Obama just got to much trust in advance. Everybody seemed to think, because his predecessor was such a catastrophe, Obama must be some kind of savior.
But he isn't. He even got the peace noble price just for his announcements. Nothing more. Still his announcement is there, that he will close Guantanamo. It is announced but nothing done. He is the savior of announcements.
Also people thought, that he would finish up with the bad ruling of his predecessor. But even the known cases of torture in Iraq did not have any consequences (besides those of letting some stupid low level soldiers be the escape goats). One of the first doings of Obama was a big amnesty for any wrongdoings of intelligence people. That already showed a foreshadow what we could expect of Obama.
I guess, either Obama is a Wolfe in savior-skin, or he is a sheep in a wolfs-skin and so much under pressure from some side, that he has to obey and shut up, no matter what he really wanted in the first place ...
I also guess, that we should internalize the thought, that the really mighty in this world are not on the cover pages of the newspapers and those on the cover pages are less mighty as we shall think.
There's another possibility. The NSA has blackmailed Obama into protecting their interests. If Obama makes substantial changes to the NSA and then is outed for something that the NSA would have known about, he may have been blackmailed.
Quite a few people didn't trust him enough to vote for him during the last two presidential elections ... since he can't run for another term, I'm guessing he doesn't care if the people that did vote for him trust him anymore.
In the NYT article it mentioned something about him trusting himself not to go too far. I guess it's this feeling of enlightened ruler that always goes too far.
I don't mean to sound conspiratorial but I get the impression that when someone becomes president their is a manner by which the intelligence community implicitly says "Ok , you're the president now...here's how the world really fucking works".
The end result being a host of very convincing cultural assumptions that are hard to argue with if you're on the inside and driving the wheel.
Is very hard to trust anyone over pervasive suveillance. That is partly why it is so poisonous. Public political figures are obvious intelligence targets, if only for budget protection.
The Founding Fathers of the USA were concerned about writing a Bill Of Rights because any natural right not enumerated therein might be construed as not being a right at all. This is where we are with pervasive surveillance: being incapable of imagining/comprehending a surveillance system of this scale, it never dawned in them to protect anything more than "persons, papers and effects". At a time when just overhearing a conversation was hard enough to require concerted effort, they could not dream of a day when a significant percentage of every conversation among 300,000,000 people could be monitored and catalogued automatically at a not-prohibitive cost. Methinks: had they known, they would have not hesitated to prohibit it as explicitly as they did infringement of arms possession. Alas, the courts adhere only to the letter of the Constitution, not its spirit.