phone monitoring

The man who gave classified documents about two sweeping U.S. surveillance programs to reporters says he's taken up refuge in Hong Kong.

Two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are divided about whether there's evidence that the government's phone records collection program has kept the United States safe.

The nation's top intelligence official says a previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen. And he says it was reckless to reveal it and another intelligence-gathering program.

For years, top officials of the Bush and Obama administrations dismissed fears about secret government data-mining by reassuring Congress that there were no secret nets trawling for Americans' phone and Internet records.

President Barack Obama is defending his government's secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorized the collection of America's phone records and U.S. internet use.

Moving to tamp down a public uproar spurred by the disclosure of two secret surveillance programs, the nation's top intelligence official is declassifying key details about one of the programs while insisting the efforts were legal, limited in scope and necessary to detect terrorist threats.