[1] However, in 2011, Obama signed a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, specifically provisions allowing roaming wiretaps and government searches of business records.
[3] In June 2013, reports from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners had created a global system of surveillance that was responsible for the mass collection of information on American and foreign citizens.
During the speech, Obama promised increased restrictions on data collection of American citizens, which would include the requirement of court approval for searches of telephone records.
Sen. Rand Paul criticized the remarks, saying: While I am encouraged the President is addressing the NSA spying program because of pressure from Congress and the American people, I am disappointed in the details.
Peter King, another member of the House Intelligence Committee, questioned the need for the proposed reform of NSA surveillance, but admitted that they were necessary to calm down the "ACLU types".
However, it was also noted that Obama had not made any progress on giving metadata storage responsibility to a third party, ending the undermining of encryption standards, increasing transparency within the NSA and protecting whistleblowers.
[15] On January 18, 2014, Obama spoke to ZDF in an attempt to improve the United States relations with Germany,[17][18] which a German foreign office official said were "worse than … the low-point in 2003 during the Iraq War" due to the surveillance leaks.
[19] Obama promised that he would not let revelations about mass surveillance damage German-American relations and admitted that it would take a long time for the United States to regain the trust of the German people.
[26] On May 24, 2017, a declassified FISA report[27][28] marked "Top Secret" was published, noting that the NSA routinely violated the 4th Amendment rights of Americans and abused intelligence tools to do so.
More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA's so-called Section 702 database, violated the safeguards the Obama administration vowed to follow in 2011.
In addition, there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person's identities in intelligence reports after the administration loosened privacy rules in 2011.
Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes the Obama administration made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.
The FISA court and the NSA's own internal watchdog entity disputes this claim, stating that the administration conducting such queries were "in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.” The FISA report also indicated hundreds of incidences in which the FBI illegally shared raw surveillance data illegally obtained by the NSA with private entities.
Earlier in May, then-FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.”[29] The ruling in the report declared that “The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported.” In a declassified report from 2015,[30] the internal watchdog had concerns as early as 2012 that the FBI was submitting "deficient” reports indicating it had a clean record complying with spy data gathered on Americans without a warrant.
The FBI's very first compliance report in 2009 declared it had not found any instances in which agents accessed NSA intercepts supposedly gathered overseas about an American who in fact was on U.S. soil.
On April 28, 2017, the NSA issued a rare press release indicating it will no longer monitor all internet communications that mention a foreign intelligence target.