President Barack Obama said in an interview that aired Friday that recent revelations the National Security Agency had collected Americans’ emails prove that oversight for such surveillance programs is working properly.
Obama told CNN’s “New Day” the data collection was “inadvertent” and attributed it to “technical problems,” which were then presented to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“The court said, ‘This isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to have to improve the safeguards, given these technical problems.’ That’s exactly what happened,” he said. “So the point is, is that all these safeguards, checks, audits, oversight worked.”
“What I recognize is that we’re going to have to continue to improve the safeguards and as technology moves forward, that means that we may be able to build technologies that give people more assurance,” he added.
Clarification: This post has been updated to clarify that President Obama described the collection of Americans’ emails as “inadvertent.”
