President Obama’s plan rejects a number of proposals from his own advisory panel on reforming the National Security Agency including a call to require court orders for national security letters by the FBI. It also ignores the panel’s call to stop undermining commercial software in order to launch surveillance or cyber-attacks. Obama accepted a proposal to establish a panel of privacy advocates to appear before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but only in special cases. Responding to Obama’s speech, Jesselyn Radack, an adviser to Edward Snowden and former Justice Department lawyer, criticized Obama for leaving the bulk collection of metadata intact.

Jesselyn Radack: “I’m happy that the government will no longer be housing people’s records, but that begs the question of why — why the government should be storing anybody’s records at all. And I think a lot of people might mistake that storing issue for the government not collecting. And the bulk metadata collection program remains intact; it continues. And they’re going to transition it, but that doesn’t really tell us anything. If they’re going to overhaul it in some kind of fashion, we have no idea. The point is, they are still collecting mass metadata on hundreds and thousands of innocent Americans.”