Obama addresses annual technology festival in Texas

"It is much easier to order pizza or a trip than it is for you to exercise the single most important task in a democracy, and that is to select who's going to represent you in government", the president said. "Technology is evolving so rapidly that new questions are being asked, and I am of the view that there are very real reasons why we want to make sure that the government can not just willy-nilly get into everybody's smartphones that are full of very personal information and very personal data".

"My conclusion so far is that you can not take an absolutist view on this", Obama said.

When moderator Evan Smith, the CEO/editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, raised the question of how a slow and bloated government could ever work efficiently with private sectors who are "in the business of sleek, fail-fast technology", the president turned to one of his greatest achievements and arguably one of his greatest momentary failures.

"All of us value our privacy, and this is a society that is built on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and a healthy skepticism of overreaching government", he said, noting that the Edward Snowden revelations have elevated awareness of these issues, despite the dangers to USA citizens being "vastly overstated".

The president said that while there must be some concessions to personal privacy (he cited airport security as one such existing concession) he said he was "way on the civil liberties side" of the debate.

Obama also said that he believed the eventual solution to this issue would likely emerge as a middle path that allowed a level of encryption that was "as strong as possible" with data "accessible by the smallest number of people possible".

Obama used his appearance at the decades-old festival to encourage the audience of tech enthusiasts to use their skills and imagination to "tackle big problems in new ways".

Obama was in Austin for the opening day of SXSW, a 10-day interactive/film/music gathering that draws more than 80,000 participants, including some of the country's most successful and talented tech industry leaders. "It's to say to you, as I'm about to leave office, how can we start coming up with new platforms and new ideas, new approaches across disciplines and across skill sets, to solve some of the big problems that we're facing today".

South by Southwest Interactive is part of South by Southwest, a movie, music and interactive media festival that had been held in Austin for the past 30 years.

Smith also asked Obama about the "massive digital divide" in the USA, pointing to the fact that minorities have significantly less access to the Internet, which makes it more hard for them to be engaged citizens or even do their homework.