'There has been a lot of misinformation out there,' Obama said. Obama: I'm not Dick Cheney

President Barack Obama used a television interview set to air Monday night to defend his administration’s use of far-reaching surveillance programs as carefully supervised and controlled.

Obama also appeared to reject comparisons between himself and Vice President Dick Cheney, who strongly backed similar surveillance efforts in the George W. Bush administration and has defended Obama’s continuation of national security-related programs similar in many respects to those pursued by the previous administration.


“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.’ Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel,’” the president told interviewer Charlie Rose in the exchange recorded Sunday, according to excerpts of the transcript published by BuzzFeed. “My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

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In an interview that’s been heavily promoted by the White House and Obama aides, the president acknowledged that a program which collects massive amounts of data on telephone calls made in or through the U.S. could theoretically be used to invade individuals’ privacy, even potentially yielding conclusions about callers’ health conditions.

“All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that,” the president said, according to a transcript. “The number of requests are surprisingly small. ....Folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.”

In the interview, Obama appears at one point to equate transparency of the surveillance programs with their oversight by the courts and Congress — even though the public was kept in the dark about the nature of the snooping until the leak of highly-classified documents by an National Security Agency contractor via Britain’s Guardian newspaper earlier this month.

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“Should this be transparent in some way?” Rose asked.

“It is transparent,” Obama insisted. “That’s why we set up the FISA Court,” the president said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — which carries out its work almost entirely in secret.

Later in the interview, the president acknowledged that the public didn’t know about the full scope of the programs.

“Even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it — despite all that, the public may not fully know.The public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right?” Obama said. He said he’d asked intelligence officials to determine “how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program.” if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.

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Obama said some of the reports based on recent leaks had exaggerated the programs and ignored the safeguards.

“There has been a lot of misinformation out there,” the president said.

At one point in the interview, the president referred by name to the former NSA contractor who has admitted leaking a series of highly-classified documents and is now taking refuge in Hong Kong. Obama described as “revealed by Mr. Snowden, allegedly,” the call tracking program and another that targets foreigners’ web traffic.

However, the president declined to comment on efforts to pursue Snowden criminally.

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“I’m not going to comment on prosecution,” Obama said. “The case has been referred to the DOJ for criminal investigation… and possible extradition. I will leave it up to them to answer those questions.”

Both the White House and PBS said the contents of the interview were embargoed until its scheduled 11 p.m. Monday airtime. However, the BuzzFeed website published extended excerpts from the interview Monday afternoon, more than seven hours before the embargo expired.

BuzzFeed editor McKay Coppins said the outlet “did not agree” to the embargo, and was not bound by it.

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