WASHINGTON - Current and former top U.S. officials on Sunday defended the government’s collection of phone and Internet data after new revelations about the secret surveillance programs, saying the operations were essential in disrupting terrorist plots and did not infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.
In interviews on Sunday talk shows, guests ranging from White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA and National Security Agency leader Michael Hayden said the government’s reliance on data collection from both Americans and foreign nationals is constitutional and carefully overseen by executive, legislative and court authorities.
All three branches of government, using “aggressive internal checks inside the administration, from inspectors general and routine audits, are overseeing how we do these programs,” McDonough said. “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking.”
President Barack Obama will soon speak to the country about the surveillance programs, McDonough said, saying the president holds privacy “sacrosanct” and does not believe the surveillance efforts that ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed violate the privacy of any Americans.
The latest reassurances from current and former government officials came as a new Washington Post report Sunday described the intertwined structure of four major data-collection programs the government has implemented since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Post report follows earlier stories based on documents Snowden provided.
Two secret programs, The Post reported in its new disclosures, are aimed at phone and Internet metadata, while two more target contents of phone and Internet communications.
Metadata include logs and timing of phone calls and lists of Internet communications, but do not include the contents of communications. Even without knowing that content, intelligence officials can learn much from metadata, including likely locations and patterns of behavior.
A previously reported surveillance program aimed at the phone logs and location information of millions of Americans is called Mainway, The Post reported. A second program that targets the Internet contact logs and location information of foreign users is called Marina.
A third program, which intercepts telephone calls and routes their contents to government listeners, is called Nucleon.
A fourth program, Prism, exposed recently by Snowden, forces major Internet firms to turn over the detailed contents of Internet communications. Prism is aimed at foreign users but sometimes also sweeps up the content of Americans’ e-mails and other Internet communications, officials have acknowledged.
Rep. Mike Rogers, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said that any phone metadata from Americans swept up in the surveillance is held under careful safeguards, kept in a “lockbox” that can only be accessed if they become relevant to terror investigations. U.S. officials also said Saturday that gathered data are destroyed every five years.
“This is a lockbox with only phone numbers, no names, no addresses in it, we’ve used it sparingly,” Rogers, R-Mich., said on CNN’s State of the Union.
But one congressional critic of the secrecy surrounding the government’s surveillance raised doubts about the effectiveness of the widespread collection of Americans’ phone metadata.
“I don’t think collecting millions and millions of Americans’ phone calls - now this is the metadata, this is the time, place, to whom you direct the calls - is making us any safer,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado. Udall said he will introduce a bill this week to narrow the reach of that collection to only “those who have a link to terrorism.”
The disclosures, provided in recent days by both The Post and the Guardian newspaper, came from classified documents exposed by Snowden, 29, who was working as a private contractor with the National Security Agency and later said he grew disenchanted by what he saw as a growing secret American surveillance apparatus. After working with the two newspapers, Snowden turned up in Hong Kong, prompting concern that he might cooperate with Chinese authorities.
The Guardian on Sunday said that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and e-mails when the U.K. hosted international conferences, even going so far as to set up a bugged Internet cafe in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.
The Guardian cited more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ’s intelligence operations, which it said involved, among other things, hacking into the South African Foreign Ministry’s computer network and targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 G-20 summit in London.
The source material - whose authenticity could not immediately be determined - appears to be a mixed bag. The Guardian described one as “a PowerPoint slide,” another as “a briefing paper” and others simply as “documents.”
It wasn’t completely clear how Snowden would have had access to the British intelligence documents, although in one article the Guardian mentioned that source material was drawn from a top-secret internal network shared by GCHQ and the NSA.
In the U.S., Cheney voiced his concerns about Snowden on Fox News Sunday.
“I am very, very worried that he still has additional information that he hasn’t released yet,” Cheney said. “The Chinese would welcome the opportunity and probably be willing to provide immunity for him or sanctuary for him, if you will, in exchange for what he presumably knows.”
He has “trouble believing” Snowden had access to all the materials he has disclosed, Cheney said, suggesting the possibility that Snowden had an accomplice inside U.S. security circles.
Cheney also said he is unaware of what, if anything, Obama did to alter the surveillance techniques, which were started under President George W. Bush.
McDonough, speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, declined to speculate on Snowden’s dealings with China or his access to secret documents, citing a law-enforcement investigation. But he cautioned against “some of the hyperbole that now is being thrown around from him and from others involved in this debate that would somehow cast a pall on the intelligence community.
McDonough also said Sunday that he doesn’t know where Snowden is. He declined to say whether there are plans to prosecute Snowden.
Other lawmakers said Snowden should return to the U.S. and face charges related to the disclosure. His most recent employer, McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., fired him last week after he revealed himself as the source of the news stories about the classified government programs.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate’s Intelligence committee, said Snowden ought to “look an American jury in the eye” and explain why he disclosed details of secret programs.
“If he’s not a traitor, then he’s pretty darned close to it,” Chambliss, a Georgia senator, said on Meet the Press.
Information for this article was contributed by Stephen Braun and Raphael Satter of The Associated Press; and by Julie Bykowicz, John Walcott, Sara Forden, Margaret Talev and Vince Golle of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/17/2013