By Alexis Simendinger - June 19, 2013

President Obama is in Berlin Wednesday after encountering a mixed reception among his peers at the G-8 global summit in Northern Ireland this week.

Rejecting Obama’s goal of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood firmly against opposition forces in Syria and challenged U.S. assertions that Assad’s military unleashed chemical weapons in the bloody civil war there. In addition, France’s president balked at aspects of a proposed transatlantic trade pact that Obama supports. And Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is up for re-election and has often been an Obama ally, challenged the president to explain to privacy-loving Germans why the United States monitors phone calls, emails and Internet activity abroad.

During a joint news conference with Merkel in Berlin, the president defended intelligence gathering by the National Security Agency abroad, arguing it had “saved lives” by averting “at least 50” known terrorist threats, including threats in Germany.

Responding to Merkel’s concerns -- which the chancellor indicated she had not entirely resolved in their conversation Wednesday -- Obama said he agreed the United States must be “cautious” and “strike a balance.”

“This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anybody else,” he said. “This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching anywhere that we want. … The encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited by a court-approved process,” he added.

Merkel described their morning discussion about counterterrorism, Internet threats and U.S. intelligence-gathering as “an important first step in the right direction, and I think it has brought us forward.” But she emphasized, “There needs to be a balance. There needs to be proportionality.”

(The president laters delivered a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, where he called on Russia to join the United States in cutting strategic nuclear warheads by one-third, CNN and other news outlets reported.)

Before leaving Washington for the annual two-day Group of Eight meeting, Obama defended as “transparent” and effective the clandestine National Security Agency programs revealed publicly by former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden, who has explained his disclosures to the British newspaper The Guardian and with members of the public while hiding out in Hong Kong.

In an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, which was taped Sunday and broadcast Monday night, the president said personal privacy and U.S. laws are safeguarded as the government scoops up call information from all phone carriers and sifts through phone and Internet activity abroad, searching for terrorist plotters.

He said the government’s electronic surveillance efforts are reported to Congress and warrants are obtained from any of the 11 federal judges who serve on the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, ensuring that the programs are “transparent.”

Unless the FBI has a suspicion of terrorist connections and obtains a wiretap to hear the content of calls or see private Internet activity, “the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls; and the NSA cannot target your e-mails,” Obama said. “They cannot and have not, by law and by rule.”

“Some people say, you know, ‘Obama was this raving liberal before, now he's, you know, Dick Cheney,’” the president lamented.

He conceded that the NSA could tap the calls and read email and text activity of non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorists, weapons proliferation, cyber-hacking, and cyber-attacks. The government accesses the information with approval from the FISA court by demanding it from commercial companies, such as phone carriers and Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Fearing reputational damage to their companies because of privacy worries among users, some of the affected corporations are seeking government permission to explain in much greater detail how they cooperate with federal demands for client information.

Obama also conceded some reputational damage of his own, noting the NSA programs stirred up public fears of potential abuses of personal privacy, leaving the government somewhat handcuffed by secrecy while Snowden asserts the “facts” behind the NSA’s actions to the world at large.

Recent polls show Obama’s job approval numbers dipping slightly since May, presumably under the weight of recent news reports about various controversies in federal agencies such as the IRS, the State and Justice departments and the NSA. Asked if Obama can manage the government effectively, 53 percent said no, and 47 percent said yes -- the former figure an increase of five points in a month, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey conducted June 11-13.

In every major policy category except combating terrorism, there were more respondents who disapproved of the job the president is doing than approved, including when it comes to managing the economy.

When it comes to NSA programs, the public says it is conflicted about what Obama calls “tradeoffs.” Fifty-one percent said NSA is “right” to gather and analyze Americans’ phone records, while 48 percent said it was wrong, according to the CNN survey. But asked if the administration had eroded civil liberties, 42 percent said the government went too far, 38 percent said the balance was right, and 17 percent said the government had not gone far enough.

The president’s argument since the NSA programs were revealed by Snowden has been that abuses of personal privacy would be easy to pull off with the hoarded “metadata” the spy agency collects each day. But he told Rose on Sunday that the NSA is not abusing its intelligence responsibilities in an effort to spy on U.S. citizens. The government is hunting for suspects within “narrow bands” of terrorism, malicious electronic hacking, and sophisticated attacks attempted by electronic means to harm the nation’s defenses, its finances and critical infrastructure, he said.

The government is not searching for private information about health data and individuals’ online activity to create a “big brother” portrait of who might be dying of cancer, he said, offering an example of what would be a privacy intrusion. The government possesses enough information to accomplish that, he suggested, but it would be illegal.

His argument -- that the administration’s intelligence operation is trustworthy and restrained -- may prevail, but it is challenging for the general public to verify because the only overseers (select members of Congress and the FISA judges) are by law prevented from speaking about what they know.

Obama’s opponents have turned to “trust in government” as a theme with more political traction because the public may be more comfortable forfeiting some civil liberties in exchange for protection from terrorists. Because Republicans have doused the Affordable Care Act with criticism, the party’s focus on Obama’s management of government and implementation of the new law next year are at center stage.

“I think there is a credibility gap when it comes to the basic issue of competence,” Sen. John Cornyn said Tuesday.

“The next thing [out of] the gate is Obamacare," the Texas Republican told reporters. “How are you going to be able to trust this government to effectively manage a multitrillion-dollar new program that starts on Jan. 1? Those are issues I think the American people are asking. And I think the American people want and deserve accountability. They want transparency from their government and from this administration; they're not getting it.”

On Capitol Hill Wednesday, Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the NSA and the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command, testified that more than 50 terrorist plots were foiled in part because of the agency’s surveillance operations in place and refined since 9/11. He called them “critical to ... our nation and our allies' security,” adding, “They assist the intelligence community efforts to connect the dots.”

(The president -- who turned to Google and other technology experts in 2012 to help his campaign mine data and create algorithms to identify Obama voters in key states -- noted that private entities are increasingly able to compile electronic mosaics of data that are intended to reveal personal characteristics about individuals.)

“What I've asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program[s],” Obama told Rose. “What I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation -- not only about these two programs, but also about the general problem of these big [electronic] data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities,” he added.

In a similar call in May for a national dialogue, Obama said he wanted a public discussion about his use of drones to kill U.S. citizens abroad in select cases when they are suspected of terrorist activities. Obama delivered a May 23 counterterrorism speech about his drone policies following months of public rebukes about secrecy from inside his Democratic base. The president did not describe his post-9/11 electronic surveillance adaptations, pegged to provisions of the USA Patriot Act, until The Guardian published Snowden’s classified information.

The administration has confirmed Snowden’s information, but avoided commenting on the 29-year-old’s legal jeopardy as a leaker of classified material.

The president recently tasked Attorney General Eric Holder to report to him by July 12 about how Justice Department prosecutorial guidelines might be modified in light of the government’s surreptitious data-gathering from journalists’ phones, faxes and emails as it hunts for federal leakers.