 Hey everybody, welcome to The Verge Live. I'm Yael Abatel. I'm joined by Russell Brandon and Addie Robertson. You're watching us right after President Obama gave a speech on NSA reform that I would categorize as very, very strange in a variety of ways. At the dawn of a republic. Yeah, no, it's weird. He was like, you know, basically America was built on surveillance. The nature of our country is that we're always watching. That's what it's always been. We've been spying on the Queen since this whole thing began. If you don't like the NSA, what do you think about Paul Revere? Yeah, Paul Revere is the original bulk collection. Like it's amazing. I expected them to name check, you know, obviously 9-11, but I was not really expecting Paul Revere. I wasn't expecting like Martin Luther King. And yeah, Martin Luther King. This is what I say when I'm drunk and I'm yelling at people about why the NSA is bad. I'm like, look, you know, our greatest Americans were surveilled as state enemies. And like now the president's saying that as he's talking about, well, we're not going to change everything. I know you're mad, but remember that like, you know, some of the most important people of my lifetime were, you know, the state was trying to destroy them through these very tools. And so we're just going to make the tools a little bit weaker. But add more of that. Yeah, exactly. Like more weaker tools instead of fewer strong tools. Well, that's because we have to spy on states like the Soviet bloc so that they will not spy on their citizens. So let's start at the top here. So this speech has been, it's been over a week or so that, you know, it's been leaked that he's going to be giving the speech. There was a presidential directive about what the intelligence community can and can't do with signals intelligence that came out earlier today. And we were expecting a number of things to happen. Well, we were not expecting a number of things to happen. A number of things could have happened. A number of things could have happened. We were expecting maybe none of them to happen. It's true. I mean, like, and so Obama, he came out and he just started. He started with this history lesson. He was in total law professor mode. He referred to the people within the United States as US persons a number of times, which just thinking of candidate Obama just walking in the campaign trail, I love meeting US persons. Let me kiss this US person, baby. That is strange. He's full legal professor mode, talking about the justifications for spying, for surveillance, for intelligence, all of which I think are known. I don't think anybody really disputes the need for like the police and for intelligence in the world. The problem is the significant overreach that that intelligence community has been. But it's not just overreach. He actually did make a really good point that the problem is now everything we do is surveillable. Right. Well, he made that at the very end, but in like a stirring, a full throat defense of the internet. He's like, and the internet has provided us with so many ways to communicate, a way for people to reach to other people across the globe and for the police to watch that interaction. And it was like, you're conflating a lot of things here. It isn't that the policies have changed although they have, it's that everything else around them has changed. Yeah. So they fall under the policies. Like somebody made a really good sort of comparison to copyright on Twitter that we're just dealing with completely. No, like now we have to deal with it. Like things don't mean the same thing anymore. They're not the same anymore. Right. And so he started with this and he did start with, you know, Martin Luther King was surveilled caught, you know, during the, with a long twilight of the cold war, we learned. And it's like, yeah. You mean when McCarthy rounded up like American citizens for witch hunts, like, yes, we learned a lot of bad lessons. Like why are we learning them again? And then he began sort of his kind of, he got into the meat, the heart of the matter, which was there have been lots of leaks. He sounded very angry about the leaks. Well, and he was like, we were, you know, we were looking at it. Yeah. But then unfortunately, now everyone's mad because of the leaks. So we have to do it now. But like, I was on it. Trust me. Like it was fine. Yeah. Which he's been saying since the beginning. Well, he also was saying like, we're just now undoing the damage that was done. We're also graciously dealing with this. He said very directly, I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden or his motivations. It's like his motivations were you giving the speech. Yeah. That's what he said it over and over again. Like we need to start talking about surveillance. That's why I'm leaving the documents. And I was like, I don't know what motivated him. I'm just giving this speech. Who knows? So he got into it. He made a lot of recommendations, some of which I think we anticipated some of which we didn't. So can you guys kind of just give the high level overview of. Yeah. Should I, I mean, so the, you have the super high level. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the main thing was the bulk telephony metadata, call records, the basically who you're calling stuff that's on your phone bill, how long the call was. I will say that the fact that the president of the United States said metadata and major policy dress today is like one of those moments where it's like, where we took over the world. It's amazing that people know what metadata, everybody knows it. It's incredible. Anyway. So, but yeah, so I mean, that was the main thing. He says, look, the two 15 program that is, was the very first thing that came out is not going to exist in its current form. Maybe they're going to move all that huge quantity of data to some third party. If there's some third party that they trust or they're going to do more judicial oversight when the database is queried. There's like, there's what happens now and what happens later. He has two stages. We have to transition away from this program. No one likes it. But we need the capabilities it gives us, right? Like we need to be able to search metadata for patterns quickly, quickly. So well, in an emergency, in an emergency, right? The whole justification is that we have to be able to do it quickly because this will produce a terrible delay. And if you have a bomb, then you can't call up Verizon. Right. So he said, we're going to keep the existing database, but we're going to make it so that you need a judicial finding to go use it. So like, again, the president of the United States today said query a database. Like if you don't believe that like the internet, that like technology is like completely taken over the world, like this is what we're talking about. Like when the government can query a metadata database, like that's great. See, but that was also, I mean, not that he's like going to go full wonk in like the speech, but it was a little ambiguous because in some ways that's what was already happening, right? Like the official legal justification for the system before was it's not surveillance when we take it and put it into the database because, you know, we're not getting a warrant for that because we don't look at it. We just have it there. And then once we, once, you know, us sort of crossing the Rubicon is when we query the database, which is why we get a warrant for the query that we're doing from the FISA court. Don't think they actually, I'm not actually sure there was a process for it. Well, my understanding was they were like, you just had to have a higher bar, a higher standard of suspicion. Well, no, I think it was sort of like clearly if someone you would say to the judge, you know, clearly if someone's saying kill the president in or, I mean, if they're okay, we know this number is a terrorist. If someone's calling that terrorist, we have a reasonable suspicion too. And so that was. And they've also reduced the number of, so if a terrorist calls you and then you call somebody and they call somebody and then they call you, yeah, they've reduced it. So they're tightening up the way they can use this program. I think the essential part there was that they were always saying metadata wasn't really surveillable information, right? It was just records, business records that were being generated. Which we believe is still not. Right. But they were saying it's business records being generated by Verizon AT&T so they can just collect them and they don't need any warrants. And then to go and then track you specifically, that's when they needed to stop. And now they're saying they're going to tighten that process. And then phase two is we're going to stop collecting this stuff entirely and either we'll figure out how to get the providers to harmonize their systems so we can query them or we'll have somebody else do it. And I would say rightfully, he said, there are challenges with both approaches. Like you don't want, I mean, I don't trust Verizon anymore than I trust the United States government. And I certainly don't trust Blackwater. Right. And who are they going to hire? You're going to hire the healthcare.gov guys to build you a database of phone records? That's awesome. If there is a terrorist attack, you'll be like, well, I can't get through. So yeah, whatever. Have a good time. So that's 215. And that's kind of a big one, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the one that came out first. That's the one where I think he announced the Moswell prison came out. It's the most specific thing. There's a lot of stuff that's sort of high level. We're going to reform everything and generate reports on everything. I mean, I also think it's the one that Obama is focusing on. I think he said in the speech, you know, this is the bulk phone records is the program that has generated the most controversy. I don't think that's true. I think there's lots of other stuff that wasn't really touched on, but that's the centerpiece of his NSA reform. Whether it's the centerpiece of the stuff that we should be reforming is kind of a question that- See, the thing is, it's not just it has generated the most controversy, just not among, you know, people who are talking. It is the thing that Congress has been debating. It's the thing that hearings are on. It's also the program that we actually can do something about. The metadata program. Right. We actually kind of know what it is. Like if we're talking about something like Prism or the giant email database, we don't even know what's in that. We don't know how it's collected. Let's quickly go through the rest of the reforms, then we have some clips from the speech. So national security letters, it seems like they're getting the gag orders that people were really mad about. Yeah. So briefly, okay, national security letters are things that mostly the FBI uses. If you need a specific piece of information, generally from an internet company, you don't have to get a court order. You just send the subpoena and say, you have to give us this data, and you can't tell the person, you can't tell anybody, you can't say that you received it. Right. And this is, you know, Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter have been nonstop complaining about this, right? That they want to release these transparency reports, they want to tell customers what they're doing, and they can't. And now it sounds like- They're getting the transparency. They're going to get a little- They're getting- There are no specifics offered. That's the only thing they're getting, though. The panel was proposing these reforms that were saying