While civil liberties groups cried foul over the program, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement late Thursday decrying the leak of the materials. He called the disclosure of the program that allows the NSA to collect communications data from Internet companies "reprehensible" and said the phone-records monitoring leak could cause harm to the nation's intelligence gathering activities.
At the same time, he took the rare step of moving to declassify information about the programs as he sought to defend them against criticism.