President Barack Obama’s speech today marks a historic step in the continuing discussion of national security, privacy and government surveillance. 
 
 The speech was delivered against a background set by numerous proposals, including various bills in Congress and the recommendations of the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, on which I served (and most of whose recommendations were endorsed in today’s speech). Seven points in the speech deserve particular attention. 
 
 First, the president called for an end to the government’s current storage of “metadata,” information about many millions of calls made by ordinary Americans. (This includes information about the time and date of calls, and the numbers involved; it doesn’t include any content.) He emphasized that the capacity to search metadata is one that must be preserved, but without government itself holding it. 
 
 Some people, including members of the Review Group, have proposed that metadata should be held by the phone companies (which have it in any case) or by a new, private entity. The central argument is that government storage contains risks to personal privacy, civil liberties and public trust, and it isn’t necessary for national security purposes (so long as government can obtain access to the information if it shows a need to do so). 
 
 The transition to private ownership creates challenges. The phone companies are aggressively resisting this proposal, which they say would impose serious economic and operational burdens on them. The president directed the U.S. attorney general and the intelligence community to report on the best way to transfer the metadata out of government hands, before the program comes up for reauthorization on March 28. 
 
 Second, the president announced that in this transition period, the government shouldn’t have access to metadata without judicial approval. As a matter of principle, and unless there is an emergency, public officials should have access to the content of people’s telephone calls only if an independent judge has authorized that access. 
 
 Third, the president endorsed the proposal to appoint a public advocate to represent privacy and civil liberties interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In recent years, the court has been asked to assess some fundamental questions of statutory and constitutional law. At least in significant cases, the president concluded that it is important to have a genuine adversary proceeding, including a team of lawyers whose mission is to protect privacy and civil liberties. Obama also called for an increase in declassification of the court’s opinions. 
 
 Fourth, the president imposed new measures to safeguard the privacy of non-Americans, including foreign leaders. He emphasized that when the U.S. collects information abroad, its goal is to protect national security, not to monitor ordinary conversations, to intrude into private lives, or to track people solely on the basis of their political convictions or religious beliefs. 
 
 Importantly, he announced that he would extend privacy safeguards for American citizens to people overseas, limiting how long information can be held and when it can be disseminated. He also directed that without a compelling national security purpose, the U.S. won’t monitor the communications of leaders of our close friends and allies. 
 
 Fifth, he announced that communications providers, including telephone companies, would be able to disclose more information about the orders they have received to provide data to the government. The companies have argued strongly for this proposal, in part on the ground that it will show that these orders aren’t common, and that providers are rarely turning over private information to officials. 
 
 Sixth, the president called for more transparency with respect to National Security letters, which allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation, without court approval, to obtain access to people’s records (such as their bank and credit card information). He stopped short of endorsing the Review Group’s recommendation that the FBI shouldn’t be able to obtain records without judicial authorization. 
 
 Seventh, the president announced the coming appointment of a White House official with the specific responsibility of carrying out the new privacy safeguards. 
 
 Notwithstanding the importance of today’s speech, it is hardly the end of the process. Some of the president’s judgments, including the transition of the metadata program, can’t be implemented without congressional action. On these questions, the usual divisions between Republicans and Democrats are confounded, and both alliances and splits have been surprising and unpredictable. The unpredictability creates real challenges, but it also provides promising opportunities for sensible reform. 
 
 (Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard Law School, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the co-author of “Nudge” and author of “Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas,” forthcoming in March.) 
 
 To contact the writer of this article: Cass R. Sunstein at csunstei@law.harvard.edu. 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this article: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net. ||||| Share 
 
 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
 
 CONTACT: media@aclu.org 
 
 WASHINGTON – President Obama today announced changes to some aspects of the NSA’s surveillance programs and left others in place. Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, had this reaction: 
 
 “The president’s speech outlined several developments which we welcome. Increased transparency for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, improved checks and balances at the FISA court through the creation of a panel of advocates, and increased privacy protections for non-U.S. citizens abroad – the first such assertion by a U.S. president – are all necessary and welcome reforms. 
 
 “However, the president’s decision not to end bulk collection and retention of all Americans’ data remains highly troubling. The president outlined a process to study the issue further and appears open to alternatives. But the president should end – not mend – the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the Constitution. The president’s own review panel recommended that bulk data collection be ended, and the president should accept that recommendation in its entirety.” 
 
