WASHINGTON (AP) — The intelligence community's top lawyer on Tuesday defended the surveillance violations by staff of the National Security Agency by comparing programs that collect mass amounts of information on Americans to problems with the troubled health care website.

"Complicated technology systems frequently don't work as they expect them to," Robert Litt, general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence, told a conference at the Georgetown University Law Center. "Using the word 'abuse' in the context of the operation of the surveillance program is a little bit like saying the Department of Health and Human Services is abusing people because of the fact that the Obamacare websites don't work properly. They are complicated."

In 2011, after the government disclosed what it said were technical problems with its computer systems, a court found the NSA had violated the Constitution for three years. Litt's statement on Tuesday could be read as significantly downplaying the constitutional violations cited by the court or as highlighting the politically sensitive problems with the health care website.