The president sounds open to at least one reform his panel proposed. Obama defends NSA database

President Barack Obama defended the National Security Agency’s call-tracking database Friday, but didn’t offer any specific examples of terrorist attacks the massive collection of telephone data had averted either in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Speaking at a year-end news conference, Obama said he was open to changes in the program, yet didn’t sound willing to give up the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to quickly check telephone numbers that surface in terrorism investigations.


“The question we’re going to have to ask is can we accomplish the same goals that this program is intended to accomplish in ways that give the public more confidence that in fact the NSA is doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Obama said.

With many in Washington sounding the death knell for the NSA’s call tracking program in the wake of the independent review group’s critical report and a judge’s ruling Monday that the program is likely unconstitutional, Obama was largely non-committal on the issue Friday. Mainly, Obama seemed eager not to give offense either to those with deep doubts about the program or to the NSA personnel who have been carrying it out.

The president expressed his openness to one reform proposed recently by an independent panel he commissioned: having telephone companies store the data the government currently gathers on billions of calls made to, from and within the U.S. each day.

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“It is possible, for example, that some of the same information that the intelligence community feels is required to keep people safe can be obtained by having the private phone companies keep these records longer and create some mechanism where they could be accessed in an effective fashion,” Obama said, while cautioning that such an approach “might cost more” and require new “checks” on how the call data could be used.

The president also made clear that he’s well aware that, despite loud calls for changes to current U.S. surveillance practices, he’s the one likely to shoulder most of the blame if the U.S. suffers another serious terrorist attack.

“These are a series of judgment calls that we’re making every single day because we’ve got a whole bunch of folks whose job it is to make sure that the American people are protected,” he said. “That’s a hard job because if something slips, then the question that’s coming from you the next day at a press conference is, ‘Mr. President, why didn’t you catch that? Why did the intelligence people allow that to slip? Isn’t there a way that we could have found out that in fact this terrorist attack took place?’”

Obama said he’s in the final stages of a review of U.S. surveillance practices and will carefully wade through all 46 recommendations from the five-member review group he established, whose report was made public Wednesday. He said he plans to wrap up his assessment and “to make a pretty definitive statement” on the surveillance-related issues next month.

In response to a question Friday, Obama declined to comment on remarks by some government officials suggesting that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked the existence of the call-tracking program, might be granted amnesty or a plea bargain if he can ensure no more of the sensitive documents he took are leaked.

“I will leave it up to the courts and the attorney general to weigh in publicly on the specifics of Mr. Snowden’s case,” the president said.

Obama did say that Snowden, who has taken refuge in Russia, is “under indictment.” However, the only charges made public against the ex-contractor were preliminary charges filed in June in a criminal complaint, a step that usually precedes an indictment.

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A White House spokeswoman said Obama was referring to the complaint pending in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

During the press conference, Obama toed a careful line with respect to Snowden’s disclosures, saying they’ve ignited a useful debate but also been damaging to U.S. national security.

“This is an important conversation that we needed to have,” the president said. “The way in which these disclosures happened have been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities. I think that there was a way for us to have this conversation without that damage,” he added, without explaining how such a debate would have come about.

While Obama didn’t attack a judge’s ruling Monday that found the current program likely unconstitutional, the president did note that decision differed with the conclusions of judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Early in his comments, Obama seemed to shy away from offering his own assessment of the call-tracking program, referring instead to reasons intelligence officials want to keep it.

However, he later came close to repeating an assessment he offered in August, when he called the database “an important tool in our effort to disrupt terrorist plots.”

“It was a useful tool working with other tools the intelligence community has, to ensure that if we have a thread on a potential terrorist threat, that that can be followed effectively,” Obama said Friday.

The president also lamented that the current controversy has allowed some countries to attack U.S. practices even though their invasions of their citizens’ privacy are far more severe. He did not name the nations he had in mind, but Russia is one to which he may have

“We’ve got countries who actually do the things that Mr. Snowden says he’s worried about…engaging in surveillance of their own citizens, targeting political dissidents, targeting and suppressing the press, who somehow are able to sit on the sidelines and act as if it’s the United States that has problems when it comes to surveillance and intelligence operations. And that’s a pretty distorted view of what’s going on out there,” the president said.