President Barack Obama says US intelligence systems depend on the public's confidence that privacy rights are not being violated either at home or abroad.
Obama only briefly mentioned one of the biggest controversies that has gripped his administration over the past year in his annual State of the Union speech Tuesday.
He repeated his pledge to overhaul US surveillance programs in cooperation with Congress.
Lawmakers are divided over how far to roll back the National Security Agency programs that collect billions of telephone and internet records from across the US and the rest of the world every day.
The spy programs were revealed last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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