US Spy Chief Clapper Defends Prism & Phone Surveillance

US spy chief James Clapper has strongly defended government surveillance programmes after revelations of phone records being collected and internet servers being tapped.

He said disclosure of a secret court document on phone record collection threatened “irreversible harm”.

Revelations of an alleged programme to tap into servers of nine internet firms were “reprehensible”, he said.

Internet firms deny giving government agents access to their servers.

The director of US national intelligence issued a strong-worded statement late on Thursday, after the UK’s Guardian newspaper said a secret court order had required phone company Verizon to hand over its records to the National Security Agency (NSA) on an “ongoing daily basis”.

That report was followed by revelations in both the Washington Post and Guardian that US agencies tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms to track people in a programme known as Prism.

The reports about Prism will raise fresh questions about how far the US government should encroach on citizens’ privacy in the interests of national security.

The NSA confirmed that it had been secretly collecting millions of phone records. But Mr Clapper said the “unauthorized disclosure… threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation”.

BBC

Posted by Editor on June 7, 2013. Filed under WORLD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry