NEWS ANALYSIS: New Limits Reshape Surveillance Policy, and Obama’s Legacy, nytimes

WASHINGTON — For more than six years, President Obama has directed his national security team to chase terrorists by scooping up vast amounts of telephone records with a program that was conceived of and implemented by his predecessor after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The new surveillance program created by the USA Freedom Act will end more than a decade of bulk collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency. But it will require telephone companies to hold the records and make them available for broad searches by government officials with a court order.

That compromise may end up being too restrictive for the counterterrorism professionals, as some Republicans predict. Or, as others vehemently insisted in congressional debate during the past week, it may remain too much of an intrusion on the lives of innocent Americans.

Either way, Mr. Obama’s signature on the law late Tuesday night ensures that he delivers the next president a method of hunting for terrorism threats despite the privacy concerns that spread throughout the American public after Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, revealed the existence of the telephone program.

White House officials said Mr. Obama was comfortable that history would show that he struck the right balance.

“To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I would suspect that that would be a logical conclusion from some historians,” said Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary. Mr. Earnest said the compromise that the president pushed found a way to address the anxiety that bulk collection of telephone records violated Americans’ civil liberties.

But he added that the president was pleased that the government would still have a way to access those records. 

At the same time, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, excoriated Mr. Obama, saying that “the president continues to conduct an illegal program,” a reference to a recent ruling by a federal appeals court that the original N.S.A. telephone data collection program was not authorized by federal law. -  Read More at NYT

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