Yesterday we heard that President Barack Obama is going to ask Congress to put the brakes on the NSA’s spying escapades, or at least a part of them.

Obama’s plans were confirmed yesterday by the White House following a leak to the New York Times. Under the President’s proposal, the NSA will be banned from collecting and storing citizens’ phone call records, with telecoms companies keeping these on file instead. And they won’t be handed over to the NSA willy nilly, except in cases where the agency can prove to a judge that a specific caller has links to terrorism.

But this poses two questions. First, do we really need this legislation? And second, is it even close to being enough? The answer in both cases, unsurprisingly, is almost certainly no.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for one remains extremely skeptical of the plans:

“This is good news, but we have not seen the details of either and details, as we have learned, are very important in assessing suggested changes to the NSA’s mass spying,” the EFF wrote in its response to the news.

We should also note that Obama’s plans are but a token gesture, as they only pertain to one small piece of the NSA’s data pie. It only affects the collection of metadata about phone calls – it has no impact whatsoever on its ability to record the content of every phone call in the world, or read millions of SMS messages, its undersea cable tapping, its spreading of malware to hack into computers (including offline ones), its plans to smash all forms of encryption, its attempts to infiltrate the servers of Yahoo and Google, and all the other things we’ve forgotten about already.

The EFF also noted these omissions, stating that:

“The Obama administration does not go beyond the telephone records programs, which are important, but are only a relatively small piece of the NSA’s surveillance and, by itself won’t stop mass surveillance.”

So in other words, Obama’s proposal doesn’t even scratch the surface of what the NSA is really doing, all it does is throw a few stumbling blocks in the way of one of its least valuable data collection operations.

What’s needed is some kind of legislation that puts an end to ALL automated data collection by the NSA, something that curbs every single one of its programs. And readers might be surprised to learn that just such an idea has already been proposed, in a new bill called the USA FREEDOM Act, which is co-sponsored by Judiciary Committee chairs Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

The stated aim of that particular act is far more comprehensive than what Obama himself has proposed:

“To rein in the dragnet collection of data by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies, increase transparency of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), provide businesses the ability to release information regarding FISA requests, and create an independent constitutional advocate to argue cases before the FISC.”

We can only hope that when this act comes up for consideration by the President, he genuinely wants to curb the NSA’s spying activities and isn’t just paying lip service to privacy advocates, as his backing of yesterday’s pointless scrap of legislation seems to suggest.

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