The peculiar ways that President Obama addressed NSA spying during his recent Hardball interview with Chris Matthews deserves a lot more scrutiny than it has received. There are four parts to these remarks*. Marcy Wheeler is one of the few analysts who've pointed out the inaccuracies and strange locutions. 

First, