The White House spent much of the day defending the National Security Agencys (NSAs) secret collection of telephone records from millions of Americans as a "critical tool" for preventing attacks, as critics called the programme first reported by Britains Guardian newspaper a heavy-handed move that raised new questions about the extent of the US governments spying on its citizens.
At days end, the flap over the NSAs mining of data from customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications was overtaken by a Washington Post report that described an even more aggressive programme of government surveillance.
The Post reported that the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been tapping "directly" into the central servers of leading US internet companies to gain access to e-mails, photographs, audio, video, documents, connection logs and other information that enable analysts to track a persons movements and contacts over time.
Some of the companies named in the article Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook immediately denied that the government had "direct access" to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies "with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers".
National intelligence director James Clapper said the report contained "numerous inaccuracies."
Washington Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti said the paper stood by its report, which was based on an NSA document that it published online.
Taken together, the reports suggested US domestic surveillance, long acknowledged to have become more prevalent since the September 11 2001 attacks, was far more extensive than the public knew.
The Post said the secret programme involving the internet companies, code-named Prism and established under Republican president George Bush in 2007, had seen "exponential growth" during the past several years under Democratic President Barack Obama.
The Post said an NSA report had found that the agency "increasingly relies on Prism" as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly one in seven intelligence reports.
Technology companies taking part in the programme, the Post said, included Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
Mr Clapper indicated that Thursdays reports were indeed significant but disputed the notion that government agents could use such data without a specific investigative purpose in mind.
He also said the programme did not allow the government to listen in on anyones phone calls.
"The unauthorised disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal programme is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans," he said in a statement.
Fuel for critics
The reports on Thursday drew attention to US authorities use of a secret federal court, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves investigators requests to conduct extraordinary surveillance in national security cases.
The NSA surveillance programmes are among thousands of operations approved by the court in the years since the 9/11 attacks. Under federal law, Congress is briefed about the courts actions.
For civil libertarians and other critics of expanded secret surveillance, Thursdays revelations amounted to a reminder of how the 9/11 attacks increased the governments reach into Americans daily lives.
"These revelations are a reminder that Congress has given the executive branch far too much power to invade individual privacy (and) that existing civil liberties safeguards are grossly inadequate," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
As Mr Obama arrived in California late on Thursday for a summit with Chinas new president, Xi Jinping, it was clear that administration officials were sensitive to such criticism.
A senior administration official emphasised that although the activities of people in the US were included in the data being amassed by the government, the surveillance programmes could target for investigation only non-Americans living outside the country.
The surveillance programme "was recently re-authorised by Congress after extensive hearings and debate", the official said. "Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."
Its called protecting America
Before the Posts report on the internet companies was published, leading members of Congress who routinely are briefed by the NSA on secret surveillance programmes, and were again on Thursday defended the agencys efforts to build a database of phone records for use in investigations. They said the programme had been going on for seven years.
Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said the surveillance effort had stopped a "significant" attack plot within the US, but did not give details.
"Its called protecting America," added Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee.
There was also a diverse group of Republicans and Democrats some who knew about the programme and its scope, others who apparently did not who blasted the gathering of such a huge database of details about Americans phone habits as an unwarranted intrusion.
"The US should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about," said Senator Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent from Vermont.
Conservative Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky called the programme "an astounding assault on the Constitution" and said the Obama administration "had sunk to a new low".
The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSAs monitoring of Americans included customer records from AT&T and Sprint Nextel in addition to Verizon, as well as e-mails and web searches. The agency had also cataloged credit-card transactions, the Journal said.
A new controversy
For an administration that has promoted an activist government as a helper and protector of Americans, the flap over the NSAs surveillance became a new battle front.
Mr Obamas White House was already under fire over another matter involving the delicate balance between security and privacy: its search of the telephone records of Associated Press journalists and the e-mails and phone records of a Fox News reporter as part of an inquiry into leaked government information.
Curious twist
In the coming days, it is also likely that the details of the Guardian and Post reports will be sifted for clues into other US surveillance activities, and who might have leaked them despite the risk of federal charges.
The Post story said part of its knowledge about the NSA programmes came from a "career intelligence officer" who cited "firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities".
There also was a curious twist to the Post story, which was written by Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras.
Mr Gellman is a longtime Post reporter; Ms Poitras is a documentary filmmaker who has been working on a film about Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the website known for publishing secret government documents.
In 2012 Ms Poitras made a documentary on Bill Binney, a former code-breaker at the NSA who became a whistle-blowing critic of the agencys surveillance of US citizens.
Reuters
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