you have to tailor the scope of it, make sure you can't just repeat, you know, section 215. You have to create some kind of judicial oversight for actually granting them. They didn't say any of that. Obama pretty much clearly said he's not going to do it. You know, he'll work with Congress. But you have some kind of situation where you will have to, at some point, prove that the thing needs to be secret. And after he's going to talk to the attorney general, and after some point, it's going to expire automatically unless a court renews it. The panel recommended 180 days. It's not necessarily clear that that's what it's going to be. And then they're also going to give them, quote, more information than ever before that they can publish. Google got- That's a low bar. It is, because now that currently Google got permission, I think it might be the only company, maybe there are more now. It can publish in ranges of one through 1000. Yeah. But the transparency reports that you see, there had been like, well, we had seen transparency reports with big black bars over the how many national security letters. And it seems like that at least, they'll have something to put in that column. And then the other stuff is there's the FISA court, which is actually, you know, the institution that's granting the warrants to say, you know, go to Verizon and get all their information. That court is going to see some reform. So we're going to see a new public interest advocate that is going to be the one specifically sort of pleading the public's case and saying, do you really need this information? Is this really important? We're going to see that. And we're also going to see annual declassification reviews on all of these programs. So- Which has already been promised more or less. Yeah. That was the first thing he promised. So I want to go to a clip here. We have it. So what's really interesting is he proposed these reforms, but after what I would describe as a pretty full throated defense of the NSA, right? So this is, there's outrage over the NSA spying. There's outrage over overreach, looking at American citizen stuff. And Obama began, like we were saying, with this stirring defense of surveillance. So we have a little bit here. If we can just go to that. To the contrary, in an extraordinarily difficult job, one in which actions are second guessed, success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic, the men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. They're not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails. When mistakes are made, which is inevitable in any large and complicated human enterprise, they correct those mistakes. Yeah. So here's the thing about that quote. There's been all kinds of revelations that NSA people are like spying on their girlfriends. No, no, that's the thing is that we haven't actually had, we haven't had revelations that have been a lot of people intentionally abusing it. And that Love Int, it was, their thing that they released was for about 10 years. And there were maybe 20 violations, which is bad in like objective terms. In subjective terms, that is very few people. The problem is that they seem, that we have all of these weird unintentional breaches, and that they probably aren't telling us about lots of other stuff. Right. Because we can't point to anything. So our ability to understand what the NSA is doing, and this is the balance. I think this is the, this is the problem that I think we face as we try to figure out what the balance, and Obama very directly called it the balance between security and liberty, which it is, right? Yeah. We do need the NSA to look at things. We do need the CIA to look at things and try to maintain our security. There needs to be a limit on that. And there's no ability for us to have a conversation about that limit, because every time we examine everything that they do, they immediately claim that we're hampering their ability to keep us secure. It's not just that. It's that fundamentally, the fact that they have proven that they cannot be trusted with this means that we can't have a debate, because they can't ever release everything. Like we wouldn't want them to, but that that means that we're always going to have to take them on faith. And now they've proven that they're totally incapable of like accepting that trust. Although, I mean, the way I read that part of the speech was partially that you imagine you're an NSA employee and you're watching this speech. I mean, really like, you know, he's managing this group of people who have just gotten their ass kicked, like every week for the last six months. Everyone hates them. And like, it's just morale. And you see this occasionally, like people come forward and just like, it's rough out there working for the NSA right now. They're just going to work in like a shitty office building every day. It's terrible. I actually looked at jobs at the NSA when I was a college student. And I feel so bad. There was a time, I think, when like, working for these large government, government police institutions was cool. Like James Bond. I just call this that stuff. Yeah, I did languages. You could be the guys in the van in Enemy of State. But I mean, and so I think part of that was, okay, he's going to do these reforms. But he also, you know, a lot of the audience- He's the manager. I mean, that's like real, right? Yeah. A lot of the audience for this was public employees who want to make, you know, who want to feel like they're reassured and he's not mad at them personally. And they're not about to like- It's not just that. You know, be burned with a pitfall. It's also anybody who doesn't agree with him. This is his sort of classic move that he's like, I understand your point of view, Republicans, not purely Republicans. Yeah, the Republicans are like, they're in the back, like they're holding like knives. It's not like, let's do it. It's not spy on everything. It's as you know, we understand- Dick Cheney's like petting a cat in the back of the room. But this other thing. Yes, say my words. No, but it's like, you know, it's like Chuck Schumer petting a cat. It's not even like, it's not even Dick Cheney at this point. It's sort of everyone. Right. And that, I think over and over and over again, especially at the end, he came back to this theme that we're being held to a higher standard. And you get the sense that, you know, he's in the West Wing with like the leadership, or he's in a Situation Room, or he's meeting with the Joint Chiefs. And he's like, and everyone's like, dude, like, why do we have to justify what we're doing? Like Ireland, they just do whatever the hell they want. And he's like, yes. And so we have it. I don't know if we have it quite yet. The Russia-China. He directly called out China and Russia. Do we have it yet? I wrote it down at one point. I think we're going to have it in just a moment. So we'll come back to it. I think part of it is also that it's weird because I think we see this as basically a policy thing. That, you know, if he wants to sort of, if he wants to make some change at the EPA, he can just sign a thing and then it's changed. Whereas, you know, the NSA is to a large extent, not just this abstract entity, it's this group of people. And whoever they choose to run the NSA is going to have to come from a fairly small group of people. And part of what you want is to change the culture of that group of people. And just constantly kicking their ass is of a limited value. You have to sort of say, well, yes, we like you. It's okay. We want to motivate you. We want to raise morale. But we also want to change it in this slow way that's going to gradually change the culture of it. So we have a text. I'll just read this off. Ready? It may seem sometimes in America as being held to a different standard. And that the readiness of some to assume that the worst motives by our government can be frustrating. Now, this hat, who is that frustrating? Right? Like, if you just read that sentence, he's talking to government employees. Like, that is designed to reassure. Like, I know you're frustrated, NSA dudes. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs or Russia to take the privacy concerns of citizens into account. We're better than China. We can go on the Vergecast and say proudly that America is more open and democratic than China. We do not like to kill people with Colonium 210. This is such a strange burn. It's like, right before this, he was talking about how we need to work better with our partners, reassure them. He's like, I won't just spy on the queen. I'll pick up the phone and call her and ask her what she thinks instead of reading her email. And then he's like, but China, we're better than you. And it's just, it's such a strange, the audience for the speech, I can't tell if it was citizens, I can't tell if it was government employees, I can't tell if it was like other spies. Well, I mean, and to a large extent. At one point he said, we're not going to apologize because our systems are better than everybody else's. That was the best quote. USA. I mean, well, which is actually the problem. Another thing that was interesting that we, I was surprised by, and I was surprised by in a positive way, was to a large extent, there was a big section of the speech where he, the audience seemed to be people in foreign countries, like the citizens of other countries that are not otherwise, you know, are we going to just spy on everyone in Norway? And how do the citizens of Norway feel about the American surveillance program? And those, that has not been a big part of the conversation up until now, at least in America. It's been touched on, but it's, yeah, it's been a thing that, especially because all of their justification has been, this only happens to foreign people. Yeah, well, and I mean, exactly. So, so much of it has been shifting the, oh my God, are we surveilling American citizens when we're surveilling some random dude who runs a coffee shop in Norway? But I mean, actually he did, and I thought it was a very positive thing. He said, look, we want buy-in from the citizens of other countries. That like, we, and part of it was America, world police stuff, but he really wanted to make a moral case for America as the surveillance entity of the entire world, that the entire world should feel good about. Right. The problem is that this happened right the day after, was it called Dish Fire? Dish Fire, yeah. Which is... What an incredible, incredible day. You know, you take like 200 million cell phone texts, or yes, texts, and you take out the American stuff and then you store everything else. And then you let the GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency, look for patterns on their citizens' data. Yeah. I mean, what's struck me about this whole speech is that it's premised on the notion that some amount of spying must occur. Right? And you can buy that notion, you cannot buy that notion. I accept like, fine, some amount of spying must occur. I don't know, I accept it both pragmatically and that it probably does have to occur. Yeah, and I think that's interesting, but important. But what I think is actually interesting is that there was a lot of reference to 9-11. We're going to highlight that soon. There was a lot of reference to 9-11. He opened with, you know, after 9-11, we had to change the way we did things. And it was like, or are you sure? Because President Bush was definitely handed a piece of paper called, been modern determined to strike in US. And he was like, yeah, whatever. They're not going to do anything. Right, the entire premise of the Section 215 collection is that you have to identify patterns, that you