The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced Tuesday that it would immediately implement new surveillance reforms, which it claims illustrate an “ongoing commitment to greater transparency.”

These new changes, among others, stipulate that content interception cannot be used to intentionally target Americans and permanent residents, change secrecy limits on National Security Letters, require that non-intelligence related information collected on Americans be deleted, and restrict that similar data gathered on foreigners be deleted after no later than five years.

The changes, which are outlined in a series of new Tumblr posts that are in response to a 2014 presidential policy directive, don’t go nearly far enough, civil liberties advocates say.

“I think what we're seeing is them nibbling at the edges rather than making dramatic reforms that go to the core of intelligence collection,” Mark Rumold, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars.

The nation’s top umbrella intelligence group has been wrestling with what, if any reforms, should be implemented in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Various groups both in and outside of government have opined as to what actions should be taken, but nothing substantial has changed since June 2013, when the bulk metadata program first became public.

"The ODNI’s report catalogs the cosmetic changes the administration has made to the NSA’s bulk surveillance programs," Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer who represents whistleblowers, told Ars in an e-mail.

"While the report goes out of its way in pointing out that the administration supported the USA Freedom Act which would have ended the [Section] 215 bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, it obscures the fact that the president could order an end the program tomorrow if he wanted. That he hasn’t speaks volumes."

Paved with good intentions

The intelligence community highlighted new clarifications of data collected under various legal umbrellas.

The first disclosure to come from the documents provided by Snowden described the bulk metadata programs, whose legal authority derives from Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the legal authority which the NSA uses as the basis for PRISM and other surveillance and data collection programs.

On Tuesday, ODNI wrote:

Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen or any other U.S. person, to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States, or to target a person outside the United States if the purpose is to target a person inside the United States.

Ed Loomis, a cryptologist at the National Security Agency from 1964 to October 2001 who later became a whistleblower, also told Ars that this declaration is deceptive.

“This [document] contains the weasel words ‘intentionally target,” he said in an e-mail.

“While the rhetoric is worded so, the intention is to imply our e-mails and web browsing history is safe from the government's prying eyes, but is anything but! Of course, the government is not intentionally targeting us as individual suspects, but they nonetheless are not proposing to terminate indiscriminate bulk collection of our Internet transactions under 'general warrant' provisions. That is what is needed if Internet privacy is to be restored. It's one thing if commercial entities collect and retain our traffic for marketing reasons—it's quite another if our government, with prosecutorial authority, acquires and stores that same traffic.”

Gag me with an NSL

The ODNI is also taking on a few of the minor recommendations made by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a Congressionally mandated watchdog group that met for the first time in late 2013. But the ODNI and the Obama administration have ignored the group's primary recommendation that the metadata program (as authorized under Section 215) be halted.

Regarding the use of National Security Letters, which compel the recipient to produce some information (and forbid them from speaking about it) to the FBI, the recipients are now allowed to discuss the matter after three years unless expressly forbidden from doing so.

“It's still an unconstitutional gag, and they just changed it from an indefinite unconstitutional gag to a three-year unconstitutional gag,” Rumold added.

Still, few legal and intelligence experts are convinced that these changes will make any meaningful difference.

“The most significant feature of the new rules is what they do not include,” Fred Cate, a law professor at the University of Indiana, told Ars in an e-mail.

“More than a year ago, the President’s own Review Group made 46 recommendations for strengthening oversight of U.S. surveillance activities. To date, the President has rejected a few and ignored most of those. The bulk collection of telephone metadata, which he promised last January to end, continues. The recommendation to split the NSA into two agencies, one with responsibility for intelligence gathering and one with responsibility for protecting critical data and systems, has been ignored. And critical changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have not been taken up.”

Thomas Drake, another well-known NSA veteran turned whistleblower, had similar conclusions.

“Let's not kid ourselves,” he wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “Snowden's disclosures are THE reason any reform is even happening—however modest. [I] would point out that other collection, bulk copy/access programs not yet fully revealed remain hidden and obscured in the shadows of secret surveillance—quite untouched. And none of this is legislative.”