At a press conference in California on Friday, President Barack Obama took questions and gave a forceful defense of the PRISM program. PRISM was revealed yesterday by two newspapers who showed that several American tech companies have been complicit in providing the government with access to their systems. In addition, Obama also responded to the disclosure of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over metadata to the National Security Agency.

“When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any other,” he said, according to The Guardian, one of the two news outlets that revealed the secret program.

“Number one, to keep the American people safe. And number two, to uphold the constitution and constitutional rights to privacy and to civil liberties. These programs are secret in the sense that they're classified. But they're not secret in the sense that—when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed."

"I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

Earlier this week, The Guardian detailed a court order requiring Verizon to hand over millions of phone records every day. However, the PRISM program appears to entail direct access to digital services by the FBI and the National Security Administration—and not phone calls.

“When it comes to telephone calls: Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” the president continued. “That's not what this program's about. What the intelligence community is doing is identifying, looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people's names, and they're not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may find potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If they want to actually listen to a phone call, they have to go back to a federal judge. I want to be very clear. Some of what we've been hearing the last day or so—nobody's listening to the content of your phone calls. This program is overseen... not only by Congress but by a special [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court.”

“They’re professionals”

According to The Washington Post, the other news outlet that broke the story, the commander-in-chief also reiterated what the director of national intelligence described late Thursday—that the PRISM program is focused on foreigners and not citizens or residents.

“They make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity,” Obama said, adding that the programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government and they do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of US citizens and US residents.”

The Guardian also quoted Obama as essentially saying he trusts America’s spy agencies, and we should too.

“I will leave this office at some point,” he said. “And after that I will be a private citizen. And I would expect that on the list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their e-mails—I'd probably be pretty high on that list. But I know that the people who are involved in these programs... They're professionals.”

“In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance,” Obama said.

“The program does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls”

A second statement released by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Thursday evening also provided several explanations to the disclosure of the Verizon-National Security Agency alliance from earlier this week.

“Although this program has been properly classified, the leak of one order, without any context, has created a misleading impression of how it operates,” he wrote. “Accordingly, we have determined to declassify certain limited information about this program.”

He continued: