President Obama was supposed to be in California to talk about his Affordable Care Act, but recent revelations about government surveillance programs meant that the law had to take a back seat. Obama defended the programs and tried to assure the American public that Big Brother was not listening or watching everything we do.

According to NBC News, Obama said that the programs were necessary tools to fight terrorism and that he had told congressional legislators about the programs before. He added that there has been strict judicial oversight.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at the numbers and durations of calls. They’re not looking at names and they’re not looking at content, but sifting through this so-called meta data, they may identify potential leads with respect to people that might engage in terrorism.”

The New York Times reports that Obama said he understood why the public is so concerned about the news. “You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said, though. “You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

The news of these programs broke on Wednesday and Thursday. First, there was a report from the Guardian that Verizon had been asked to hand over phone records of every customer, then a secret Internet monitoring program called PRISM was reported on by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The PRISM program drew particular anger, since it showed that companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google had been giving the government information. Those companies have all since denied involvement.

“I don’t welcome leaks, because there’s a reason why these programs are classified,” Obama said today.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement Thursday night that “The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time. The FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions.”

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