Pure Eyewash

President Obama’s speech on intelligence gathering reforms basically said: We’ll continue what we’ve been doing because we can.

It wasn’t much. As eagerly as President Obama’s speech had been anticipated, that’s how disappointing the expected reforms the president provided on Friday proved to be. The speech was long on reasons why spying and surveillance programs were historically necessary and full of praise for how U.S. intelligence programs have met and mastered the challenges that came in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

And indeed, Obama defended as necessary precisely the most controversial aspect of the NSA’s activities — the comprehensive collection of telephone data. Oh, and, by the way, the president was unable to find the least bit of impropriety on the part of those great patriots at NSA. Naturally, privacy protection for private citizens can’t be based on the good intentions of the intelligence community, but it’s so darned difficult to strike a fair balance. And so Obama’s supposedly clear statement that the programs introduced in the wake of 9/11 can’t continue in their present form stands in direct contrast to his vague suggestions for changing them.

Nevertheless, allied heads of state won’t be spied upon in the future, Obama promised. But not before he poked fun at those countries who were shocked at Snowden’s revelations, but whose own intelligence services were engaging in the same activities or had at least profited from the information they covertly got from the NSA.

It was a speech in which the carefully selected and purposely disparate ingredients of data privacy, the private sector and national security were apparently thrown together onto the kitchen scale and then spiced with the predictable Obama lofty principles. The result was the usual U.S. arrogance that says we’ll do whatever we please because no one can stop us and we’ll continue to do it in the future. Suck it up.

The fact that reforms took a back seat isn’t surprising. The domestic and international pressure to which Obama was subjected in the wake of Snowden’s revelations is nothing compared to the pressure the security apparatus itself can apply. And the incident at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 and the domestic treatment of it in America have demonstrated that somehow a miffed Angela Merkel and an outraged right-wing libertarian like Rand Paul are easier to deal with than a public fearful of any possible terrorist attack.

Regardless of whether the monitoring programs are really as effective in preventing terrorist attacks as the intelligence services claim, if the government actually cut the programs back and an attack followed it would be the political end of any administration.

With the exception of Benghazi, Barack Obama has denied his Republican opponents any opportunity to claim he is “soft on national security,” traditionally a weak spot for any Democratic president. And that carries a lot more weight than the fears of a few civil rights activists, libertarians or Europeans.