text: Marina Koren and Dustin Volz @dnvolz
  Obama, who stepped into his presidency with a "healthy skepticism" toward federal surveillance programs, outlined measures he took to improve or change operations. But what he didn't do "is stop these programs wholesale — not only because I felt that they made us more secure; but also because nothing in that initial review, and nothing that I have learned since, indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens."
  How intelligence agencies like the FBI use National Security Letters will no longer be so secretive. "I have therefore directed the attorney general to amend how we use National Security Letters so this secrecy will not be indefinite, and will terminate within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy," Obama said. These documents compel certain parties to disclose information to the FBI.
  From a software perspective, how the NSA collects data won't change. "The U.S. government should examine the feasibility of creating software that would allow the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies more easily to conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk-data collection." Obama made no mention of tweaks to the agency's massive dragnet during his speech.
  The NSA is still going to bypass security encryptions on the Web. The review board said that the government should be "fully supporting and not undermining efforts to create encryption standards" and "making clear that it will not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption." The intelligence agency, however, has no plans to stop cracking others' encryption codes — it has plans to get better at it.