The president’s most significant announcement was also the hardest to parse. He ordered “a transition that will end” the bulk collection of phone metadata as it currently exists, but what exactly will end? The database will still exist, even if he said he wants it held outside the government. Mr. Obama should have called for sharp reductions in the amount of data the government collects, or at least adopted his own review panel’s recommendation that telecommunications companies keep the data they create and let the National Security Agency request only what it needs. Instead, he gave the Justice Department and intelligence officials until late March to come up with alternate storage options, seeking a new answer when the best ones are already obvious.

But he added two restrictions that could significantly reduce the possibility of abuse of this information: Wherever the database resides, he said, it may be queried only “after a judicial finding or in the case of a true emergency.” (That calls for a clear definition of “emergency.”) Agency analysts will be permitted to pursue phone calls that are two “hops” removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization, instead of three. That extra hop allowed for the examination of an exponentially larger number of phone calls.

Mr. Obama did not address the bigger problem that the collection of all this data, no matter who ends up holding onto it, may not be making us any safer. That was the conclusion of the president’s review panel as well as a federal judge in Washington who ruled that the bulk-collection program was probably unconstitutional and an extensive report by the New America Foundation finding that the program “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity.”

Mr. Obama called on Congress to create a panel of independent advocates to argue in significant cases before the intelligence court, which currently hears arguments only from the government and must rely on government officials to identify and disclose their own mistakes. That would be a huge improvement to the one-sided process that often turns the court into a rubber stamp, but Congress is likely to dither over it. It would be better for the president to create the panel himself and work with the courts to find independent members. At the same time, any public advocate must be free to decide what cases to argue and not be limited to the administration’s or the court’s view of what is “significant.”

Mr. Obama wisely sought to tamp down the international furor over surveillance of foreign leaders and ordinary citizens by announcing restrictions on the collection, use and retention of that data. He said he would extend certain protections normally afforded only to Americans. “People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” Mr. Obama said.