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NSA snooping: Obama under pressure as

senator denounces 'act of treason'

Information chiefs worldwide sound alarm while US senator Dianne Feinstein orders NSA to reviewmonitoring program

Officials in European capitals denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information onEuropeans as unacceptable. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Barack Obama was facing a mounting domestic and international backlash against US surveillance

operations on Monday as his administration struggled to contain one of the most explosive national

security leaks in US history.

Political opinion in the US was split with some members of Congress calling for the immediateextradition from Hong Kong of the whistleblower,Edward Snowden. But other senior politicians in

both main parties questioned whether US surveillance practices had gone too far.

Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the national intelligence committee, has ordered theNSA to review howit limits the exposure of Americans to government surveillance. But she made clear her disapproval of

Snowden. "What he did was an act of treason," she said.

Officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced

the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and aserious violation of basic rights. The NSA, meanwhile, asked the Justice Department to open a criminal

investigation and said that it was assessing the damage caused by the disclosures.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the

Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leakas even more important and perhaps the mostsignificant leak in American history.

Snowden disclosed his identity in an explosive interview with the Guardian, published on Sunday,

which revealed he was a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the

defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden worked at the National Security Agency for the pastfour years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

In his interview, Snowden revealed himself as the source for a series of articles in the Guardian last

week, which included disclosures of a wide-ranging secret court order that demanded Verizon pass to

the NSA the details ofphone calls related to millions of customers, and a huge NSA intelligence system

called Prism, which collects data on intelligence targets from the systems of some of the biggest techcompanies.

Snowden said he had become disillusioned with the overarching nature of government surveillance in

the US. "The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. Theresult is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to," he said.

"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done

against them."

As media interest intensified on Monday, Snowden checked out of the Hong Kong hotel where he had

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been staying, and moved to an undisclosed location.

Reacting to Snowden's revelations, Paul Ryan, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee, raised

questions about whetherprivacy was being unduly threatened. "I'm sure somebody can come up with a

great computerprogram that says: 'We can do X, Y, and Z,' but that doesn't mean that it's right," he tolda radio station in Wisconsin. "I want to learn a lot more about it on behalf of the people I represent," he

added.

Pressure was growing on the White House to explain whether there was effective congressional

oversight of the programmes revealed by Snowden. The director of national intelligence, JamesClapper, said in an NBC interview that he had responded in the "least untruthful manner" possible

when he denied in congressional hearings last year that the NSA collected data on millions of

Americans.

Clapper also confirmed that Feinstein had asked for a review to "refine these NSA processes and limitthe exposure to Americans' private communications" and report back "in about a month".

In Europe, the German chancellorAngela Merkelindicated she would press Obama on the revelations

at a Berlin summit next week, while deputy European Commission chief Viviane Reding said she

would press US officials in Dublin on Friday, adding that "a clear legal framework for the protection of

personal data is not a luxury or constraint but a fundamental right".

Peter Schaar, Germany's federal data protection commissioner told the Guardian that it was

unacceptable that US authorities have access to the data of European citizens "and the level of

protection is lower than what is guaranteed for US citizens." His Italian counterpart, Antonello Soro,said that the data dragnet "would not be legal in Italy" and would be "contrary to the principles of our

legislation and would represent a very serious violation".

In London, the British foreign secretary William Hague was forced to defend the UK's use of

intelligence gathered by the US. In the House of Commons, Hague told MPs that British laws did notallow for "indiscriminate trawling" for information. "There is no danger of a deep state out of control in

some way," he said.

But Hague was reluctant to go into detail on how Britain handled information offered by US

intelligence agencies, as opposed to information requested, or whether it was subject to the sameministerial oversight, including warrants.

Civil liberties groups ask for review of 'secret law'

The Obama administrationoffered no indication on Monday about what it intended to do aboutSnowden. The White House did however say he had sparked an "appropriate debate" and hinted it

might welcome revision of the Patriot Act, legislation introduced in 2001 which it claims gives legal

authority for the programmes carried out by the National Security Agency.

"If [congressional] debate were to build to a consensus around changes [to the Patriot Act] the presidentwould look at that," said spokesman Jay Carney. "Although this is hardly the manner of discussion we

hoped for, we would still like to have the debate."

The first polls since the leak stories first broke indicated that the majority of Americans oppose the

government scooping up their phone data. According to the Rasmussen poll just 26% of voters are infavour of the government's collection of data from Verizon while 59% are opposed. In total 46% of

Americans think that their own data has been monitored. But a poll by the Pew Research Center, asking

a more general question, said 56% respondents approved of the NSA surveillance program.

The ACLU and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion on Monday

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asking for secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions on the Patriot Act to be made public

in the light of the Guardian's revelations.

The motion asks for any documents relating to the court's interpretation of the scope, meaning and

constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which authorises government to obtain "anytangible thing" relevant to foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations to be published "as quickly

as possible" and with only minimal redaction.

"In a democracy, there should be no room for secret law," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal

director. "The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government's surveillance authority,and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy."

There was support for Snowden among civil liberty activists. Ellsberg wrote for the Guardian: "In my

estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's

release of NSA material and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago".

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet rights group, called for a "new Church committee" toinvestigate potential government infringements on privacy and to write new rules protecting the public.

In the wake of the Watergate affair in the mid-1970s, a Senate investigation led by Idaho senator Frank

Church uncovered decades of serious abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers. The

committee report led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and set up the Fisacourts that today secretly approve surveillance requests.

Both Snowden and the Obama administration appeared to be considering their options on Monday.

Hong Kong, which has an extradition treaty with the US, is unlikely to offer Snowden a permanentrefuge. But Snowden could buy time by filing an asylum request, thanks to a landmark legal ruling that

has thrown the system into disarray.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong said the case could be a "strong test" of the Chinese

province's commitment to freedom of expression. "The FCC will watch closely how the SAR [HongKong] government handles his case, and in particular how it responds to any pressure from authorities

both in Washington and Beijing to restrict his activities or to impede access by the media," it said in a

statement.

In New York, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cancelled at very short notice a planned photoopportunity with the Hong Kong chief executive, Leung Chun-ying. "It would have been a circus, so

we decided to catch up with him another time," a mayoral spokesman told the Guardian.

Additional reporting by Matt Williams and Tom McCarthy in New York.

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