President Obama will shortly give a speech in which he’ll make cosmetic changes to the NSA dragnet, but will continue, in many ways, the accessing of personal data from Americans with no probable cause.As part of his cosmetic effort, he will also say there has been no evidence of abuse in these programs. That means he does not consider any of the following abuse:

Rather than discussing any of these violations, the NSA has waved around a few cases of LOVEINT (most, if not all, of which have not been prosecuted) as part of a successful ploy to distract from much more systemic abuses of its authority, affecting far more Americans.

But there has been abuse, even beyond practices (like back door searches) that gut the Fourth Amendment or (like NSA’s approach to encryption) that hurt Americans’ security.President Obama will spend a lot of time saying there have been no abuses. He’s wrong.