Obama: ‘We need this intelligence’

President Obama defended the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs on Friday, but said he will seriously weigh recommendations for reform from his review panel on the subject. [WATCH VIDEO]

“We need this intelligence. We can’t unilaterally disarm,” Obama said during his end-of-the-year news conference.

{mosads}He said he is confident the NSA is “not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around,” but that, given the public outrage following the leaks by Edward Snowden, reforms are necessary to restore the public’s trust. 

Obama’s review panel released a report this week calling for major restrictions on the NSA, including changes to its bulk collection of U.S. phone records. Under the group’s plan, private companies would hold the phone records and the NSA could obtain access with orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.   

Obama said he is studying the recommendations and will announce which of them he supports in January.

He expressed interest in the proposal to have the NSA give up its vast database of phone records, but his comments also hinted at instituting a requirement for private companies to maintain the database. Any mandate for data retention would prompt fierce opposition from privacy groups.  

“It is possible, for example, that some of the same information that the intelligence community feels is required to keep people safe can be obtained by having the private phone companies keep these records longer and to create some mechanism where they can be accessed in an effective fashion,” Obama said.

He also defended the importance of the bulk data collection, saying it allows the NSA to be “confident in pursuing various investigations of terrorist threats.”

But Obama’s review panel expressed serious doubts about how useful the program is. The group concluded the information in the phone database “was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using” more targeted surveillance.