Obama Presents Cosmetic Reforms to the US State Security Apparatus

First, it must be noted that Obama's definition of spying is the same as the one used by DNI James Clapper as an alibi for perjury, that you can collect everything, and it is not spying unless you actually call it up for a specific purpose, even if we have found that NSA employees tracking ex-giflfriends with that "not spying" data that they collected:

President Obama said Friday, in his first major speech on electronic surveillance, that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.”

Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by the National Security Agency, but the changes he announced will allow it to continue — or expand — the collection of personal data from billions of people around the world, Americans and foreign citizens alike.

Obama squares that circle with an unusually narrow definition of “spying.” It does not include the ingestion of tens of trillions of records about the telephone calls, e-mails, locations and relationships of people for whom there is no suspicion of relevance to any threat.

In his speech, and an accompanying policy directive, Obama described principles for “restricting the use of this information” — but not for gathering less of it.

Alongside the invocation of privacy and restraint, Obama gave his plainest endorsement yet of “bulk collection,” a term he used more than once and authorized explicitly in Presidential Policy Directive 28. In a footnote, the directive defined the term to mean high-volume collection “without the use of discriminants.”

That is perhaps the central feature of “the golden age of signals intelligence,” which the NSA celebrates in top-secret documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden. Obama for the first time put his own imprimatur on a collection philosophy that one of those documents summarized this way: “Order one of everything from the menu.”

………

“It’s noteworthy that the president addressed only the bulk collection of call records, but not any of the other bulk collection programs revealed by the media,” said Alexander Abdo, an attorney with the ACLU’s national security project. “That is a glaring omission. The president needs to embrace structural reforms that will protect us from all forms of bulk collection and that will make future overreach less likely.”

Other bulk collection programs, like the NSA hoovering over 200 million text messages a day.

You could tell that this was entirely damage control, and an attempt to avoid any meaningful reform because of is bizarre and ahistorical invocation of silversmith and revolutionary Paul Revere:

In a speech that tried hard to defend the actions of the U.S. intelligence community while simultaneously admitting that some of those actions were unnecessary and egregious, President Obama on 17 January 2014 announced modest reforms of NSA spying practices that have been revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

President Obama began by comparing the National Security Agency to the Sons of Liberty, an American revolutionary group famous for the 1773 Boston Tea Party, and one of whose members, Paul Revere, famously warned of incoming British troops. Ironically, Revere’s legendary midnight ride would have most likely been stopped by the British if they had the NSA’s metadata collection capabilities. Even more ironically, the American Revolution was kicked off in part by overly broad general warrants that gave British troops nearly unlimited power to search for contraband. It’s all about intelligence.

I would also suggest that you read Marcy Wheeler's list of secret police style techniques that Obama thinks is OK, because he has claimed that there have been no abuses:

• The spying on the personal lives of political opponents who have nothing to do with terrorism.
• Spying on Antiwar activists. 
• Continued activities forbidden by the FISA Court 
• Never developed minimization procedures as required by law
• Etc. (Read the whole thing at the link)

It's no wonder that Glen Greenwald has dismissed this as a PR gesture.

Obama stressed the importance of restoring trust in our state security apparatus, and this does very little to inspire trust.

The definitive word comes from public interest Telco Maven Harold Feld, "First step of oversight that regains my trust. Actually enforce the law."

This does not do that, and it is clear that the "Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever^™" has no interest in ever doing so.