Barack Obama's FBI pick James Comey defied Bush's 2004 secret data collection plan

Under fire for authorising expansive secret surveillance programmes, US President Barack Obama has selected James Comey as his new FBI director, choosing a lawyer best known for refusing to sign off on a private data collection plan in the Bush administration.

Introducing Comey at a Rose Garden ceremony, Obama described him as "a leader who understands how to keep America safe and stay true to our founding ideals no matter what the future may bring". Alluding to the debate over National Security Agency programmes, Obama said Comey understood "this work of striking a balance" between security and privacy.

Comey, a longtime prosecutor who put away gangsters, gunrunners and terrorists before rising to deputy attorney general under George W. Bush, will replace Robert Mueller if confirmed by the Senate. With a 10-year term under law, Comey would be in place to outlast this president and possibly even the next one as he steers the bureau into the next phase of its post-September 11 evolution.

Comey is best known for a dramatic showdown in 2004 when he and Mueller, among others, refused to reauthorise an expiring NSA surveillance programme because they believed that it had exceeded the president's legal authority. They threatened to resign from the Bush administration if it were extended without their agreement. After a Hollywood-style confrontation in the hospital room of an ailing John Ashcroft, then attorney general, Bush acquiesced to their concerns, and the programme was later revived under a different legal theory.

That episode came to define Comey's tenure and clearly helped win him the job from a Democratic president. "He joined Bob in standing up for what he believed was right," Obama said. "He was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong."

But Comey also authorised or supported other assertive policies during his tenure in Bush's Justice Department, and the prospect of his FBI nomination has drawn criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal activists.