In response to mounting pressure from a skeptical public over the breadth of the government’s surveillance programs, President Obama on Friday unveiled steps toward reforming the National Security Agency’s policy on spying—but did the president go far enough?
“The whole thing felt like a grudging exercise in which the president was basically telling everyone, ‘you should trust me, we don’t really have to do this, but if you insist on it, we will do these little things,” The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman said on NOW with Alex Wagner Monday.
The president outlined four, somewhat vague proposals on Friday, the most substantive of which involved appointing a privacy advocate to monitor the secret dealings of the Foreign Intelligence (FISA) court.
The president’s proposals were met with skepticism on both sides—Obama’s remarks managed to simultaneously anger the editorial boards of both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times—no small feat.
Several commentators were critical of the president’s insistence that he had already taken steps to address privacy concerns raised by the programs, long before NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks to The Guardian and Washington Post.









