U.S. Surveillance Brings Privacy and Security to the Fore

On the morning after the disclosure of the program, lawmakers in Washington, many of whom have been privately briefed on the secret surveillance efforts for years, sought to balance their public expressions of concern about the impact on privacy with the need to combat national security threats. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who often votes with Democrats, said Friday morning that there needed to be a discussion about that balance.

“People ought to have at least a general idea of what’s going on,” Mr. King said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “It’s unfortunate that it has to come out in the form of leaks. The question is where’s the appropriate balance?”

He added: “It makes me nervous that all those phone records are in the possession of the National Security Agency.”

Under the classified program revealed Thursday, the federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats. The revelation came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States.

Dennis C. Blair, who served as President Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said Friday that there was little debate at the beginning of the Obama administration about whether to continue the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet surveillance programs that began under President Bush.

“In 2006 and 2007, everything was put under a legal basis. That looked pretty good to us, so we continued it,” Mr. Blair said in an interview with The New York Times. He said that the agency’s relationships with Internet companies have been especially valuable, given the volume of global communications that are now done strictly in cyberspace.

“As the Internet has become the way people communicate, that’s the way we gather intelligence,” he said.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement late Thursday night that the classified program to collect information from Internet providers is used to “protect our nation from a wide variety of threats” and he condemned the leaks of documents describing its existence.

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans,” Mr. Clapper said. In a separate statement, he warned about the negative impact from the leak of a secret court order authorizing the collection of phone records. The release of the four-page order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court “threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Mr. Clapper said in the statement.

Mr. Obama, speaking at a fund-raiser in Silicon Valley on Thursday night,did not mention the surveillance programs or the leaks of secret documents. In comments to tech executives at the home of Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the president focused on the need to have all schools connected to the Internet.

After a stop in San Jose this morning where he is scheduled to talk about the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama is scheduled to fly to Southern California to attend a fund-raiser and then visit President Xi Jinping of China. The meetings had been expected to focus on issues of cybersecurity, with Mr. Obama pressing Mr. Xi on accusations of state-run hacking of American businesses and government installations.