My Slate colleagues will have plenty of
analysis of the president's big national security address. I'll have
less; this is a speech designed to defend and obfuscate and win a
certain sort of foreign headline, not one designed to really inform.
More important than the speech itself is the directive being issued as
it's given—the directive I've posted below. What starts with a lot of
on-the-one-hand-ing about how spying is necessary gets into some
promises about the stoppage of bulk surveillance, with caveats.
The limitations contained in this section do not apply to
signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate
targeted collection. References to signals intelligence data collected
in "bulk" mean the authorized collection of large quantities of signals
intelligence data which, due to technical or operational
considerations, is acquired without the use of discriminants (e.g.,
specific identifiers, selection terms, etc.).