep those records longer” and allowing the government to search them under tight guidelines, Obama said.