Leaks Overshadow Obama’s Meeting With President of China

WASHINGTON â€" New disclosures about top-secret government programs to collect data on Americans’ phone calls and Internet activity are likely to overshadow President Obama’s two-day summit this weekend with the president of China.

Mr. Obama is set to meet with President Xi Jinping on a 200-acre estate in Southern California on Friday and Saturday, a historic visit that was expected to be a venue for Mr. Obama to raise concerns about Chinese cyber attacks and spying.

But now, that diplomatic conversation will take place in the midst of striking revelations about the United States’s surveillance operations on its own citizens.

Leaked documents published on Wednesday and Thursday revealed National Security Agency programs to collect vast amounts of information about the daily communications of United States residents with people inside the country and overseas.

One program involved an N.S.A. order to a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to provide records of all calls made, but not their content. The other program, according to leaked documents, involved agreements between the N.S.A. and several of the nation’s most prominent Internet companies to allow government agencies to collect data from the companies’ services.

Late Thursday evening, the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, said in a statement that “only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S.” were targeted. He added that the surveillance was subject to a strict legal review to “minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.”

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Josh Earnest, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday that the judicial oversight of the program “reflects the president’s desire to strike the right balance between protecting our national security and protecting constitutional rights and civil liberties.” He added, “The president welcomes a discussion of the tradeoffs between security and civil liberties.”

Mr. Earnest was also peppered with questions about when and how Mr. Obama himself would discuss the N.S.A. programs.

“Can we expect the president to come out and talk about this at some point?” a reporter asked.

“I don’t anticipate that this will be part of the president’s remarks today,” Mr. Earnest said, referring to the speech at the North Carolina school.

“Not necessarily today, but at some point, as people become more aware of what’s been going on?” the reporter pressed.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t rule it out,” Mr. Earnest said.

The response is complicated by Mr. Obama’s 3,000-mile trip to the West Coast. As is typical when the president travels, some top aides are accompanying him while others remain at the White House.

With the further disclosure later in the day of the program involving the Internet companies, it is all but certain that reporters will no longer be focusing on the relationship between the United States and China.

Instead, they are likely to press aggressively to be given more information about the surveillance programs and to hear directly from Mr. Obama about them. The challenge for the White House will be to juggle those requests with the demands of the mini-summit with Mr. Xi.