President Obama said Friday he would pursue reforms to open the legal proceedings surrounding government surveillance programs to greater scrutiny, the administration's most concerted response yet to a series of disclosures about secret monitoring efforts.
At his first full news conference in more than three months, Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice — such as a lawyer assigned to advocate privacy rights— to the secret proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Several Democratic senators have proposed such changes to the court, which approves government requests for warrants and other collection efforts.
In addition, Obama said he intends to work on ways to tighten one provision of the Patriot Act — known as Section 215 — that has permitted the government to obtain the phone records of millions of Americans. He announced the creation of a panel of outsiders — former intelligence officials, civil liberties and privacy advocates, and others — to assess the programs and suggest changes by the end of the year.
"It's not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs," Obama said in the White House East Room. "The American people need to have confidence in them as well."
Obama spoke on the eve of a week's vacation, and he struck a defiant tone in speaking about a range of issues over the hour-long news conference.
The Gallup tracking poll shows that his public approval rating of 44 percent is near a 12-month low. A mix of Republican opposition to his gun control legislation, public disclosure of the National Security Agency's vast surveillance programs, and a turbulent Middle East have complicated the early months of what he intended to be an ambitious second term.
Obama defended his signature health-care legislation against Republican threats of repeal, expressed confidence over the eventual passage of immigration legislation, and noted that his brusque Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, with whom he has a difficult relationship, has a "slouch" like "the bored kid in the back of the classroom." Obama recently canceled a summit scheduled for next month in Moscow, citing a lack of progress on a range of security and diplomatic issues.
A former constitutional law lecturer who campaigned on a pledge to ensure that national security policy remained consistent with American laws and values, Obama has faced a public outcry, including from many in his own party, since the scope of the NSA's surveillance and data-collection effort was revealed earlier this summer by The Washington Post and the Guardian, a British newspaper.
He has defended the programs as essential to protecting the United States from foreign attack and continued to do so vigorously Friday, portraying the controversy as one of public perception rather than practice. Civil liberties advocates have called the programs overly intrusive, as technological advances improve spying capabilities and raise new privacy concerns at home and abroad.
