Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I've said, and I continue to believe is that we don't have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That's a false choice. That doesn't mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn't the case…. And so that's a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, "Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive." To say there's a tradeoff doesn't mean somehow that we've abandoned freedom. I don't think anybody says we're no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.
Charlie Rose: But there is a balance here.
Barack Obama: But there is a balance, so I'm going to get to your — get to your question. The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I've said is "Let's examine and make sure that we're making the right tradeoffs." Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the intelligence gathering business for a very long time —
Charlie Rose: Bigger and better than everybody else.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/president-obama-defends-nsa-spying
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