have to have all this data. And then he references a specific number and a specific case that they already knew about and could have just queried. Right, and a lot of what his justifications for these programs existing came back, I think, to 9-11 over and over and over again, which is crazy because I think he also said, we went too far and we begin walking it back. He said the previous administration began walking it back. And to think of George Bush and Dick Cheney actually ever walking back their Patriot Act proposals and their surveillance proposals, would that mean like if he truly believes that they've been walking back and he's cared for that process, then we are nowhere near close. Because, yeah, I was thinking about this, that we have come pretty much full circle on the Bush administration, which we would like, they did this and we were totally outraged and felt awful about it. And Obama and everyone ran on the premise that this will never, ever happen again. And now we're here, you know, some years later. So that was the other interesting element of it because ostensibly the NSA is not a counter-terrorism organization, right? Like supposedly, and these things are constantly shifting like the border of who's in charge of what, but like ostensibly they investigate, they get signals intelligence when they find something useful, they give it to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or sort of any, I mean, and part of the post 9-11 reforms is that there wasn't primarily a counter-terrorism organization. But the idea that the NSA is primarily concerned with counter-terrorism is, this is the first time we've heard a president make that case. And that it's wildly, like a huge expansion of powers if it's true. And then there were all of these primarily domestic things that he was saying, look, people are trying to bring down our stock exchange with malware. We don't want hackers in your bank account. Well, yeah, but I mean, okay, if someone robs a bank, is that the NSA's problem? I thought we had a whole domestic law enforcement framework for this. I mean, it's very common. Well, he is the head of Cyber Command. Which they're not splitting off. Yeah. I mean, let's just never use that phrase again. I mean, like, the language that we use to describe these, here's what I'm saying. Cyber packet coming to destroy Wall Street. Yeah. I mean, he's like hackers in your bank accounts. Like, I'm the head of cyber, it's like, you know what? It's time for us to just open up and admit that the internet is part of our real lives. And it's not like some other place where other weird behaviors exist. And you can't be like, well, the internet's different, so we have to give it to the NSA, because they understand how information travels on wire. That's what's so strange. We just heard a speech where he was basically saying, look, someone needs to keep the internet safe. That's why we need an NSA. Yeah. Which is insane. That was never, ever. It signals intelligence. They're listening and trying to figure out, I mean, what would securing the internet even mean? And also, by the way, to the extent that the NSA is in charge of defending anything in cyber terms, it's just government infrastructure. Right. Like, there's no, and I mean, we can say that various things are like infrastructure that is important to national security, so the power grid or something. But the idea that they're going to keep Chinese hackers off of my laptop, because they've suddenly decided that, as a Verge reporter, I'm a target of interest, the NSA is not going to do anything for me. And we saw this with The New York Times. We see this any time a third party is attacked. Like, the NSA does not keep the internet safe. That's just insane. OK. Although they've argued this, the cyber packet Wall Street thing is a Keith Alexander, I believe, interview in which he essentially compared it to a missile, saying that it doesn't matter where the missile lands. It is the job of the Department of Defense to stop it. Right. Yeah, but I mean, what if it's like a hosting server, like Facebook's Icelandic hosting server? I don't know. It's just odd. It is odd. I don't think they have the capabilities for that. We had the CISPA fight last year, and that's what this was all about. This is what this is, is CISPA. Yeah, like that's the meeting between these two. OK, so we actually have it. It's only a little bit. We actually have a super cut of all of his 9-11 references. Oh, god. It's only 10 seconds long. But I mean, it was. He didn't actually mention it as much as I expected him to. I didn't expect him to mention it at all. Because I was in college. I just have a distinct memory of where I was on 9-11. It is a meaningful memory to me. But it is so disconnected from the NSA reading my email that I. I'm not disconnected enough for it to be the opening line of the decision that struck down. And that's where we're at. Anyway, so let's take a look at this. There is September 11 after 9-11 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 after 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11. Yeah, I mean, it's ridiculous. It's eight references in like over an hour or just under an hour. And to me, that is I'm not ready to just. I went through that, right? Like I voted against George Bush and like I didn't want there to be a war in Iraq. And I remember very clearly what my politics were because I knew that saying 9-11 would let people get away with bad things over and over and over again. And it's to me, that's like it. I've landed at every time our government says 9-11 and we have to do something crazy because of 9-11. It's like, well, the terrorists won. And that's like the legacy of 9-11 to me. So to ignore what I think are really, really clear civil liberties issues and really, really clear like the NSA was never designed to police the entire internet issues because something bad happened a decade ago is crazy to me. I think part of it is just, I mean, it was a very historical speech, right? He was from the Paul Revere stuff on. And I think, for better or worse, this defined our public policy for this whole decade. And I mean, it's impossible to talk about the changing nature of our national security infrastructure without saying, we were kind of just doing whatever we wanted for a while there and like all of the- Well, these rules were all put in place because of it. Yeah. And now we have to, we can't just time machine back. We have to somehow, it's going to be a revision of the Patriot Act. It's going to be a revision of the FISA Act. It has to, you just have to keep going. And this stuff is permanently written in history now. As it should be. But to justify its existence or to justify not walking it back to where it should be or could be because something bad happened, because there's this looming specter of terror has all, I mean, for me anyway, for a decade has been the mistake. Yeah. That we, yeah, there are bad guys out there. We should stop them. Obama killed bin Laden. Good job, Barry. Well, I think that's very relevant to this whole thing. I mean, I think because we saw when he came in, I mean, he was, and this was a while ago that everyone was disillusioned by this, but I mean, he was much more hawkish on all of this stuff than anyone expected. And I think a lot of it has to do with he just really wanted to kill bin Laden. It was clearly like going to be a political win and something that- But also like the national security went like, great, that's all there. But this continued reference, particularly in this speech where it's, we're worried that you're sweeping up American citizens' emails and text messages and you do have love where NSA guys are like, what's my girlfriend doing? And like pushing a button and they can just get it without any oversight, without anyone looking over their shoulder and being like, that's illegal. That's like, you don't need that to stop bin Laden again. You just don't. We have to stop pretending that that's the necessary evil of keeping us safe. So we have some slides, I believe, of the four particular, he ended with, I'm making very, you know- Oh yeah, he's got specific changes. Very specific changes. Let him be clear. He made precisely two specific changes during that. Well, he said four, so we've got slides of the first. This is crazy. First, this is first, the same technological advances that allow US intelligence agencies to pinpoint an Al Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sahel also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach. At a time when more and more of our lives are digital, that prospect is disquieting for all of us. So he said, that there is he was changing how we collect the information. Right? So you guys, I gave you the task of grading his initiatives. Where does that one fall? How do you, I think that was, yeah, I mean- The metadata base? That's the presidential directive for signals intelligence. The email stuff, we had a big section on email collection and there wasn't really a lot, like, you can see it on the site right now. I mean, we have locked down the NSA email database and we have two Bs and a D. And those Bs are because, honestly, because a lot of what we were grading is how does this match up to the proposals? Like not to even our ideal version of this, because that would be ridiculous and they would all be Fs. Oh yeah. But they didn't, they basically just said, reassure them that we're using this for good. I mean, that's- Which is kind of- I feel reassured. I mean, so we have the presidential directive. If you're watching this on our site right now, there's a big link to it right above the live stream. You can go look at it. It's, I would say, tremendously boring, but you can go look at it. It's a lot of like principle. And the first one is like, I'm issuing an order that signals intelligence must be conducted in accordance with the constitution. It's like, yeah, what was happening before? Like, do you have to occasionally remind the NSA that the constitution applies to them? So that was one. Do we have the second slide? So the second one, and we'll get this one, is we're going to reform the programs for more transparency and increase safeguards for US persons, which was my favorite phrase. So this is all preamble here. But the actual one was we need more transparency. And this is where Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft can all tell people about what's happening to them. It is going to be very interesting to see what they're allowed to say. They were basically, all of their transparency reports thus far have been like, and there are a number of things we cannot say. Well, Apple did an interesting dead man's switch in which it said we have not received any 215 orders. But the problem with all of these is that they've consistently denied that any of the huge amount of stuff that is supposedly in databases is from them. So it may well be moot because we're also hearing about the NSA tapping into data links. So it doesn't matter how many orders they've received if they're also just getting everything from links. Well, and the other thing, I mean, one of the interesting elements of it is how the we were talking in the beginning about the focus on phone records, right? And I think part of it is you don't really see anything in this speech that addresses stuff like breaking into the Yahoo and Google networks, prism. A lot of that stuff is just, it's focusing on the phones. And so my pet little paranoid theory is if you have to give something up, you give up the least useful tool. And it seems plausible. And they have many times said that section of 702 is infinitely more useful. They didn't say infinite, but