Former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – Former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said he was “proud” to defend President Barack Obama in his massive surveillance of the Internet, likening it to making people walk through metal detectors at airports.
“The fundamental notion of is it good for this country if the United States government is collecting massive information in an attempt to find small numbers of individual people who could do us harm?” Fleisher told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Friday, where he debated Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story.
“It reminds me, Anderson of other things we’ve accepted in life, such as going through airports. All innocent people go through metal detectors. Innocent people take off their shoes. Why? To find an occasional one or two bad people, and frankly, we haven’t had that in recent years.”
Last week The Guardian of London and The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had a program that allowed the federal government to tap into servers of major U.S. companies such as Google, AOL and Facebook to scoop out communications that could lead to tracking foreign nationals suspected of terrorism.
“We prevented the bad people from doing that because we make the good people go through,” Fleischer continued. “My point is – we have broad programs designed to catch the few. When it comes to keeping us safe in the global war on terror, I think the president’s program, President Obama’s program, is the right one, and it’s a good one.”
Fleischer went on to say, “I'm proud on this one to defend President Obama, because I think he's continuing those policies that have kept us safe.”