but he says that some of these programs are necessary to keep us safe. he s going to keep them in place with new safeguards but in place. responding to months of spirited debate sparked by the explosive revelations of edward snowden, today the president told americans what he would do and not do to rein in mass surveillance. there are fewer and fewer technical restraints on what we can do. that places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do. reporter: the most significant changes affect the most controversial surveillance program. the bold collection of american s phone records effectively immediately the nsa will need judicial approval before searching the data. the president asked congress to create a panel of public advocates to counter government search requests. and he asked the attorney general and intelligence committee to explore moving the data out of nsa control. he also ordered an end to spying
put them together and draw a picture from them. you have dots here and here. the picture we come up with is probably wrong. three scraps of data out of 100,000 that is not going to work. and to me that gets to the kind of second conversation which is about politics. again, this is now part of the ritual which is so bizarre is that the second order conversation is about policy responses because mass shootings have happened with guns. and we have a country that has way more guns that other democracies for a bunch of other reasons which we can get into. when you are thinking about that, part of that in wrestling to get to why did this happen is one vision of this as essentially a natural disaster. people, there are horrible