President Obama defended the , telling NBC’s Jay Leno on Tuesday that: “There is no spying on Americans.”
“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”
Obama also called the National Security Agency’s surveillance a “critical component to counterterrorism,” and defended the shutdown of U.S. embassies and travel warnings this weekend, saying they followed information about a possible terrorist threat “significant enough that we’re taking every precaution.”
But he added: “We’re going to live our lives,” and noted that for Americans, the odds off dying in a terrorist attack is lower than dying in a car accident.
During a lengthy discussion with Leno, Obama said he was “disappointed” in Russia’s decision to grant temporary asylum to , the CIA contractor who leaked information about the secret U.S. electronic surveillance program.
“There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality,” Obama said of Russia. “What I continually say to them and to President [Vladimir] Putin, ‘That’s the past. We’ve got to think about the future.’ ”
Obama added that the U.S. government has been trying to reduce reliance on contractors, and asked rhetorically: “When it comes to intelligence, should we in fact be farming this much stuff out?”