Obama: Time to 'Put the Whole Elephant Out There' on Surveillance

On Friday, in a press conference at the White House East Room, President Obama said of Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks, “once the leaks had happened, we’ve seen information coming out in drips and in drabs, sometimes coming out sideways.” 

He admitted, “a general impression has taken hold” around the globe that “we’re sucking in information willy-nilly and doing what we please with it.”

He also admitted that the “instinctive bias” of the intelligence community to keep everything close, and that his personal assumption of checks and balances from Congress ensuring public trust, had undermined that public trust. Obama suggested that the administration “put the whole elephant out there.”

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).