much more useful than section 215, which they, I think, can only pinpoint one case that it helped, and it was a terrorist funding case. And they've said that most of the things that they said initially, the 54 plots, were stopped by 702. Well, I mean, if you remember when the prism first broke, the controversy was not about metadata or phone collection. It was about direct access to networks, right? Direct access to Google, Yahoo, Apple. It was about whether they're hacking into the backbone connection and getting it that way, or the companies are helping them. As far as you can tell, none of that was addressed during the speech. Yeah. No, I don't think. At all. That's the thing that makes me wonder how much we actually feasibly can do, because this is basically how much should the NSA try to break everything, which is their explicit directive. Slightly less breaking. I mean, I think part of the weird thing, to me, it's interesting as a media story that people are, broadly speaking, calling each other on the phone less and texting, sending email, right? So now if we need to roll back this massive surveillance apparatus, we're going to do the sort of thing that's tailing off. We're going to say, okay, less phone records, less phone calls. We'll just keep a huge, we're going to keep our surveillance tools on email. Texting maybe falls into the metadata. It's sort of unclear. I think digital communications of the kind, if the most shocking revelation to you was that the NSA can read your email, which for me it was, then this doesn't really do a lot. I mean, it's funny because when you describe it like that, it's like this is exactly how the phone companies are treating you. They're like, well, we're just going to cap you at unlimited voice because you're not using it anymore. So you definitely have to pay 10 bucks a month for that because you're not using that anymore and we'll just meter you for all the other stuff. And it's the same thing. We're not using the phones. We're not making. So if you're a bad guy, what you've learned today is don't make a phone call. Which they already knew. Right. It's like do something else. We've also already known use Tor because they have not cracked that yet. Right. Okay, so we have one last clip we should wrap up. I think you guys have, I want to see the last clip here and then I want to, you guys have been grading it so I want to get some overall grades from you. So let's run this last clip here. This is Obama talking about the internet and how it's both wonderful and a reason for the government to watch every movie. When you cut through the noise, what's really at stake is how we remain true to who we are in a world that is remaking itself at dizzying speed. Whether it's the ability of individuals to communicate ideas, to access information that would have once filled every great library in every country in the world, or to forge bonds with people on the other sides of the globe, technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order. So while the reforms that I've announced will point us in a new direction, I am mindful that more work will be needed in the future. One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger. And I also know that in this time of change, the United States of America will have to lead. It may seem sometimes that America is being held to a different standard. And I'll admit, the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs, or Russia to take privacy concerns of citizens in other places into account. But let's remember, we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity. As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control. Having faced down the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and communism, the world expects us to stand up for the principle that every person has the right to think and write and form relationships freely. Because individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress. When you cut through the noise. So that line, individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress, I think that is, to me, it's the key. You know, he said every person has the, every person has the right to think and write and form relationships. And that's great. And, you know, in real life, the government can't really watch you do that, right? I mean, they're not here with us right now. I mean, presumably some of the NSA is watching this. Well, presumably they can also hijack your laptop and then activate the mic. Right. But saying like, what's interesting is that when you start doing that stuff online, the government can immediately in real time monitor every single thing that you do. And they have the ability to do that. And that's what all of the Snowden leaks have been pointing at, is that we're only constrained by where we say with our words and like our laws, you have to stop there. And what we haven't done a good job of saying is what are you doing? Like, what is it that you're doing and where should you stop? And this is like, I think a first step. It's please stop looking at our phones, which is great. It is not the first step towards please stop, you know, scouring our email. Please stop, you know, jacking directly in the backbone to look at encrypted iMessage or whatever the hell you're trying to do. Yeah. Because we don't know. We don't actually know the full extent of what they're doing and why they're doing it. Then all these justifications for we have to do it because of terrorists. And these are actually good people at the NSA who are doing a good job. And they're patriots too. And we're frustrated. Break your laptop. This laptop is already so broken. I mean, the NSA has been so deep in this laptop already and not even worried about it. And that to me, that's the whole issue is we don't, I still don't know enough about what the government is doing. I still don't know enough about where they think the real limits should be. And I haven't heard enough of that debate. And I think, you know, I've got my issues with Greenwald and with Snowden. And I think they made it a lot about themselves and said a lot about what's happening. And that's fine. But he's a hero now. I think that's great. He's a symbol. But he's accomplished only half of what he set out to do. He got the president to make a speech about one thing. We haven't yet had a real conversation about the whole totality of what's out there. And you were saying right before we started, there are undoubtedly more leaks to come. Oh yeah. And that, how we react to the next set of leaks. You know, if Greenwald's smart, I think he's smart. I think he's very savvy. He's holding on to something big just to respond to a speech like this. And so I'm very curious to see what that next step is like. But so let's end real quick. You guys were grading the speech in terms of proposed reforms, real reforms, what he said. Let's do some overalls. Where do you think Obama landed? I'm going to go C. I think he gets a C. And he started talking about it. That's like a good strong point. I think the phone stuff is a good first step. But I haven't heard enough. So that's a C for me. Yeah, I think it's weird. So the big story of this to me was we're putting a lot more power in the judiciary. Like there's a lot more court based oversight. There's not a lot of congressional oversight. There's not a lot of other parts of the executive oversight, which is potentially interesting, but also there was already judicial oversight. And so in many ways there's a lot of stuff that hasn't... We're using a lot of tools that have already not really worked. So I think C minus, yeah, I'm a little bit lower. Okay. Addie? To some extent it feels a little bit pointless to grade this because what we are doing is grading rhetoric. And that so much of the rhetoric is essentially we will create more oversight. It is we will reaffirm our principles. It's things that they should be doing anyways and that they have been promising since I suppose it's almost going on eight months now. Maybe more, maybe less. But the problem is that every time we do this we talk about, okay, this is the thing that we've changed and we did a report card, which is useful. And I would maybe also go with CC minus, but it's that is this going to actually lead to anything meaningful? And we'll never know if it does. Right. Well, unless you work for the NSA. Yes. It's time to get that job. Yeah. They're still talking. I would ask. I'm sure they will hire you. I would ask all of our readers to immediately begin applying for jobs at the NSA and then leaking that information to us, which I believe is treason. And I will be talking to an agent of the government soon. And that was The Verge Live, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. We're going to have lots more, I'll say this, we're going to have lots more NSA coverage coming up. These two are maniacs. You should hear them argue when the cameras are off. It's terrifying, to be honest with you. So we'll have lots more on the NSA coming up probably later today. There's some news just from the speech we need to do some more analysis of. And obviously as the story is ongoing, we'll have more. So thanks for tuning in. We'll see you here on The Verge Live.
 Hey everybody, welcome to The Verge Live. I'm Yael Abatel. I'm joined by Russell Brandon
 and Addie Robertson. You're watching us right after President Obama gave a speech on NSA
 reform that I would categorize as very, very strange in a variety of ways.
 At the dawn of a republic.
 Yeah, no, it's weird. He was like, you know, basically America was built on surveillance.
 The nature of our country is that we're always watching. That's what it's always been.
 We've been spying on the Queen since this whole thing began.
 If you don't like the NSA, what do you think about Paul Revere?
 Yeah, Paul Revere is the original bulk collection.
 Like it's amazing. I expected them to name check, you know, obviously 9-11,
 but I was not really expecting Paul Revere. I wasn't expecting like Martin Luther King.
 And yeah, Martin Luther King.
 This is what I say when I'm drunk and I'm yelling at people about why the NSA is bad. I'm like,
 look, you know, our greatest Americans were surveilled as state enemies. And like now
 the president's saying that as he's talking about, well, we're not going to change everything. I know
 you're mad, but remember that like, you know, some of the most important people of my lifetime
 were, you know, the state was trying to destroy them through these very tools. And so we're just
 going to make the tools a little bit weaker.
 But add more of that.
 Yeah, exactly. Like more weaker tools instead of fewer strong tools.
 Well, that's because we have to spy on states like the Soviet bloc so that they will not spy
 on their citizens.
 So let's start at the top here. So this speech has been, it's been over a week or so that,
 you know, it's been leaked that he's going to be giving the speech. There was a presidential
 directive about what the intelligence community can and can't do with signals intelligence that
 came out earlier today. And we were expecting a number of things to happen.
 Well, we were not expecting a number of things to happen.
 A number of things could have happened.
 A number of things could have happened. We were expecting maybe none of them to happen.
 It's true. I mean, like, and so Obama, he came out and he just started. He started with this
 history lesson. He was in total law professor mode. He referred to the people within the United
 States as US persons a number of times, which just thinking of candidate Obama just walking
 in the campaign trail, I love meeting US persons. Let me kiss this US person, baby.
