White House officials say Obama was not trying to be dismissive about privacy concerns. Obama NSA message getting lost

From the days of Edward Snowden’s first leaks about National Security Agency surveillance, President Barack Obama has tried to calm public fears by stressing that ordinary Americans have nothing to fear.

“If you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails, unless it’s getting an individualized court order,” Obama said in a June interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose.


His words — repeated by officials across the U.S. government at congressional hearings, at panel discussions and in TV appearances — may have eased the concerns of some Americans. But they haven’t done much to reassure foreign citizens. Many overseas perceive a double standard at work, where their privacy got short shrift from a superpower with a voracious appetite for information.

Now, Obama is struggling to address a wave of anger from foreigners — and, in particular, from foreign politicians — that is roiling U.S. diplomatic relationships across the globe, threatening to disrupt anti-terrorist data sharing programs with Europe, and risking economic damage to American technology: Some in Europe are floating proposals that could make it harder for U.S. Internet firms to do business on the continent, either by forcing them to move servers to Europe or by pushing customers toward locally run competitors.

( PHOTOS: NSA spying: 15 great quotes)

“If there’s a criticism to be made of the United States, it’s that they’ve got their own Constitution. They are reliant on protecting their own citizens above all else,” said Timothy Kirkhope, a former British Home Minister who’s part of a European Parliament delegation in Washington this week to discuss fallout from the NSA story. “Citizens of other parts of the world are complaining, saying the U.S. is not giving us the same level of respect or accountability or redress that they are giving to their own citizens.”

That skepticism overseas was initially dampened by claims that the snooping was carried out to fight terrorism — attacks more often focused abroad than in the United States. But those claims of a focus on terror became suspect in recent days with the revelation that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was tapped by the NSA, as were the phones of dozens of other world leaders.

“We are not considering our chancellor as a terrorist,” said Axel Voss, a German member of the European Parliament also part of the visiting group. “And as long as she is not a terrorist, I can’t see any value of [listening to] her cellphone.”

“There isn’t a sufficient appreciation, perhaps, of the lack of privacy that European citizens feel,” said Claude Moraes, a lawmaker representing Britain in Brussels.

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Some scholars say the foreign outcry signals the demise, or at least the limits, of American legal principles interpreted to grant constitutional rights to U.S. citizens worldwide and to foreign nationals on U.S. soil, but which often leave foreign citizens abroad with no legal protection at all.

“There’s this almost reflex among American policymakers to steer toward citizenship-based limitations that are almost self-justifying,” said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro. “There’s a basis in cases in constitutional law for that … There’s a pedigree to that reflex, but it’s no longer sustaining. It no longer makes sense to non-citizens.”

“It obviously goes down extremely poorly with the rest of the world when they’re told the U.S. barely recognizes any privacy interest on their part, yet the U.S. has the capacity to routinely invade their privacy because it remains the epicenter of much of the internet,” Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth said. “If the U.S. aspires to continue on with that role on the Internet, it will have to find some way to respect the privacy of communications channeled through the U.S.”

White House officials say Obama and other aides were not trying to be dismissive about foreigners’ privacy concerns, but were simply describing the legal regime in place. They also note that as the NSA scandal unfolded, Obama did try to address foreigners worries about U.S. surveillance.

( WATCH: Glenn Greenwald: Spying not about terror)

“I can give assurances to the publics in Europe and around the world that we’re not going around snooping at people’s emails or listening to their phone calls. What we try to do is to target very specifically areas of concern,” Obama said in September during a visit to Sweden.

“Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it. And there may be situations in which we’re gathering information just because we can that doesn’t help us with national security, but does raise questions in terms of whether we’re tipping over into being too intrusive with respect to the interactions of other governments,” the president said, in what now looks like a hint of the Merkel-related news that was yet to emerge.

Former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said the concerns law-abiding Europeans and others are raising about their lack of legal protection from U.S. surveillance are valid and should be addressed.

