White House official pens op-ed urging 'greater focus' in foreign surveillance

The White House edged closer on Friday towards an apology for eavesdropping on friendly foreign leaders with a newspaper column acknowledging the damage caused by excessive collection of data.

“We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can,” said homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco. 

She also called for “greater focus” to ensure the US was balancing “security needs with the privacy concerns all people share”.

Until recently, such calls for balance from the administration officials have focused only on the privacy of US citizens, but the allegations of surveillance in France and Germany this week have led to a shift that now includes foreign concerns. 

The tensions heightened on Thursday after the Guardian revealed the National Security Agency had monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders in surveillance that produced “little reportable intelligence”. 

“Today's world is highly interconnected, and the flow of large amounts of data is unprecedented,” Monaco wrote. “That's why the president has directed us to review our surveillance capabilities, including with respect to our foreign partners.”

The White House first publicly acknowledged that its review objectives included the overseas activities of the NSA on Monday after French president François Hollande called Obama to complain.

A White House statement said the allegations, which it has not specifically confirmed, “raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed”.

Monaco went further in the USA Today op-ed, saying the “disclosures have created significant challenges in our relationships with some of our closest foreign partners”.

Administration officials are working furiously behind the scenes to mend fences with a slew of key allies, which come as its foreign partnerships are facing unprecedented challenge of a number of fronts.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “We have enormously important and valuable and deep friendships and alliances with countries that require us to take very seriously concerns that are expressed.

“These are very important relations for the United States – economically, in terms of national security – and we will, of course, work to maintain the strongest possible ties with our closest allies.”

But Carney ducked repeated efforts by reporters to clarify a carefully limited denial that the US is currently targeting personal phone calls of German chancellor Angela Merkel.

“You understand that by saying the United States is not monitoring and will not, that invites a supposition, as it has in Germany, that the United States was monitoring not just foreign communications of a friendly government – Germany – but a chancellor’s cellphone,” asked CBS correspondent Major Garrett. “I’m just trying to ask you, on the record, at the podium: are you comfortable with that supposition? Or do you want to say anything that would knock that down?“

Carney answered: “What I can’t do and won’t do is answer every allegation that appears in print about intelligence activities that have been engaged in, or may or may not have been engaged in by the United States, because the path that leads us down is not one that we can travel.”