 That is strange. He's full legal professor mode, talking about the justifications for
 spying, for surveillance, for intelligence, all of which I think are known. I don't think anybody
 really disputes the need for like the police and for intelligence in the world.
 The problem is the significant overreach that that intelligence community has been.
 But it's not just overreach. He actually did make a really good point that the problem is now
 everything we do is surveillable.
 Right. Well, he made that at the very end, but in like a stirring,
 a full throat defense of the internet. He's like, and the internet has provided us with
 so many ways to communicate, a way for people to reach to other people across the globe and for
 the police to watch that interaction. And it was like, you're conflating a lot of things here.
 It isn't that the policies have changed although they have, it's that everything else around them
 has changed. Yeah. So they fall under the policies.
 Like somebody made a really good sort of comparison to copyright on Twitter
 that we're just dealing with completely. No, like now we have to deal with it.
 Like things don't mean the same thing anymore. They're not the same anymore.
 Right. And so he started with this and he did start with, you know, Martin Luther King was
 surveilled caught, you know, during the, with a long twilight of the cold war, we learned.
 And it's like, yeah. You mean when McCarthy rounded up like American citizens for witch hunts,
 like, yes, we learned a lot of bad lessons. Like why are we learning them again?
 And then he began sort of his kind of, he got into the meat, the heart of the matter, which was
 there have been lots of leaks. He sounded very angry about the leaks.
 Well, and he was like, we were, you know, we were looking at it.
 Yeah. But then unfortunately,
 now everyone's mad because of the leaks. So we have to do it now. But like, I was on it.
 Trust me. Like it was fine. Yeah. Which he's been saying since the beginning. Well,
 he also was saying like, we're just now undoing the damage that was done.
 We're also graciously dealing with this. He said very directly, I'm not going to dwell on
 Mr. Snowden or his motivations. It's like his motivations were you giving the speech.
 Yeah. That's what he said it over and over again. Like we need to start talking about
 surveillance. That's why I'm leaving the documents. And I was like, I don't know what motivated him.
 I'm just giving this speech. Who knows? So he got into it. He made a lot of recommendations,
 some of which I think we anticipated some of which we didn't. So can you guys kind of just
 give the high level overview of. Yeah. Should I, I mean, so the, you have the super high level.
 Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the main thing was the bulk telephony metadata, call records,
 the basically who you're calling stuff that's on your phone bill, how long the call was.
 I will say that the fact that the president of the United States said metadata and major
 policy dress today is like one of those moments where it's like, where we took over the world.
 It's amazing that people know what metadata, everybody knows it. It's incredible. Anyway.
 So, but yeah, so I mean, that was the main thing. He says, look, the two 15 program that
 is, was the very first thing that came out is not going to exist in its current form. Maybe
 they're going to move all that huge quantity of data to some third party. If there's some third
 party that they trust or they're going to do more judicial oversight when the database is queried.
 There's like, there's what happens now and what happens later. He has two stages. We have to
 transition away from this program. No one likes it. But we need the capabilities it gives us,
 right? Like we need to be able to search metadata for patterns quickly, quickly. So
 well, in an emergency, in an emergency, right? The whole justification is that we have to be
 able to do it quickly because this will produce a terrible delay. And if you have a bomb, then you
 can't call up Verizon. Right. So he said, we're going to keep the existing database, but we're
 going to make it so that you need a judicial finding to go use it. So like, again, the president
 of the United States today said query a database. Like if you don't believe that like the internet,
 that like technology is like completely taken over the world, like this is what we're talking
 about. Like when the government can query a metadata database, like that's great.
 See, but that was also, I mean, not that he's like going to go full wonk in like the speech,
 but it was a little ambiguous because in some ways that's what was already happening, right? Like the
 official legal justification for the system before was it's not surveillance when we take it and put
 it into the database because, you know, we're not getting a warrant for that because we don't look
 at it. We just have it there. And then once we, once, you know, us sort of crossing the Rubicon
 is when we query the database, which is why we get a warrant for the query that we're doing from
 the FISA court. Don't think they actually, I'm not actually sure there was a process for it.
 Well, my understanding was they were like, you just had to have a higher bar, a higher standard
 of suspicion. Well, no, I think it was sort of like clearly if someone you would say to the judge,
 you know, clearly if someone's saying kill the president in or, I mean, if they're okay,
 we know this number is a terrorist. If someone's calling that terrorist, we have a reasonable
 suspicion too. And so that was. And they've also reduced the number of, so if a terrorist calls
 you and then you call somebody and they call somebody and then they call you, yeah, they've
 reduced it. So they're tightening up the way they can use this program. I think the essential part
 there was that they were always saying metadata wasn't really surveillable information, right?
 It was just records, business records that were being generated. Which we believe is still not.
 Right. But they were saying it's business records being generated by Verizon AT&T so they can just
 collect them and they don't need any warrants. And then to go and then track you specifically,
 that's when they needed to stop. And now they're saying they're going to tighten that process.
 And then phase two is we're going to stop collecting this stuff entirely and either we'll
 figure out how to get the providers to harmonize their systems so we can query them or we'll have
 somebody else do it. And I would say rightfully, he said, there are challenges with both approaches.
 Like you don't want, I mean, I don't trust Verizon anymore than I trust the United States government.
 And I certainly don't trust Blackwater.
 Right. And who are they going to hire? You're going to hire the healthcare.gov
 guys to build you a database of phone records? That's awesome. If there is a terrorist attack,
 you'll be like, well, I can't get through. So yeah, whatever. Have a good time. So that's 215.
 And that's kind of a big one, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the one that came out first.
 That's the one where I think he announced the Moswell prison came out.
 It's the most specific thing. There's a lot of stuff that's sort of high level.
 We're going to reform everything and generate reports on everything.
 I mean, I also think it's the one that Obama is focusing on. I think he said in the speech,
 you know, this is the bulk phone records is the program that has generated the most controversy.
 I don't think that's true. I think there's lots of other stuff that wasn't really touched on,
 but that's the centerpiece of his NSA reform. Whether it's the centerpiece of the stuff that
 we should be reforming is kind of a question that-
 See, the thing is, it's not just it has generated the most controversy, just not among, you know,
 people who are talking. It is the thing that Congress has been debating. It's the thing that
 hearings are on. It's also the program that we actually can do something about.
 The metadata program.
 Right. We actually kind of know what it is. Like if we're talking about something like Prism or the
 giant email database, we don't even know what's in that. We don't know how it's collected.
 Let's quickly go through the rest of the reforms, then we have some clips from the speech.
 So national security letters, it seems like they're getting the gag orders that people were
 really mad about.
 Yeah. So briefly, okay, national security letters are things that mostly the FBI uses. If you need
 a specific piece of information, generally from an internet company, you don't have to get a
 court order. You just send the subpoena and say, you have to give us this data, and you can't tell
 the person, you can't tell anybody, you can't say that you received it.
 Right. And this is, you know, Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter have been
 nonstop complaining about this, right? That they want to release these transparency reports,
 they want to tell customers what they're doing, and they can't. And now it sounds like-
 They're getting the transparency.
 They're going to get a little-
 They're getting-
 There are no specifics offered.
 That's the only thing they're getting, though. The panel was proposing these reforms that were
 saying you have to tailor the scope of it, make sure you can't just repeat, you know,
 section 215. You have to create some kind of judicial oversight for actually granting them.
 They didn't say any of that. Obama pretty much clearly said he's not going to do it.
 You know, he'll work with Congress. But you have some kind of situation where you will have to,
 at some point, prove that the thing needs to be secret. And after he's going to talk to the
 attorney general, and after some point, it's going to expire automatically unless a court renews it.
 The panel recommended 180 days. It's not necessarily clear that that's what it's going to be.
 And then they're also going to give them, quote,
 more information than ever before that they can publish. Google got-
 That's a low bar.
 It is, because now that currently Google got permission, I think it might be the only company,
 maybe there are more now. It can publish in ranges of one through 1000.
 Yeah. But the transparency reports that you see, there had been like,
 well, we had seen transparency reports with big black bars over the how many national security
 letters. And it seems like that at least, they'll have something to put in that column.
 And then the other stuff is there's the FISA court, which is actually,
 you know, the institution that's granting the warrants to say, you know, go to Verizon and get
 all their information. That court is going to see some reform. So we're going to see
 a new public interest advocate that is going to be the one specifically sort of pleading
 the public's case and saying, do you really need this information? Is this really important?
 We're going to see that. And we're also going to see annual declassification reviews on
 all of these programs.
 So-
 Which has already been promised more or less.
