President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks about National Security Agency surveillance, Friday at the Justice Department in Washington. The president called for ending the government’s control of phone data from millions of Americans.WASHINGTON- President Barack Obama is putting limits on the harvesting of Americans’ phone records and seeking revisions to a program that sweeps up email and Internet data around the world, seven months after former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden began divulging the secret spying.
Here are some questions and answers about Obama’s plan:
Q: Why did Obama decide to make changes?
A: The president has been under pressure since Snowden took an estimated 1.7 million documents from the NSA and gave them to journalists around the world. The U.S. public, Congress and allies overseas were shocked to learn the extent of the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance. Soon after Snowden’s disclosure in June, Obama promised to review the system that has changed rapidly as technology improved.
On Friday, Obama defended the work of the U.S. spying apparatus as necessary to protect Americans and international allies. He left the programs mostly intact, but added restrictions.