TEMPO.CO, Washington - Denis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff, said that President Barrack Obama did not believe that the National Security Agency's (NSA) activity of intercepting telephone conversation and private internet accounts has violated the American citizens' rights of privacy.
On a CBS's political interview show 'Face the Nation', Denis claimed that he has no information about the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor that leaked the agency's activity of monitoring phone conversation and internet data activity on big companies such as Verizon Communications, Google and Facebook.
Previously, the US government stated that the top-secret collection of massive amounts of 'metadata' from phone calls - raw information that does not include any information on individual telephone subscribers, was legal and authorized by the Congress in the interests of eradicating terrorist attacks.
Defending his arguments, McDonough said that "the existence of these programs obviously have unnerved many people." He also said that Obama is ready for a public debate on this particular matter "because he does say and he will say in the days ahead that we have to find the right balance, and we will not keep ourselves on a perpetual war footing."
REUTERS | TRIP B
