ACLU dings Obama for failing to reform the NSA

The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden

(Image credit: Adam Berry/Getty Images)

published 4 February 2015

This time last year, President Obama promised he'd take action to reform the broad, scary spying habits of the National Security Agency (NSA). At the time, his promises were met with little enthusiasm from civil liberties advocates, who deemed most of his plans far too limited.

On Tuesday of this week, Obama followed up with additional new rules for the NSA, modest changes which have received widespread dismissal as a failure to actually rein in the surveillance agency. Notably, the reforms do not stop warrantless bulk data collection on millions of innocent people and though they do theoretically limit retention of data about Americans, no such protection is offered to vast numbers of people the NSA monitors around the world.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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