Over the weekend Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting defended and clarified President Obama's stance on the program, known as PRISM.
“He expressed concern about some of the lack of oversight and safeguards associated with programs in the past – for instance, when you had warrantless wiretapping that did not have that full oversight of a judge. What he's done as President is say which programs are necessary, which capabilities are necessary to protect the American people and which aren't.”
Under President the government has been collecting vast amounts of data from Verizon phone records as well as web services.
Talking about Prism and the fate of Snowden, Paul Rozenzweig gives his comment to the Voice of Russia. 
Let's first get into this Prism program. Is this something we should be nervous about or is this kind of business usual and we're a little bit too nervous than we should be?
Rozenzweig: I think it's important to distinguish between the Verizon call metadata program and Prism. Prism is a data analytic program that targets foreign traffic under the Intelligence Surveillance Act that is classic national security counterterrorism information that's used, for example, to track terrorist e-mail targeting. It's explicitly authorized. We shouldn’t be concerned about that one too much, maybe just be a little surprised about it, but no so concerned.
The more interesting one in terms of the law is the metadata call records — that the first of the programs which was disclosed. The reason it's different is a) that one also involved Americans, so that makes it a little more interesting, I think, to American citizens and b) this program harvests all of the call data.
I want to read a statement by representative Peter King, he's Chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee. He gave us quote to the Guardian paper.
"If Edward Snowden did, in fact, leak the NSA, the U.S. Government should prosecute him in full extent of the law and begin the proceedings on the earliest date. The U.S. must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence."
Do you agree with those statements?
Rozenzweig: I think this is one of the largest and most significant leaks we've had in a long time and it does extreme damage to our ability to counterterrorism. I also think it's important to understand that somehow we've developed a system where a single 29-year-old gets to make decisions like this. And that seems to me to be wrong. This is the program which was cleared by the Executive Branch, by Congress and by the courts — all of the leadership. There're not always right, but it seems to me that if we let a single individual make the determination on a personal basis that, way leads chaos. For me, Mr. Snowden should be prosecuted.
Some people regard him to be a hero. What do you make of that?
Rozenzweig: That is obviously wrong. Mr. Snowden revealed absolutely nothing that was unlawful, nor did he reveal any abuse. For all we know, he's simply a well-minded young man who wanted to do right by the law, but who promised not to. It's not heroic to break your solemn obligations.
To get a different perspective on Snowden, Voice of Russia called Patrice McDermott.
This is one of the biggest leaks in U.S. history. How significant is the information that Edward Snowden revealed to the public?
McDermott: I think the information is very significant. It reveals to the public the scope of surveillance. Even though if it's metadata, as the government claims, of the phone records. It's also significant in that Mr. Snowden was very careful and thoughtful and selective in what he released, he was not releasing information just because it offended him at some level.
We basically live in an era where there's going to be some looking at records, some responsible way of having surveillance of systems that keep as safe as a whole. Does that argument hold up?
McDermott: I think the issue is that there're several levels. The government intrusion is being used to justify intrusions into the privacy of American citizens. And I think that we're going to have these sorts of collections of information. I think for me the largest concern is that we don't know clearly what efforts the government is actually making to minimize the collection of information. To me the fact that they're collecting information is very troubling and not knowing what the policies are and not knowing how they're protecting this from misuse within the government is also troublesome.
I want to play a clip from Edward Snowden himself describing his reasons to release this information.
McDermott: You recognize that some of the things here are actually abuses, but when you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it. And then, the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who is hired by the government.
Don't you think that maybe it's troubling to hear that the government has these capabilities, but so far what have we learnt about how this affects individuals?
McDermott: We really don't know that