his final week in office, President Obama made several feel-good moves that played to his base. He transferred 10 Guantanamo detainees to Oman. He commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning. He donated his children’s swing set to a D.C. shelter.
And then there was his decision to significantly strengthen the surveillance state. On January 12, the New York Times reported that Obama had rolled back limits on the National Security Agency’s most powerful surveillance operations, allowing the agency to share raw feeds of intercepted data with 16 other government agencies rather than selectively filtering it beforehand. The personal data of private citizens is now more widely and easily accessible to government eyes.