 Yeah.
 That was the first thing he promised.
 So I want to go to a clip here. We have it.
 So what's really interesting is he proposed these reforms, but after what I would describe as
 a pretty full throated defense of the NSA, right? So this is, there's outrage over the NSA spying.
 There's outrage over overreach, looking at American citizen stuff. And Obama began,
 like we were saying, with this stirring defense of surveillance. So we have a little bit here.
 If we can just go to that.
 To the contrary, in an extraordinarily difficult job, one in which actions are second guessed,
 success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic, the men and women of the
 intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to
 protect the privacy of ordinary people. They're not abusing authorities in order to listen to
 your private phone calls or read your emails. When mistakes are made, which is inevitable in
 any large and complicated human enterprise, they correct those mistakes.
 Yeah. So here's the thing about that quote. There's been all kinds of revelations that
 NSA people are like spying on their girlfriends.
 No, no, that's the thing is that we haven't actually had, we haven't had revelations that
 have been a lot of people intentionally abusing it. And that Love Int, it was,
 their thing that they released was for about 10 years. And there were maybe 20 violations,
 which is bad in like objective terms. In subjective terms, that is very few people.
 The problem is that they seem, that we have all of these weird unintentional breaches,
 and that they probably aren't telling us about lots of other stuff.
 Right.
 Because we can't point to anything.
 So our ability to understand what the NSA is doing, and this is the balance. I think this is
 the, this is the problem that I think we face as we try to figure out what the balance, and Obama
 very directly called it the balance between security and liberty, which it is, right?
 Yeah.
 We do need the NSA to look at things. We do need the CIA to look at things and try to maintain
 our security. There needs to be a limit on that. And there's no ability for us to have
 a conversation about that limit, because every time we examine everything that they do, they
 immediately claim that we're hampering their ability to keep us secure.
 It's not just that. It's that fundamentally, the fact that they have proven that they cannot
 be trusted with this means that we can't have a debate, because they can't ever release everything.
 Like we wouldn't want them to, but that that means that we're always going to have to take
 them on faith. And now they've proven that they're totally incapable of like accepting that trust.
 Although, I mean, the way I read that part of the speech was partially that
 you imagine you're an NSA employee and you're watching this speech. I mean,
 really like, you know, he's managing this group of people who have just gotten their ass kicked,
 like every week for the last six months. Everyone hates them. And like, it's just morale.
 And you see this occasionally, like people come forward and just like,
 it's rough out there working for the NSA right now. They're just going to work in like a shitty
 office building every day. It's terrible. I actually looked at jobs at the NSA when
 I was a college student. And I feel so bad. There was a time, I think, when like,
 working for these large government, government police institutions was cool.
 Like James Bond. I just call this that stuff. Yeah, I did languages.
 You could be the guys in the van in Enemy of State. But I mean, and so I think part of that
 was, okay, he's going to do these reforms. But he also, you know, a lot of the audience-
 He's the manager. I mean, that's like real, right?
 Yeah. A lot of the audience for this was public employees who want to make, you know,
 who want to feel like they're reassured and he's not mad at them personally. And they're not about
 to like- It's not just that.
 You know, be burned with a pitfall. It's also anybody who doesn't agree with him.
 This is his sort of classic move that he's like, I understand your point of view,
 Republicans, not purely Republicans.
 Yeah, the Republicans are like, they're in the back, like they're holding like knives.
 It's not like, let's do it. It's not spy on everything.
 It's as you know, we understand-
 Dick Cheney's like petting a cat in the back of the room.
 But this other thing.
 Yes, say my words.
 No, but it's like, you know, it's like Chuck Schumer petting a cat. It's not even like,
 it's not even Dick Cheney at this point. It's sort of everyone.
 Right. And that, I think over and over and over again, especially at the end,
 he came back to this theme that we're being held to a higher standard.
 And you get the sense that, you know, he's in the West Wing with like the leadership,
 or he's in a Situation Room, or he's meeting with the Joint Chiefs.
 And he's like, and everyone's like, dude, like, why do we have to justify what we're doing?
 Like Ireland, they just do whatever the hell they want.
 And he's like, yes. And so we have it. I don't know if we have it quite yet.
 The Russia-China.
 He directly called out China and Russia. Do we have it yet?
 I wrote it down at one point.
 I think we're going to have it in just a moment. So we'll come back to it.
 I think part of it is also that it's weird because I think we see this as basically a policy thing.
 That, you know, if he wants to sort of, if he wants to make some change at the EPA,
 he can just sign a thing and then it's changed.
 Whereas, you know, the NSA is to a large extent, not just this abstract entity,
 it's this group of people. And whoever they choose to run the NSA
 is going to have to come from a fairly small group of people.
 And part of what you want is to change the culture of that group of people.
 And just constantly kicking their ass is of a limited value.
 You have to sort of say, well, yes, we like you. It's okay. We want to motivate you.
 We want to raise morale. But we also want to change it in this slow way
 that's going to gradually change the culture of it.
 So we have a text. I'll just read this off. Ready?
 It may seem sometimes in America as being held to a different standard.
 And that the readiness of some to assume that the worst motives by our government
 can be frustrating. Now, this hat, who is that frustrating?
 Right? Like, if you just read that sentence, he's talking to government employees.
 Like, that is designed to reassure. Like, I know you're frustrated, NSA dudes.
 No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs
 or Russia to take the privacy concerns of citizens into account.
 We're better than China. We can go on the Vergecast and say proudly
 that America is more open and democratic than China.
 We do not like to kill people with Colonium 210.
 This is such a strange burn. It's like, right before this, he was talking about
 how we need to work better with our partners, reassure them.
 He's like, I won't just spy on the queen. I'll pick up the phone and call her
 and ask her what she thinks instead of reading her email.
 And then he's like, but China, we're better than you.
 And it's just, it's such a strange, the audience for the speech,
 I can't tell if it was citizens, I can't tell if it was government employees,
 I can't tell if it was like other spies.
 Well, I mean, and to a large extent.
 At one point he said, we're not going to apologize
 because our systems are better than everybody else's.
 That was the best quote.
 USA.
 I mean, well, which is actually the problem.
 Another thing that was interesting that we, I was surprised by,
 and I was surprised by in a positive way, was to a large extent,
 there was a big section of the speech where he, the audience seemed to be
 people in foreign countries, like the citizens of other countries
 that are not otherwise, you know, are we going to just spy on everyone in Norway?
 And how do the citizens of Norway feel about the American surveillance program?
 And those, that has not been a big part of the conversation up until now,
 at least in America.
 It's been touched on, but it's, yeah, it's been a thing that,
 especially because all of their justification has been,
 this only happens to foreign people.
 Yeah, well, and I mean, exactly.
 So, so much of it has been shifting the, oh my God,
 are we surveilling American citizens when we're surveilling some random dude
 who runs a coffee shop in Norway?
 But I mean, actually he did, and I thought it was a very positive thing.
 He said, look, we want buy-in from the citizens of other countries.
 That like, we, and part of it was America, world police stuff,
 but he really wanted to make a moral case for America
 as the surveillance entity of the entire world,
 that the entire world should feel good about.
 Right.
 The problem is that this happened right the day after,
 was it called Dish Fire?
 Dish Fire, yeah.
 Which is...
 What an incredible, incredible day.
 You know, you take like 200 million cell phone texts,
 or yes, texts, and you take out the American stuff
 and then you store everything else.
 And then you let the GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency,
 look for patterns on their citizens' data.
 Yeah.
 I mean, what's struck me about this whole speech is that
 it's premised on the notion that some amount of spying must occur.
 Right?
 And you can buy that notion, you cannot buy that notion.
 I accept like, fine, some amount of spying must occur.
 I don't know, I accept it both pragmatically
 and that it probably does have to occur.
 Yeah, and I think that's interesting, but important.
 But what I think is actually interesting is that
 there was a lot of reference to 9-11.
 We're going to highlight that soon.
 There was a lot of reference to 9-11.
 He opened with, you know, after 9-11,
 we had to change the way we did things.
 And it was like, or are you sure?
 Because President Bush was definitely handed a piece of paper
 called, been modern determined to strike in US.
 And he was like, yeah, whatever.
 They're not going to do anything.
 Right, the entire premise of the Section 215 collection
 is that you have to identify patterns,
 that you have to have all this data.
 And then he references a specific number and a specific case
 that they already knew about and could have just queried.
 Right, and a lot of what his justifications for these programs existing
 came back, I think, to 9-11 over and over and over again,
 which is crazy because I think he also said,
 we went too far and we begin walking it back.
 He said the previous administration began walking it back.
