Barack Obama, outlining his changes to the NSA:
Why is this necessary? The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San Diego to a known al- Qaida safehouse in Yemen.
Skating to where the puck used to be.
I’m also calling on Congress to authorize the establishment of a panel of advocates from outside government to provide an independent voice in significant cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
This might actually help. One of the biggest problems with FISA courts was that there was no opposing voice.
For example, if a bomb goes off in one of our cities and law enforcement is racing to determine whether a network is poised to conduct additional attacks, time is of the essence.
No real examples? This is movie threat security.
The review group recommended that our current approach be replaced by one in which the providers or a third party retain the bulk records, with government accessing information as needed.
Because Verizon employees are so much more trustworthy than NSA employees. This makes the phone records BS worse, not better.
tl;dr
We will continue collection enormous amounts of private data on nearly all citizens, foreign and domestic. We may disclose more info about how we use that data, unless it’s important or something. I’ve issued a bunch of presidential orders saying we really shouldn’t be evil with this data; but the “access private data” button will still be right there next to the “drone strike” button. The next President may reverse those orders.
Can’t say I expected better - Obama is a centrist, and isn’t going to scale back any programs labelled “defense” or “security.” We knew that when he was elected. But it’s still disappointing.