Hayden: Spying on Merkel Was the Sort of Thing ‘We Were Expected to Do’

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, told CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Sunday that the counterintelligence measures recently unveiled by national-security leaker Edward Snowden were unexceptional. Though he said it’s conceivable the president may not have been aware of specific measures, he indicated that “leadership intentions were a very high intelligence priority.”

“It’s impossible for me to imagine that the NSC, the administration, the White House, didn’t know,” Hayden said, “and the fact that they didn’t rush in to tell the president this was going on, points out what I think is a fundamental fact: This wasn’t exceptional, this is what we were expected to do.”

Public outcry from Merkel herself as well as from the American public, however, has prompted what Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said will be a wholesale review of the intelligence community’s surveillance programs. “The NSA programs are under scrutiny, some of them you don’t know to ask [about] because you don’t know they exist,” she said. “And that’s why we need to do a whole review.”