In his speech regarding changes to the NSA’s Section 215 phone metadata collection and surveillance program, President Barack Obama stated outright, “I am ordering a transition that will end the section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists.” During his speech (full transcript below), President Obama also announced that the federal government will need to go to the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) every time that they want to search data, rather than relying on previous orders.

Newly released documents relating to the massive collection of the email data and metadata of regular non- “person of interest” citizens by the NSA, following Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have revealed, among other things, that the NSA was collecting (overcollecting, say some) the cc: and bcc: information (metadata) in emails being sent by millions of U.S. citizens.