Barack Obama defended two secret programmes that allow the US to collect telephone records and emails amid accusations from Europe that his administration’s embrace of sweeping surveillance tactics had become “monstrous”.

Insisting that “nobody is listening to your phone calls”, Mr Obama said the two programmes were approved by Congress and were overseen by a federal judge. The impact, he said, was only “a modest encroachment on privacy”.

He was speaking a day after it emerged that the administration had been secretly collecting the phone records of citizens and amid reports that it was also tapping into the servers of the country’s biggest internet and social media companies, allowing emails, audio and video files, photos and documents to be gathered.