President Obama has outlined his so called reforms of America’s controversial surveillance tactics. But as expected the reforms are light on real change, and leave many of the worst policies in place and unabated. We’ll dig into the most egregious.

Plus: It’s new round of character assassination for Edward Snowden, and this time the claims are even more ridiculous. Is Snowden a double agent for the FSB? We’ll debunk.

Then it’s your feedback, our followup, and much much more.

On this week’s Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

NSA is CRAZY

• Michael Morell joins CBS News

Michael Morell, who retired as deputy director of the CIA last summer, has joined CBS News as an intelligence, national security and counterterrorism contributor, the network announced this week.

• Obama’s proposed NSA ‘reform’ changes nothing

The Washington Post has already identified the five big takeaways from Obama’s speech:

1. US intelligence agencies will no longer hold Americans’ phone call records.

2. There will, nevertheless, be some system for those records to be accessible when required.

3. The US will no longer monitor the communications of the heads of state or government of “close friends and allies”.

4. A new panel will be created to provide additional input into the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including privacy specialists and other non-government folks.

5. There will be new rules to extend some of the privacy provisions applying to US citizens to foreigners, unless there’s a “compelling national security purpose”.

6. ’The USA knows that for us spying is a crime’

“The German justice system will not stand idly by if the efforts of the NSA blithely continue here,” he told Bild newspaper on Monday.

• New documents: NSA provided 2–3 daily “tips” to FBI for at least 3 years | Ars Technica

Hours after President Barack Obama finished his speech last Friday on proposed intelligence and surveillance reforms, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified a number of documents from the nation’s most secretive court.

The new documents are heavily redacted orders from FISC to the FBI. These items request that the court order an entity (likely a business) to provide “tangible things” under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. The documents do not refer to who the target is, nor which company or organization they apply to.

“The Court understands that NSA expects that it will continue to provide on average approximately three telephone identifiers per day to the FBI,” reads a footnote in a 2007 court order (PDF) authored by FISC Judge Frederick Scullin, Jr.

• Rating Obama’s NSA Reform Plan: EFF Scorecard Explained | Electronic Frontier Foundation

We’ve put together a scorecard showing how Obama’s announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance. Each necessary reform was worth 1 point, and we were willing to award partial credit for steps in the right direction. On that scale, President Obama racked up 3.5 points out of a possible 12.

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Snow Job:

• Snowden Denies Suggestions That He Was a Spy for Russia – NYTimes.com

Mr. Rogers said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Mr. Snowden should be seen not as a whistle-blower but as “a thief, who we believe had some help.”

Officials at both the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. have said their investigations have turned up no evidence that Mr. Snowden was aided by others.

• Snowden Calls Russian-Spy Story ‘Absurd’ in Exclusive Interview : The New Yorker

Speaking from Moscow, where he is a fugitive from American justice, Snowden told The New Yorker, “This ‘Russian spy’ push is absurd.”

“It’s not the smears that mystify me,” Snowden told me. “It’s that outlets report statements that the speakers themselves admit are sheer speculation.” Snowden went on to poke fun at the range of allegations that have been made against him in the media without intelligence officials providing some kind of factual basis: “ ‘We don’t know if he had help from aliens.’ ‘You know, I have serious questions about whether he really exists.’ ”

Snowden went on, “It’s just amazing that these massive media institutions don’t have any sort of editorial position on this. I mean these are pretty serious allegations, you know?” He continued, “The media has a major role to play in American society, and they’re really abdicating their responsibility to hold power to account.”

• Before Snowden, Nixon Admin Pioneered Evidence-Free ‘Russian Spy’ Smears Against Daniel Ellsberg | Techdirt

Ellsberg is commonly looked at as the quintessential whistleblower today, but shortly after he leaked the top secret Vietnam War study, the Nixon administration made a concerted effort to paint him as a Soviet spy in the press, using anonymous quotes and non-existent ‘secret’ evidence.

• Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST | Free Snowden](https://freesnowden.is/_2476.html)

Top Story in the unfilter Subreddit

• NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.

The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.

The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.

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