Obama and the N.S.A.: Why He Can’t Be Trusted

Courtesy of reports in the Times and elsewhere, we already pretty much know what restrictions on the surveillance state President Obama is going to announce in a speech planned for Friday: very few. Far from taking the National Security Agency to task for the flagrant breaches of individual privacy that Edward Snowden has revealed, Obama is set to reject some of the main recommendations contained in a report by his own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which was itself hardly a radical document.

The news reports say that Obama has rejected the Review Group’s main recommendation, which was to end the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of metadata, such as the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans. The panel, which issued a long report in December, said the N.S.A. should continue to have access to these records under the auspices of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but it said that the data should be held by the phone companies, or by a third party. Having thrown out this suggestion, Obama is set to leave the current system in place and hand its ultimate fate over to Congress, which is tantamount to doing nothing.

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