 And to think of George Bush and Dick Cheney
 actually ever walking back their Patriot Act proposals
 and their surveillance proposals,
 would that mean like if he truly believes that they've been walking back
 and he's cared for that process, then we are nowhere near close.
 Because, yeah, I was thinking about this,
 that we have come pretty much full circle on the Bush administration,
 which we would like, they did this and we were totally outraged
 and felt awful about it.
 And Obama and everyone ran on the premise
 that this will never, ever happen again.
 And now we're here, you know, some years later.
 So that was the other interesting element of it
 because ostensibly the NSA is not a counter-terrorism organization, right?
 Like supposedly, and these things are constantly shifting
 like the border of who's in charge of what,
 but like ostensibly they investigate, they get signals intelligence
 when they find something useful, they give it to the FBI
 or the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or sort of any,
 I mean, and part of the post 9-11 reforms is that there wasn't
 primarily a counter-terrorism organization.
 But the idea that the NSA is primarily concerned with counter-terrorism is,
 this is the first time we've heard a president make that case.
 And that it's wildly, like a huge expansion of powers if it's true.
 And then there were all of these primarily domestic things
 that he was saying, look, people are trying to bring down
 our stock exchange with malware.
 We don't want hackers in your bank account.
 Well, yeah, but I mean, okay, if someone robs a bank,
 is that the NSA's problem?
 I thought we had a whole domestic law enforcement framework
 for this. I mean, it's very common.
 Well, he is the head of Cyber Command.
 Which they're not splitting off.
 Yeah.
 I mean, let's just never use that phrase again.
 I mean, like, the language that we use to describe these,
 here's what I'm saying.
 Cyber packet coming to destroy Wall Street.
 Yeah. I mean, he's like hackers in your bank accounts.
 Like, I'm the head of cyber, it's like, you know what?
 It's time for us to just open up and admit that the internet
 is part of our real lives.
 And it's not like some other place where other weird behaviors exist.
 And you can't be like, well, the internet's different,
 so we have to give it to the NSA,
 because they understand how information travels on wire.
 That's what's so strange.
 We just heard a speech where he was basically saying,
 look, someone needs to keep the internet safe.
 That's why we need an NSA.
 Yeah.
 Which is insane.
 That was never, ever.
 It signals intelligence.
 They're listening and trying to figure out, I mean,
 what would securing the internet even mean?
 And also, by the way, to the extent that the NSA is in charge
 of defending anything in cyber terms,
 it's just government infrastructure.
 Right.
 Like, there's no, and I mean, we can say that various things
 are like infrastructure that is important to national security,
 so the power grid or something.
 But the idea that they're going to keep Chinese hackers
 off of my laptop, because they've suddenly decided that,
 as a Verge reporter, I'm a target of interest,
 the NSA is not going to do anything for me.
 And we saw this with The New York Times.
 We see this any time a third party is attacked.
 Like, the NSA does not keep the internet safe.
 That's just insane.
 OK.
 Although they've argued this, the cyber packet Wall Street thing
 is a Keith Alexander, I believe, interview in which he
 essentially compared it to a missile,
 saying that it doesn't matter where the missile lands.
 It is the job of the Department of Defense to stop it.
 Right.
 Yeah, but I mean, what if it's like a hosting server,
 like Facebook's Icelandic hosting server?
 I don't know.
 It's just odd.
 It is odd.
 I don't think they have the capabilities for that.
 We had the CISPA fight last year,
 and that's what this was all about.
 This is what this is, is CISPA.
 Yeah, like that's the meeting between these two.
 OK, so we actually have it.
 It's only a little bit.
 We actually have a super cut of all of his 9-11 references.
 Oh, god.
 It's only 10 seconds long.
 But I mean, it was.
 He didn't actually mention it as much as I expected him to.
 I didn't expect him to mention it at all.
 Because I was in college.
 I just have a distinct memory of where I was on 9-11.
 It is a meaningful memory to me.
 But it is so disconnected from the NSA reading my email that I.
 I'm not disconnected enough for it to be the opening line of the decision that struck down.
 And that's where we're at.
 Anyway, so let's take a look at this.
 There is September 11 after 9-11 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 after 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11,
 9-11, 9-11.
 Yeah, I mean, it's ridiculous.
 It's eight references in like over an hour or just under an hour.
 And to me, that is I'm not ready to just.
 I went through that, right?
 Like I voted against George Bush and like I didn't want there to be a war in Iraq.
 And I remember very clearly what my politics were because I knew that saying 9-11 would
 let people get away with bad things over and over and over again.
 And it's to me, that's like it.
 I've landed at every time our government says 9-11 and we have to do something crazy
 because of 9-11.
 It's like, well, the terrorists won.
 And that's like the legacy of 9-11 to me.
 So to ignore what I think are really, really clear civil liberties issues and really, really
 clear like the NSA was never designed to police the entire internet issues because something
 bad happened a decade ago is crazy to me.
 I think part of it is just, I mean, it was a very historical speech, right?
 He was from the Paul Revere stuff on.
 And I think, for better or worse, this defined our public policy for this whole decade.
 And I mean, it's impossible to talk about the changing nature of our national security
 infrastructure without saying, we were kind of just doing whatever we wanted for a while
 there and like all of the-
 Well, these rules were all put in place because of it.
 Yeah.
 And now we have to, we can't just time machine back.
 We have to somehow, it's going to be a revision of the Patriot Act.
 It's going to be a revision of the FISA Act.
 It has to, you just have to keep going.
 And this stuff is permanently written in history now.
 As it should be.
 But to justify its existence or to justify not walking it back to where it should be
 or could be because something bad happened, because there's this looming specter of terror
 has all, I mean, for me anyway, for a decade has been the mistake.
 Yeah.
 That we, yeah, there are bad guys out there.
 We should stop them.
 Obama killed bin Laden.
 Good job, Barry.
 Well, I think that's very relevant to this whole thing.
 I mean, I think because we saw when he came in, I mean, he was, and this was a while ago
 that everyone was disillusioned by this, but I mean, he was much more hawkish on all of
 this stuff than anyone expected.
 And I think a lot of it has to do with he just really wanted to kill bin Laden.
 It was clearly like going to be a political win and something that-
 But also like the national security went like, great, that's all there.
 But this continued reference, particularly in this speech where it's, we're worried
 that you're sweeping up American citizens' emails and text messages and you do have
 love where NSA guys are like, what's my girlfriend doing?
 And like pushing a button and they can just get it without any oversight, without anyone
 looking over their shoulder and being like, that's illegal.
 That's like, you don't need that to stop bin Laden again.
 You just don't.
 We have to stop pretending that that's the necessary evil of keeping us safe.
 So we have some slides, I believe, of the four particular, he ended with, I'm making
 very, you know-
 Oh yeah, he's got specific changes.
 Very specific changes.
 Let him be clear.
 He made precisely two specific changes during that.
 Well, he said four, so we've got slides of the first.
 This is crazy.
 First, this is first, the same technological advances that allow US intelligence agencies
 to pinpoint an Al Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sahel
 also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach.
 At a time when more and more of our lives are digital, that prospect is disquieting
 for all of us.
 So he said, that there is he was changing how we collect the information.
 Right?
 So you guys, I gave you the task of grading his initiatives.
 Where does that one fall?
 How do you, I think that was, yeah, I mean-
 The metadata base?
 That's the presidential directive for signals intelligence.
 The email stuff, we had a big section on email collection and there wasn't really a lot,
 like, you can see it on the site right now.
 I mean, we have locked down the NSA email database and we have two Bs and a D.
 And those Bs are because, honestly, because a lot of what we were grading is how does
 this match up to the proposals?
 Like not to even our ideal version of this, because that would be ridiculous and they
 would all be Fs.
 Oh yeah.
 But they didn't, they basically just said, reassure them that we're using this for good.
 I mean, that's-
 Which is kind of-
 I feel reassured.
 I mean, so we have the presidential directive.
 If you're watching this on our site right now, there's a big link to it right above
 the live stream.
 You can go look at it.
 It's, I would say, tremendously boring, but you can go look at it.
 It's a lot of like principle.
 And the first one is like, I'm issuing an order that signals intelligence must be conducted
 in accordance with the constitution.
 It's like, yeah, what was happening before?
 Like, do you have to occasionally remind the NSA that the constitution applies to them?
 So that was one.
 Do we have the second slide?
 So the second one, and we'll get this one, is we're going to reform the programs for
 more transparency and increase safeguards for US persons, which was my favorite phrase.
 So this is all preamble here.
 But the actual one was we need more transparency.
 And this is where Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft can all tell people about what's
 happening to them.
