U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

[BeyondGeography]

34. You're riding that Cnet story awfully hard, aren't you?

Obama shouldn't be implicitly trusted, but you should understand at least one thing about him by now: He does not ever shoot from the hip (well, ok, the Kamala Harris thing was shooting from the hip, but, you know).

So it's worth recalling what he specifically said the other day:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks—if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So, I want to be very clear—some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so—nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-obama-said-on-nsa-controversy/

That's awfully clear to me, coming from a guy with a lot to lose if it's way off the mark, and one with a pretty damned good track record of avoiding mistakes with the language. Compare the President's straightforward statement with the Cnet article which could easily be read as Nadler and Mueller misunderstanding each other in a hearing, and contains no follow-up reporting post-hearing (i.e., no fresh statement from Nadler), and I hope you'll excuse some of us from jumping to conclusions.