Barack Obama defends US surveillance tactics

President Barack Obama on Friday staunchly defended the sweeping government surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet activity, calling it a modest encroachment on privacy that was necessary to defend the United States from attack. Obama said the programs were "trade-offs" designed to strike a balance between privacy concerns and keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks. He said they were supervised by federal judges and Congress, and that lawmakers had been briefed. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about," Obama told reporters during a visit to California's Silicon Valley. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that federal authorities have been tapping into the central servers of companies including Google, Apple and Facebook to gain access to emails, photos and other files allowing analysts to track a person's movements and contacts. That added to privacy concerns sparked by a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency had been mining phone records from millions of customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications. The two reports launched a broad debate about privacy rights and the proper limits of government surveillance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said he thought the administration had good intentions but stressed the program was "just too broad an overreach."  "I think there ought to be some connection to suspicion, otherwise we can say that any intrusion on all of our privacy is justified for the times that we will catch the few terrorists," Waxman told MSNBC. "Good intentions are not enough. We need protections against government intrusion that goes too far."