 A new chart comparing the ACLU’s proposals, President Obama’s announcement, and the USA FREEDOM Act (a bipartisan bill currently pending in Congress) is at: 
 
 aclu.org/national-security/where-does-president-stand-nsa-reform 
 
 ACLU Action is demanding an end to dragnet surveillance at: 
 
 aclu.org/endsurveillance ||||| In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy. 
 
 The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge. 
 
 This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community. 
 
 But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government. 
 
 Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols". 
 
 As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms. 
 
 The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well. 
 
 This was also the same tactic used in the wake of the 2008 financial crises. Politicians dutifully read from the script that blamed unregulated Wall Street excesses and angrily vowed to rein them in. They then enacted legislation that left the bankers almost entirely unscathed, and which made the "too-big-to-fail" problem that spawned the crises worse than ever. 
 
 And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards. "Individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress," he gushed with an impressively straight face. "One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger," he pronounced, while still seeking to imprison for decades the whistleblower who enabled that debate. The bottom line, he said, is this: "I believe we need a new approach." 
 
 But those pretty rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by a series of plainly cosmetic "reforms". By design, those proposals will do little more than maintain rigidly in place the very bulk surveillance systems that have sparked such controversy and anger. 
 
 To be sure, there were several proposals from Obama that are positive steps. A public advocate in the Fisa court, a loosening of "gag orders" for national security letters, removing metadata control from the NSA, stricter standards for accessing metadata, and narrower authorizations for spying on friendly foreign leaders (but not, of course, their populations) can all have some marginal benefits. But even there, Obama's speech was so bereft of specifics – what will the new standards be? who will now control Americans' metadata? – that they are more like slogans than serious proposals. 
 
 Ultimately, the radical essence of the NSA – a system of suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world – will fully endure even if all of Obama's proposals are adopted. That's because Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, "to restore public confidence" in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn't to truly reform the agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer fear it or are angry about it. 
 
 As the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero said after the speech: 
 
 The president should end – not mend – the government's collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans' data. When the government collects and stores every American's phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an 'unreasonable search' that violates the constitution. 
 
 That, in general, has long been Obama's primary role in our political system and his premiere, defining value to the permanent power factions that run Washington. He prettifies the ugly; he drapes the banner of change over systematic status quo perpetuation; he makes Americans feel better about policies they find repellent without the need to change any of them in meaningful ways. He's not an agent of change but the soothing branding packaging for it. 
 
 As is always the case, those who want genuine changes should not look to politicians, and certainly not to Barack Obama, to wait for it to be gifted. Obama was forced to give this speech by rising public pressure, increasingly scared US tech giants, and surprisingly strong resistance from the international community to the out-of-control American surveillance state. 
 
 Today's speech should be seen as the first step, not the last, on the road to restoring privacy. The causes that drove Obama to give this speech need to be, and will be, stoked and nurtured further until it becomes clear to official Washington that, this time around, cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate.
– President Obama used his usual soaring rhetoric yesterday in announcing changes to the NSA surveillance program, but the journalist behind many of the Edward Snowden scoops doesn't think they'll amount to much. Sure, some of the proposals have merit—putting a public advocate on the FISA court, removing the control of metadata from the NSA—but even if all are adopted, they will do very little to end the NSA's practice of "suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world," writes Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian. He doesn't sound surprised, though, summing up the ways of Obama with a particularly scathing passage: "He prettifies the ugly; he drapes the banner of change over systematic status quo perpetuation; he makes Americans feel better about policies they find repellent without the need to change any of them in meaningful ways. He's not an agent of change but the soothing branding packaging for it." Greenwald's silver lining: Public criticism forced this "first step," and continued pressure might eventually make it clear to DC that "cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate." Click to read his full column. The ACLU, meanwhile, praises some of the proposals but adds that" the president should end—not mend—the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data." At Bloomberg, Cass Sunstein, who was on the president's advisory panel for the reforms, lays out his seven key takeaways. He, too, emphasizes that much work remains, calling the speech a "historic step in the continuing discussion of national security, privacy and government surveillance."