US President Barack Obama waves after giving his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, yesterday. Obama arrived with his family in the German capital for his first visit as president.
BERLIN: President Barack Obama defended US intelligence methods on a visit to Berlin yesterday, telling Chancellor Angela Merkel and wary Germans that Washington was not monitoring the emails of ordinary citizens or damaging civil liberties.
Obama is popular in Germany but revelations before the trip that the United States has a covert Internet surveillance programme, codenamed Prism, have caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh.
Merkel said at a joint news conference that also touched on Afghanistan, Syria and the global economy, that the two leaders had held “long and intensive” talks on the spying issue, and pointed out that some questions still need to be cleared up.
“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,” said Obama, on his first visit to the German capital as president.
“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.”
Obama was later due to speak to a crowd of roughly 4,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate, which used to stand alongside the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Berlin from the capitalist West of the city. His visit comes on the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Reuters
