NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Monday that Americans would have understood the need for the National Security Agency’s secrecy-shrouded surveillance programs if they had been made aware of the data collection.
“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said at an event dedicating new harbor patrol boats, as quoted by the New York Daily News. “I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it’s going to be recorded and goes to the government.”
The police commissioner also called for more transparency about the mechanisms of NSA oversight, adding that such disclosure would ease the public’s concerns about the surveillance programs.
“We can raise people’s comfort level … that we have these controls and these protections inside the NSA,” Kelly said, per the Daily News.
