President Obama yesterday delivered a powerful, no-apologies defense of the government’s secret data-mining campaign — while it was revealed that the effort foiled a terror plot to blow up New York subways.
Obama dismissed the “hype” about “modest encroachments on privacy” as he laid out the rationale for tracking phone calls and monitoring Internet records in a program called PRISM.
The value of PRISM was underlined in 2009 when an e-mail sent to a rarely used al Qaeda address was traced back to a Denver suburb, and from there to New Yorker Najibullah Zazi, CBS News reported.
Zazi, placed under surveillance, fled from Queens to Colorado, where he was arrested before he and two fellow terrorists could carry out his plan to detonate bombs in the Grand Central and Times Square subway station during rush hour.
Zazi and two Flushing HS pals were convicted for the plot and Zazi is facing life in prison.
The Zazi connection came as Obama made his first public comments since disclosure of the seven-year-old federal data-mining program.
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Obama said.
“It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in San Jose, Calif., in what was supposed to be a pitch to promote the launch of ObamaCare.
His remarks came as it was disclosed the feds had also monitored credit-card transactions and that the tracking of phone records had extended beyond Verizon to other telecom giants such as AT&T and Sprint Nextel.
Obama, a former constitutional law scholar, said he welcomed a national debate over what the government was doing.
“In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother, and how this is a potential program run amok,” he said. “But when you actually look at details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.”
He didn’t get into details about the spying programs that now seem larger than when first reported. Former National Security Agency employee William Binney estimated yesterday that the super-secret agency collects records on 3 billion phone calls each day.
But Obama said, “They are not looking at people’s names, and they are not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata they might identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.”
Even then, investigators would have to go to federal court to get permission to listen in on calls, he added.
Stung by criticism by liberal allies that he’s become “George W. Obama,” the president insisted he took office with a “healthy skepticism” about the data-mining programs he inherited from the previous administration.
“We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards,” he said.
He added that when he leaves office “I will be a private citizen” and probably be high on that list” of people who might be targeted for having their e-mails and phone calls monitored.
Obama insisted Congress has been regularly briefed on the data-mining programs.
And the president said he’s irked by the leaks of sensitive national security secrets. “There’s a reason these programs are classified,” he said.
His administration is believed to be conducting a new search — to find out who leaked documents about the phone-tracking and Internet programs to the Washington Post and the British newspaper the Guardian.
“I don’t welcome leaks. There’s a reason these programs are classified,” Obama said.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, called the leaks “reprehensible” and said they threaten to inflict “potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm.”
