President Barack Obama today announced a series of reviews of US surveillance programmes so as to bring transparency and win public confidence, shaken following the leak of secretive data by former CIA analyst Edward Snowden.
"What I'm going to be pushing the intelligence community to do is rather than have a trunk come out here and a leg come out there and a tail come out there, let's just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they're looking at, let's examine what is working, what's not, are there additional protections that can be put in place and let's move forward," Obama said at a news conference.
Acknowledging that the recent leaks to these secretive American internet and phone surveillance programmes, has given the general impression, not only among the American public but also around the world, that somehow the US is out there willy-nilly just sucking in information on everybody, Obama said the US laws specifically prohibit the Administration from surveilling US persons without a warrant.
And there are whole range of safeguards that have been put in place to make sure that that basic principle is abided by, he said.
"Because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation; it's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process," he said as he spelled out the series of steps that he is taking to bring transparency to the process and win people's confidence.
They include reforms in the Patriot Act on the programme that collects telephone records and to improve public confidence in the oversight conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
The measures also include directing the intelligence community to make public as much information about these programmes as possible, and forming a high level group of outside experts to review entire intelligence and communication technologies.
Obama said he is tasking an independent group to step back and review US capabilities, particularly its surveillance technologies to consider how the US can maintain the trust of the people, how to make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts its foreign policy, particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public.