( Also on POLITICO: Barack Obama: No comment on foreign leader surveillance)

“That’s a fair question,” Harman said when asked about U.S. officials’ frequent references to privacy protections for those who are citizens of, or living in, the United States. “But our Constitution is designed that way.”

“Am I in favor of compromising the civil liberties of people who are U.S. persons? Of course not. But as we have this international conversation, I think it’s very important to assure non-U.S. persons that we’re not targeting them either,” said the former House Intelligence Committee member, who now runs the Wilson Center in Washington.

“We need to make clear we’re targeting individual bad guys,” she added. “It’s complicated. It’s not an easy argument to make in the U.S. either.”

Obama has already pledged not to target Merkel’s communications in the future. And French President Francois Hollande says he received a similar assurance.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Monday that U.S. intelligence gathering on leaders of allies has been halted.

“The White House has informed me that collection on our allies will not continue,” she said, adding that she is “totally opposed” to such spying and was in the dark about it until recently.

A senior administration official said late Monday that Feinstein’s statement was “not accurate” when it said surveillance aimed at U.S. allies had been ended.

“While we have made some individual changes … we have not made across-the-board changes in policy like, for example, terminating intelligence collection that might be aimed at all allies,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The White House did confirm publicly that some changes to intelligence gathering have taken place as a result of a review Obama ordered earlier this year, but officials would not share details at this point.

“We have already made some decisions through this process and expect to make more as we continue,” spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

Some lawmakers and experts believe Obama should fight to maintain robust U.S. surveillance, including the option to spy on current allies.

“We don’t know who the chancellor will be, who the president will be, who the prime minister will be,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) warned on CNN. “If we’re not going to tap a chancellor, are we going to go to the vice chancellor? people in the cabinet? where does this end? …This is not something the president should unilaterally and forever write off. “

”Generally, the United States needs to get out of a defensive crouch and go on the offense,” said Michael Allen, a George W. Bush administration official and author of the book “Blinking Red.”

“The job of the intelligence community is to collect intelligence on issues bearing on the national interest. This is what policymakers demand of the intelligence community. … We shouldn’t be apologetic, especially when we are the No. 1 intelligence target for most of the world’s intelligence services.”

Former Justice Department intelligence lawyer Carrie Cordero said it isn’t accurate to say foreigners have no protection in the current surveillance regime. For instance, some U.S. intelligence analysts have been punished for instituting surveillance on romantic interests who happened to be foreigners. And all surveillance is supposed to serve “national intelligence priorities” established by the executive branch.

Cordero says any changes to U.S. intelligence gathering are likely to be practical ones, not legal.

“I think our basic legal framework with respect to that [U.S./foreign] distinction is not going to change,” she said. “If there’s going to be a change in how the U.S. does foreign intelligence collection, it’s going to be in the interests of diplomacy and negotiations between individual countries based on the relationships we have with those individual countries…I think that part of this discussion has left the legal world.”

Former Department of Homeland Security official Paul Rosenzweig said it’s not clear what kind of accommodation European officials are seeking or whether it is practical. He said applying U.S. citizen-type protections abroad would be unwise because it would effectively end most of the useful foreign surveillance.

“I think the right thing for the U.S. to do is to have an aggressive national security regime that spies on foreigners [but] I think we’re very much in a position to need to smooth the water and ameliorate the problem we’ve created for ourselves” through the Merkel disclosures, he said. “My problem is I don’t know what those [changes] are … Do we give an EU ombudsman the right to look over our shoulder?”

Spiro agreed that it’s not clear what protections will be accorded to foreigners, but said some kind of safeguards are almost certain to result from the current controversy.

“It’s clear that the old paradigm has been destabilized and that was a citizenship-based paradigm. It’s not clear what replaces it,” said Spiro. “It’s pretty clear the days of ‘anything goes’ with respect to non-citizens outside the U.S. is over.”

Reid J. Epstein contributed to this report.