In Pushing for Revised Surveillance Program, President Obama Strikes His Own Balance

For more than six years, President Barack Obama has directed his national security team to chase terrorists around the globe by scooping up vast amounts of telephone records with a program that was conceived and put in place by his predecessor after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, after successfully badgering Congress into reauthorizing the program, with new safeguards the President says will protect privacy, President Obama has left little question that he owns it.

The new surveillance program created by the USA Freedom Act will end more than a decade of bulk collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency. But it will make records already held by telephone companies available for broad searches by government officials with a court order. “The reforms that have now been enacted are exactly the reforms the president called for over a year and a half ago,” said Lisa Monaco, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser. She called the bill the product of a “robust public debate” and said the White House was “gratified that the Senate finally passed it.” The President is trying to balance national security and civil liberties to put into practice the kind of equilibrium he has talked about since he was in the Senate, when he expressed support for surveillance programs but also vowed to rein in what he called government overreach.