The debate Obama never wanted

In the East Room on Friday, Obama said he always wanted what he is now awkwardly juggling—a national debate on counterterrorism surveillance. This is demonstrably false. Obama did not want this debate, and he has been forced into numerous linguistic contortions in avoiding it. He did not want a debate that forced him to embrace a review panel to examine his administration’s countersurveillance practices and to call for a privacy and civil-liberties advocate before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approves surveillance warrants. On Friday, Obama sought to limit the ferocity of the debate by asserting his role as calm, constitutional arbiter of executive power and reform. “I believe that there are steps we can take to give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse,” he said.

Obama authorized more surveillance than President George W. Bush in part because technology and threat matrices convinced him it was necessary. For two months since Snowden’s leaks, Obama has been hesitant to engage in debate and call for reforms, in part because he was waiting for the Justice Department and intelligence community to cough up information explaining what the NSA was doing and its legal authority. Obama released much of that on Friday. It was a defensive move designed to prove he hasn’t abused powers and that the surveillance has defined and defensible limits. That assertion was undercut by additional—there is that word again—reporting about the NSA’s previously unknown authority to cull data about Americans in the general neighborhood, electronically speaking, of suspected terrorist communications. All of this has raised, despite Obama’s reassurances, concern about the real-time hollowing out of Fourth Amendment protections.