Why NSA critics will probably be disappointed with Obama's 'reforms'

In a highly-anticipated speech Friday, President Obama will announce changes to the nation's spy practices that are intended to better protect Americans' civil liberties. Unfortunately for advocates of drastically reining in the National Security Agency's authority though, the new guidelines are expected to be more of a minor tweak than a sweeping overhaul.

From The New York Times:

The changes would fall far short of the suggestions made by the president's own review panel, which back in December issued a 300-page report with 46 specific recommendations, the boldest of which called for stripping the NSA of its power to collect phone records en masse. And even among the changes Obama is likely to announce, some would need congressional approval which, given lawmakers' general support for the NSA, and Congress' inability to get much of anything done, seems like a long shot.

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In other words, Obama is expected to take a light touch approach that won't address the biggest concerns critics have raised over the nation's spy ops.

Now, the White House has said the president's review is "incomplete," so it's possible the final changes could look a little different. Yet the administration has signaled for months that it is resistant to big changes.

The president stood firmly behind the NSA's controversial data collection practices when critics, including some in Congress, assailed them and questioned their effectiveness in rooting out terror attacks. Though proponents of the programs claim they "disrupted" some 54 terror plots, independent reviews have cast serious doubt on whether they've been helpful at all. Nevertheless, Obama has defended their effectiveness and said they are merely "modest encroachments on privacy."

In another sign the White House has no intention of dramatically altering its bulk collection capabilities, The Los Angeles Times reported this week that Obama's top advisers believe such data vacuuming could have prevented the September 11 attacks. Leaving aside that traditional spy tools could arguably have had the same effect, that detail was "a blinking-red signal that the administration is not about to be accused of making the country more vulnerable by tampering with such a preventive weapon," James Oliphant wrote in National Journal.

"All of which means Friday's speech is going to be a piece of kabuki theater," he added. "The president is going to have to look like he's taking meaningful action to curb the NSA's reach when he really isn't."

Obama offered a preview of his thinking back in December when he decided, against his review panel's recommendation, to keep the NSA and the Pentagon's cyberwarfare ops in the hands of a single military chief. The panel had recommend Obama "give serious consideration to making the next Director of NSA a civilian," and to not have both posts manned by one person.

Another more recent discouraging sign for reform was the disclosure this week that the NSA has used a covert radio signal to surveil nearly 100,000 computers worldwide — even when those machines aren't connected to the Internet. And the NSA this week, responding to a question from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), said that while it doesn't spy on Congress per se, it can't say for sure if lawmakers' private information is scooped up accidentally.

Obama indeed has a fine balance to strike between civil liberties and national security, but what he is expected to endorse will almost certainly fall far short of what reformers had hoped for.