UPDATE: Below is a video of Obama’s speech, from Friday morning, in which he announced a new surveillance-policy directive and a “transition” away from bulk metadata collection.

“DISHFIRE contains a large volume of unselected SMS traffic,” a says a presentation that was put together by Britain’s General Communications Headquarters, and obtained by the Guardian thanks to Edward Snowden. The volume is very large: close to two hundred million text messages from around the world every day. “This makes it particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or even years before the target was known to be of interest.” The documents go on to say that Dishfire, a National Security Agency program, whose products the G.C.H.Q. was allowed to look at, “collects pretty much everything it can, so you can see SMS from a selector which is not targeted.”

And there, in a few sentences, is an expression of why so many of the reassurances that we have heard since the first Snowden revelations seem hollow—and why President Obama has been pushed to confront their inadequacy in a speech on Friday morning. The N.S.A. collects information on people that it has no reason to suspect; it does so indiscriminately; its standard is what “it can” do, not what it ought to; and it includes not just abstract metadata but rich content. Also, the phrase “not targeted” means “surveilled without the paperwork” or, in plain English, “targeted.” The Guardian notes that the agency has “minimization” procedures for information that it somehow gets from Americans whom it hasn’t targeted. As the N.S.A. said in a statement to the paper:

Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data. Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.

And yet, the minimizing never quite seems to make the volume as small as the N.S.A.’s practices makes it large.

Early on Friday, there were reports that Obama would go further in his speech than expected, shifting the way that the N.S.A. operates. In particular, there might be changes to the agency’s collection of telephone metadata. That would be a step toward figuring out how the larger configuration of programs operate, and what the words we use to talk about them even mean.

Some aspects of Dishfire have been out for a while—for example, privacy violations related to the database earned it a place in an internal N.S.A. audit, which was published by the Washington Post this summer. The new Guardian story adds the G.C.H.Q. documents, along with an N.S.A. presentation on Dishfire and a related instrument called Prefer, which has the subtitle, “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit.” Mixing metaphors, it then refers to “such gems” as “contact chaining, geolocation” and “travel, finance”:

Features & Notifications on mobile phones are increasing —> rich data set awaiting exploitation.

In other words, this is not just about the N.S.A. reading a text in which you tell someone a joke or that you miss him. It is about knowing where you are when you send it. Or reading a message from your bank, or from an app that you use to buy coffee or one saying that your flight has been delayed—or a record of which news headline alerts you click on and read. (Another slide said that it was working on passwords.) The presentation uses the phrases “metacontent” and “content derived metadata.” This speaks to a crucial legal point: because of the word “phone” in “smartphone,” the N.S.A. has been justifying its collection of telephone records based on a Supreme Court ruling about a single suspect’s phone number in a case that was decided in 1979—when telephones couldn’t do things like this.

My colleague John Cassidy has a good analysis of why Obama needs to let go of the notion that if people were being sensible they would just trust him to make sure that their privacy is protected. As Cassidy says, they can’t. Dishfire is one of many programs that have come to light: it has international reach, and there will be more to learn about how many Americans get tangled in it. But it is already useful as a reminder of what Obama can no longer say: that metadata is slim and impersonal (lean and hungry is more like it); that only proper suspects are spied on; or that everything is basically headed in the right direction, with the only issue being the need to make us feel better.

There is one more argument for Obama, and the rest of us, to avoid: the idea that running the N.S.A. differently, with real and not just mechanical respect for civil liberties and privacy, would just be too much trouble—that neither the agency nor the public could handle it. That argument was made in a letter from Judge John Bates, formerly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, to the Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. He urged them not to listen to the President’s review panel, which suggested dozens of changes, such as a more adversarial process and more transparency. “Releasing freestanding summaries of court opinions is likely to promote confusion and misunderstanding,” Bates wrote. Confusion tends to lead to questions, which one would think would be useful—especially when what is confusing are claims about safety and privacy in a democracy. Effectiveness in fighting terrorism and blind gliding are not the same thing. Bates also worried that “some of the proposed changes would profoundly increase the Courts’ workload.” Would that mean a large volume of cases? That’s work that we can do, and have to do.

Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.