Denis McDonough, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation" program, also said he did not know the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who said he was the source of reports in Britain's Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post about the agency's monitoring of phone and Internet data at big companies such as Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Facebook Inc (FB.O).
The administration has said the top-secret collection of massive amounts of "metadata" from phone calls - raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers, was legal and authorized by Congress in the interests of thwarting militant attacks. It has said the agencies did not monitor calls.
Asked whether Obama feels he has violated the privacy of Americans, McDonough said, "He does not."
While he defended the surveillance, McDonough said "the existence of these programs obviously have unnerved many people." He said Obama "welcomes a public debate on this question 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."
na·iv·erna·iv·est
3
a : self-taught, primitive
b : produced by or as if by a self-taught artist <naivemurals>
— na·ive·ly or na·ïve·ly adverb
— na·ive·ness noun
