Clapper says the recent disclosure is a blow to the nation's fight against terrorism. | AP Photos DNI defends 'important' surveillance

The Obama administration is defending a pair of surveillance programs — one focused on Internet records, the other on telephone information — calling them vital to national security and well within the bounds of the law.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the highly unusual step Thursday night of declassifying information about a program that required Verizon to release information about millions of phone calls, saying the court order did not allow the government to listen in on the calls.


But Clapper saved his most scathing tone for reports Thursday night in The Washington Post and The Guardian that the National Security Agency monitored data from major Internet companies, saying the program involved only the records of foreign nationals — and not Americans — and that its recent disclosure is a blow to the nation’s fight against terrorism.

( See also: Full coverage of NSA phone tracking)

Clapper described the program as “important and entirely legal” and said the leak of a document describing it was “reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

About the phone-tracking program, the director said the unauthorized disclosure of a top secret document “threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”

He said he would declassify parts of the phone records program to give Americans a more complete understanding of its limits. And he responded to reports that the NSA and FBI are tapping in to data from the country’s leading Internet companies with a robust defense of the program, calling it critical to national security and subject to legal oversight.

The snooping revelations set off spirited reactions from both opponents and champions of the surveillance.

“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald, the reporter for the British newspaper, The Guardian, who broke the Verizon story, speaking on CNN Thursday. “That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.”

But former Bush adviser Karl Rove — a veteran of the debates over balancing civil liberties with national security — defended the practices.

“I’m not going to defend the Obama administration. I will defend the intelligence community,” Rove said on Fox. “To identify patterns of phone calls between individuals here and individuals abroad, and then you identify the patterns of phone calls inside this country … that allows the intelligence agencies to identify connections between people abroad and people at home.”

( Also on POLITICO: Verizon on offense behind the scenes)

Clapper’s statement capped a day of dramatic disclosures, starting with a report Wednesday night in The Guardian that the Obama administration secretly obtained records for millions of Verizon phone calls. Then late Thursday, The Washington Post came out with a story describing an operation called PRISM that allowed two federal agencies to access Internet servers. According to the Post, PRISM allows access to information including emails, videos, photos, chats, documents and connection logs.

Both admissions continue to feed growing concerns that Americans have sacrificed civil liberties to the mantle of security.

The Wall Street Journal, citing former NSA officials, also reported that the agency has monitored credit card activities, and that data from other phone companies, including AT&T and Sprint.

The disclosures concerning Verizon and PRISM put the Obama White House on the defensive. Data pulls from companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook involve “extensive procedures” approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons,” Clapper said.

The tech companies named in the reports — also including Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — read like a who’s who of the tech industry — with products and services that reach millions of Americans. Many of them issued denials of involvement in the program.

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a Google spokesperson told POLITICO. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”

Other tech companies echoed a similar theme of denial. Some even used the same language around “direct access” to their servers.

“We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers,” an Apple spokesperson said.

A Facebook representative insisted the company does not “provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers.”

“When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws and provide information only to the extent required by law,” she said. “And any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

And Yahoo said simply it does “not provide the government direct access to our servers, systems or network.”

Microsoft also denied participation. A few tech heavy-hitters such as Twitter and Amazon did not appear on the list.

Some lawmakers have defended the phone records report, saying that access to phone records is an important tool in fighting terrorism.

“There are so many layers to this issue,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday. “The first is…we ought to have an open debate. People at least ought to have a general idea of what’s going on and argue about it and whether it’s appropriate and whether it’s necessary to protect the country or whether it goes too far.”

This marks the first time the secret PRISM program, established in 2007, has been made public.

Only a smattering of congressional representatives knew about the plan, according to the Post, and they vowed secrecy. The slides indicated that the program contributed significantly to the President’s Daily Briefing, factoring into almost one in seven intelligence reports.

Still reeling from the Verizon phone record revelations, the American Civil Liberties Union issued stern warnings about the role of government in protecting its people. “The bottom line concern for us is that democracy relies on the consent of the governed, and we really have not had that in this context,” Patrick Toomey, a national security fellow for the ACLU, said in an interview. The organization is calling for a congressional investigation into the scope of the programs.

“We want to know what other programs are out there,” he said.

Michelle Quinn, Jennifer Epstein and Katie Glueck contributed to this report.