Lesley Stahl, CBS News: According to an article in the New Yorker, every time there’s been a question about putting restraints on the NSA up to now, the president has sided with the intelligence community.
Susan Rice, National Security Advisor: What the NSA and our intelligence community does as a whole is designed to protect Americans and our allies. And they do a heck of a good job at it.
Lesley Stahl: Officials in the intelligence community have actually been untruthful both to the American public in hearings in Congress and to the FISA Court.
Susan Rice: There have been cases where they have inadvertently made false representations. And they themselves have discovered it and corrected it.
Lesley Stahl: But when you have so many phone records being held, emails, heads of state’s phone conversations being listened in to, has it been worth our allies being upset? Has it been worth all the tech companies being upset? Has it been worth Americans feeling that their privacy has been invaded?
Susan Rice: Lesley, it's been worth what we've done to protect the United States. And the fact that we have not had a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11 should not be diminished. But that does not mean that everything we're doing as of the present ought to be done the same way in the future.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/12/22/susan_rice_on_intel_officials_lying_theyve_made_inadvertently_made_false_representations.html---------------------------------------------------------------
In other news: Benghazy: Nothing evil ever happened over there, trust me.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice says she has no regrets about taking the Sunday show interviews that brought her career under fire in September 2012.
Pressed Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as to why Hillary Clinton didn’t appear for interviews following the lethal attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Rice said she had filled in willingly because of the then-secretary of state’s particularly “painful” and “stressful” week.
“I don’t have time to think about the false controversy,” Rice said. “In the midst of all of swirl about things like talking points, the administration has been working very, very hard across the globe to review our security of our embassies and our facilities. That’s what we ought to be focused on.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/susan-rice-benghazi-interviews-60-minutes-101462.html--------------------------------------------------------------
Rice: No amnesty for Snowden