Net snooping has saved lives: Obama

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United States’ President Barack Obama shaking hands with German Chancellor Angela Merkel after their joint press meet in Berlin on Wednesday.

AP

BERLIN: Trying to tamp down concerns about government over-reach, President Barack Obama today defended US Internet and phone surveillance programmes as narrowly targeted efforts that have saved lives and thwarted at least 50 terror threats.

“This is not a situation in which we are rifling through ordinary

emails” of huge numbers of citizens in the United States or elsewhere, the president declared during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He called it as a “circumscribed, narrow” surveillance programme.

“Lives have been saved,” Obama said, adding that the programme has been closely supervised by the courts to ensure that any encroachment of privacy is strictly limited.

Merkel, for her part, said it was important to continue debate about how to strike “an equitable balance” between providing security and protecting personal freedoms.

“There has to be proportionality,” she said. She added that their discussion on the matter today was “an important first step” over striking a balance.

Merkel appeared to be looking to avoid a public rift with Washington over the surveillance programme, particularly since Germans benefit from American intelligence.

Much of the German criticism of the programme has come from her junior coalition partners, facing the prospect of losses in the September election and looking for an issue.

The two leaders spoke to the media after meeting privately on a range of issues confronting US and European leaders, including the fragile effort to bring peace in Afghanistan, where peace talks with the Taliban are in the offing to find ways to end the nearly 12-year war.

On another world trouble spot, the two-year-old Syrian civil war, the president declined to provide details on the type of military support the US will provide to opposition forces. But he said the administration had been consistent in working towards the over-riding goal of a Syria that is “peaceful, non-sectarian, democratic, legitimate, tolerant.”

“I cannot and will not comment on specifics around our programs related to the Syrian opposition,” he said.

The president said while world leaders at the just-completed Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland could not agree on whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must go, he believes Assad cannot regain legitimacy.

Later today, Obama planned to draw attention to his plan for a one-third reduction in US and Russian arsenals, rekindling a goal that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.

His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership.

Obama will make the case for his nuclear plan during a speech at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate.