US President Barack Obama was to meet on Friday with an independent Government board that weighs privacy and civil liberties concerns in the fight against terrorism, as his administration comes under increasing scrutiny for broad surveillance programmes.
The long-standing but little-consulted five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board would meet with the President for the first time since he took office in 2009.
Spokesman Jay Carney said they would be discussing “recent developments, including the disclosure of classified information,” and that Obama would also meet with other stakeholders about digital privacy in coming weeks.
Obama on Thursday also asked Lisa Monaco, his assistant on homeland security and counterterrorism issues, to seek a review of rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which secretly approves such surveillance, and to determine what additional information the Government can share about the programme.
“We have seen in the wake of these unauthorised disclosures of classified information a developing debate about these issues,” Carney said.
“The President, as you know, believes that this is an important and worthy debate. He has made clear his views on the trade-offs involved in finding the balance between our need to protect our citizens, protect our country, and our need to retain our values and our privacy, but he believes that that’s a discussion that we should engage in.”
Reports of secret programmes to monitor US phone records and international Internet traffic have prompted widespread concern since they were made public this month. The Obama administration has been on the defensive about the programmes, claiming the spying thwarted 50 terrorist plots around the world.