 It is going to be very interesting to see what they're allowed to say.
 They were basically, all of their transparency reports thus far have been like, and there
 are a number of things we cannot say.
 Well, Apple did an interesting dead man's switch in which it said we have not received
 any 215 orders.
 But the problem with all of these is that they've consistently denied that any of the
 huge amount of stuff that is supposedly in databases is from them.
 So it may well be moot because we're also hearing about the NSA tapping into data links.
 So it doesn't matter how many orders they've received if they're also just getting everything
 from links.
 Well, and the other thing, I mean, one of the interesting elements of it is how the
 we were talking in the beginning about the focus on phone records, right?
 And I think part of it is you don't really see anything in this speech that addresses
 stuff like breaking into the Yahoo and Google networks, prism.
 A lot of that stuff is just, it's focusing on the phones.
 And so my pet little paranoid theory is if you have to give something up, you give up
 the least useful tool.
 And it seems plausible.
 And they have many times said that section of 702 is infinitely more useful.
 They didn't say infinite, but much more useful than section 215, which they, I think, can
 only pinpoint one case that it helped, and it was a terrorist funding case.
 And they've said that most of the things that they said initially, the 54 plots, were
 stopped by 702.
 Well, I mean, if you remember when the prism first broke, the controversy was not about
 metadata or phone collection.
 It was about direct access to networks, right?
 Direct access to Google, Yahoo, Apple.
 It was about whether they're hacking into the backbone connection and getting it that
 way, or the companies are helping them.
 As far as you can tell, none of that was addressed during the speech.
 Yeah.
 No, I don't think.
 At all.
 That's the thing that makes me wonder how much we actually feasibly can do, because
 this is basically how much should the NSA try to break everything, which is their explicit
 directive.
 Slightly less breaking.
 I mean, I think part of the weird thing, to me, it's interesting as a media story that
 people are, broadly speaking, calling each other on the phone less and texting, sending
 email, right?
 So now if we need to roll back this massive surveillance apparatus, we're going to do
 the sort of thing that's tailing off.
 We're going to say, okay, less phone records, less phone calls.
 We'll just keep a huge, we're going to keep our surveillance tools on email.
 Texting maybe falls into the metadata.
 It's sort of unclear.
 I think digital communications of the kind, if the most shocking revelation to you was
 that the NSA can read your email, which for me it was, then this doesn't really do a
 lot.
 I mean, it's funny because when you describe it like that, it's like this is exactly how
 the phone companies are treating you.
 They're like, well, we're just going to cap you at unlimited voice because you're not
 using it anymore.
 So you definitely have to pay 10 bucks a month for that because you're not using that anymore
 and we'll just meter you for all the other stuff.
 And it's the same thing.
 We're not using the phones.
 We're not making.
 So if you're a bad guy, what you've learned today is don't make a phone call.
 Which they already knew.
 Right.
 It's like do something else.
 We've also already known use Tor because they have not cracked that yet.
 Right.
 Okay, so we have one last clip we should wrap up.
 I think you guys have, I want to see the last clip here and then I want to, you guys have
 been grading it so I want to get some overall grades from you.
 So let's run this last clip here.
 This is Obama talking about the internet and how it's both wonderful and a reason for the
 government to watch every movie.
 When you cut through the noise, what's really at stake is how we remain true to who we are
 in a world that is remaking itself at dizzying speed.
 Whether it's the ability of individuals to communicate ideas, to access information that
 would have once filled every great library in every country in the world, or to forge
 bonds with people on the other sides of the globe, technology is remaking what is possible
 for individuals and for institutions and for the international order.
 So while the reforms that I've announced will point us in a new direction, I am mindful
 that more work will be needed in the future.
 One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger.
 And I also know that in this time of change, the United States of America will have to
 lead.
 It may seem sometimes that America is being held to a different standard.
 And I'll admit, the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be
 frustrating.
 No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs, or Russia
 to take privacy concerns of citizens in other places into account.
 But let's remember, we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at
 the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity.
 As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital
 revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control.
 Having faced down the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and communism, the world expects
 us to stand up for the principle that every person has the right to think and write and
 form relationships freely.
 Because individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress.
 When you cut through the noise.
 So that line, individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress, I think that is, to me,
 it's the key.
 You know, he said every person has the, every person has the right to think and write and
 form relationships.
 And that's great.
 And, you know, in real life, the government can't really watch you do that, right?
 I mean, they're not here with us right now.
 I mean, presumably some of the NSA is watching this.
 Well, presumably they can also hijack your laptop and then activate the mic.
 Right.
 But saying like, what's interesting is that when you start doing that stuff online, the
 government can immediately in real time monitor every single thing that you do.
 And they have the ability to do that.
 And that's what all of the Snowden leaks have been pointing at, is that we're only constrained
 by where we say with our words and like our laws, you have to stop there.
 And what we haven't done a good job of saying is what are you doing?
 Like, what is it that you're doing and where should you stop?
 And this is like, I think a first step.
 It's please stop looking at our phones, which is great.
 It is not the first step towards please stop, you know, scouring our email.
 Please stop, you know, jacking directly in the backbone to look at encrypted iMessage
 or whatever the hell you're trying to do.
 Yeah.
 Because we don't know.
 We don't actually know the full extent of what they're doing and why they're doing it.
 Then all these justifications for we have to do it because of terrorists.
 And these are actually good people at the NSA who are doing a good job.
 And they're patriots too.
 And we're frustrated.
 Break your laptop.
 This laptop is already so broken.
 I mean, the NSA has been so deep in this laptop already and not even worried about it.
 And that to me, that's the whole issue is we don't, I still don't know enough about
 what the government is doing.
 I still don't know enough about where they think the real limits should be.
 And I haven't heard enough of that debate.
 And I think, you know, I've got my issues with Greenwald and with Snowden.
 And I think they made it a lot about themselves and said a lot about what's happening.
 And that's fine.
 But he's a hero now.
 I think that's great.
 He's a symbol.
 But he's accomplished only half of what he set out to do.
 He got the president to make a speech about one thing.
 We haven't yet had a real conversation about the whole totality of what's out there.
 And you were saying right before we started, there are undoubtedly more leaks to come.
 Oh yeah.
 And that, how we react to the next set of leaks.
 You know, if Greenwald's smart, I think he's smart.
 I think he's very savvy.
 He's holding on to something big just to respond to a speech like this.
 And so I'm very curious to see what that next step is like.
 But so let's end real quick.
 You guys were grading the speech in terms of proposed reforms, real reforms, what he
 said.
 Let's do some overalls.
 Where do you think Obama landed?
 I'm going to go C. I think he gets a C. And he started talking about it.
 That's like a good strong point.
 I think the phone stuff is a good first step.
 But I haven't heard enough.
 So that's a C for me.
 Yeah, I think it's weird.
 So the big story of this to me was we're putting a lot more power in the judiciary.
 Like there's a lot more court based oversight.
 There's not a lot of congressional oversight.
 There's not a lot of other parts of the executive oversight, which is potentially interesting,
 but also there was already judicial oversight.
 And so in many ways there's a lot of stuff that hasn't...
 We're using a lot of tools that have already not really worked.
 So I think C minus, yeah, I'm a little bit lower.
 Okay.
 Addie?
 To some extent it feels a little bit pointless to grade this because what we are doing is
 grading rhetoric.
 And that so much of the rhetoric is essentially we will create more oversight.
 It is we will reaffirm our principles.
 It's things that they should be doing anyways and that they have been promising since I
 suppose it's almost going on eight months now.
 Maybe more, maybe less.
 But the problem is that every time we do this we talk about, okay, this is the thing that
 we've changed and we did a report card, which is useful.
 And I would maybe also go with CC minus, but it's that is this going to actually lead to
 anything meaningful?
 And we'll never know if it does.
 Right.
 Well, unless you work for the NSA.
 Yes.
 It's time to get that job.
 Yeah.
 They're still talking.
 I would ask.
 I'm sure they will hire you.
 I would ask all of our readers to immediately begin applying for jobs at the NSA and then
 leaking that information to us, which I believe is treason.
 And I will be talking to an agent of the government soon.
 And that was The Verge Live, everybody.
 Thank you for tuning in.
 We're going to have lots more, I'll say this, we're going to have lots more NSA coverage
 coming up.
 These two are maniacs.
 You should hear them argue when the cameras are off.
 It's terrifying, to be honest with you.
 So we'll have lots more on the NSA coming up probably later today.
 There's some news just from the speech we need to do some more analysis of.
 And obviously as the story is ongoing, we'll have more.
 So thanks for tuning in.
 We'll see you here on The Verge Live.