President Obama, acknowledging that high-tech surveillance poses a threat to civil liberties, announced significant changes on Friday to the way the government collects and uses telephone records, but left in place many other pillars of the nation’s intelligence programs.Responding to the clamor over sensational disclosures about the National Security Agency’s spying practices, Mr. Obama said he would restrict the ability of intelligence agencies to gain access to phone records, and would ultimately move that data out of the hands of the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/us/politics/obama-nsa.htmlAlso see:Obama Says NSA’s Mass Collection of U.S. Phone Data Will End
President Barack Obama’s plan to curtail the government’s mass collection of American phone data shakes up U.S. spying practices amid a world-wide firestorm over revelations about the nation’s surveillance programs.But Mr. Obama, promising a continued review, left large swaths of the surveillance programs unchanged, and many of his proposals for overhauling them still face congressional debate and approval.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304603704579326333792513314Obama Addresses Economic Damage Caused by Snowden NSA Leaks
Brookings Institution fellow Cameron Kerry says President Obama’s speech on Friday “accomplished a great deal” in the effort to rebuild trust in U.S. companies, which was badly shaken by Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance and its connections to U.S.-based tech giants.”The Impact on trust in U.S. government, U.S. companies and the model of Internet governance has been far greater than the impact on intelligence. There has been … enormous fallout. The president accomplished a great deal,” Mr. Kerry said Friday during a Brookings webcast that analyzed President Barack Obama’s speech on Friday, which announced new limits on NSA intelligence gathering. As the WSJ reported, Mr. Obama said that the mass collection of phone data will be sharply curtailed. Under the new presidential directive, intelligence officials must now obtain approval from a secret national-security court for government searches of phone data, and the scope of individual searches has been scaled back, the WSJ’s Carol E. Lee and Siobhan Gorman reported.
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/01/17/obama-addresses-economic-damage-caused-by-snowden-nsa-leaks/Obama NSA reforms receive mixed response in Europe and Brazil
Europeans were largely underwhelmed by Barack Obama’s speech on limited reform of US espionage practices, saying the measures did not go far enough to address concerns over American snooping on its European allies.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/obama-nsa-reforms-reaction-europe-brazilUS telecoms giants express unease about proposed NSA metadata reforms
US telecoms giants expressed concern Friday about president Barack Obama’s reform of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of American citizens’ phone records.In a widely anticipated speech Obama said the government should no longer hold databases of every call record made in the United States, citing the “potential for abuse”. But Obama made clear the intelligence agencies should still be able to access call records information and gave no details of how that information will be stored.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/17/telecoms-giants-concern-nsa-metadata-reformsApple, Google Gear Up to Lobby Congress on NSA Reform
Apple Inc., Google Inc. and other technology companies are gearing up to bring their fight over U.S. surveillance to Congress after President Barack Obama offered no specific proposals on their central request: to tell customers more about what the government is doing.The coalition of companies, which has pressed the White House to limit the National Security Agency’s sweeping global surveillance programs, plans to ramp up lobbying members of Congress next week, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. The president, in his remarks, put the onus of revamping intelligence gathering and storage of data onto the shoulders of Congress, these people said.
www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-18/apple-google-gear-up-to-lobby-congress-on-nsa-reform.html