In a long-awaited speech, President Barack Obama on January 17 trimmed the powers of the secretive US eavesdropping agency by calling for new privacy safeguards, but allowed bulk phone data sweeps to continue as an anti-terror tool. Obama also said he had halted National Security Agency (NSA) spy taps targeting friendly world leaders. At the heart of the changes is a commitment from the president to end the NSA’s hoarding of telephone “metadata” detailing the duration and destination of calls but not their content. These seemed to represent a search for a compromise between demands of civil liberties advocates – who see all bulk data collection as unconstitutional – and resistance from US intelligence community.
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