Live-Blogging President Obama's NSA Speech | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy

Live-Blogging President Obama's NSA Speech | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy: The limits on retention of personal data of foreigners also make little sense. NSA often collects data that has proven to be valuable in the past, and holds it for later search. It doesn’t have time or resources to evaluate the entire database right away. Now, it seems as though the NSA will have to evaluate all that data right away, not to find actionable intelligence but to scrub out the personal data of any foreign national whose communications might be found there. Now, maybe in time, we’ll find workarounds to avoid dumb results like that, but remember NSA’s culture. No one there is going to say, “This is dumb, the President can’t mean that, so let’s apply his guidance with a leavening of common sense.” They’re going to say, “Until you hear from the lawyers, apply the directive in the strictest possible way, no matter how dumb that seems.”