A lot of reactions to Obama’s decisions seem to remember that he was the guy on the <i>Hope</i> posters, but not that he was the guy who told PolSci majors how politics was heart-wrangling, soul-blackening compromises, all the time -- and that you needed to keep the eye on the bigger prize, because you’d have to sacrifice everything just under it.<p>Obama promised to save tens of thousands how American lives (and ten times as many Middle-Eastern) and the budget by scaling down physical operations. To do that, he had to grant the intelligence and military personnel everything else, if only to avoid a coup. I hate the compromise, but I can’t imagine making a different choice.<p>Yes, that appears to be extremely disappointing, but more than actual deescalation of the surveillance apparatus, what he is working on is to make the Intelligence community realise that they went too far, and that the fact that Snowden could get so much information was a problem in itself. You don’t tear things away from people when you want them to contrite, not significantly: that comes later. Right now, most people in that community want to drop a Hellfire on the guy: saying he was right to do what he did, and to follow his recommendation would be akin, for the US operatives, to have the US adopt Sharia law on Christmas 2001 because Ben Laden asked for it.<p>Give them time.<p>Show a guy who is articulate, considerate and criticise his actions ‘but his ideals where not far off…’; show how targeted collection help keeping focus, show how judicially-sound investigations help avoiding mistakes… The NSA will feel confident to take off the side-wheels (still ‘protect the Homeland’ without the all-access) but that’s later, alas.