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oberliner

(58,724 posts)
10. Obama promises privacy protections, overhauls surveillance program (Jan 2014)
Sat Jan 9, 2016, 09:45 AM
Jan 2016

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama called Friday for the end of his government’s control over masses of phone data from hundreds of millions of Americans, and promised in a major and long-expected speech that U.S. intelligence would no longer be listening in on the telephone conversations of leaders of nations that are U.S. friends and allies.

The existence of the U.S. intelligence program that bugged the phones of leaders like Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, for example, significantly cooled relations with some of Washington’s key partners abroad. Merkel made her displeasure broadly known, and Rousseff blasted the United States at the United Nations. She canceled a planned trip to the United States that was supposed to culminate in a coveted state dinner at the White House on Oct. 23.

“The leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to learn what they think about an issue, I will pick up the phone and call them, rather than turning to surveillance,” Obama said.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-sets-limits-overhauls-surveillance-program/

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