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Obama Defends NSA Surveillance

Attempts to quell Germans’ concerns.

During his first presidential trip to Berlin, on Wednesday Barack Obama took time to quell concerns from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her country’s citizens about his administration’s intentions with the recently revealed NSA spying program. The news of the covert surveillance has proved bothersome to Germans, who are otherwise mostly fans of the U.S. president. “This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else,” Obama insisted. “This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people, and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.”