U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that some National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance has overreached boundaries and certain practices had occurred without the knowledge of Obama's administration.
Kerry's stance came while participating via London teleconference in a summit on governmental transparency where he said that modern technology has some NSA activities running on "automatic pilot." The former presidential candidate promised a thorough review of surveillance practices and the end altogether of some activities.
"The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there," said Kerry. "In some cases, some of these actions have reached too far and we are going too far and we are going to try to make sure it doesn't happen in the future."
Obama's administration has put some distance between it and the NSA in recent days following the potential diplomatic fallout from last week's revelation that the cellphone of German chancellor Angela Merkel was being monitored by the US.
A French newspaper also reported that the NSA gathered 70 million phone records from the country's citizens while a Spanish publication made similar allegations. Both allegations were reported as "false" by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander. Tech companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL have called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reform surveillance policies of the NSA after Edward Snowden showed the scope of its date collection on private U.S. citizens.
During the teleconference, Kerry spoke on both the negative and positive aspects of NSA surveillance.
"We have actually prevented airplanes from going down, buildings from being blown up and people from being assassinated because we've been able to learn ahead of time of the plans," Kerry said. "I assure you, innocent people are not being abused in this process, but there's an effort to try to gather information."
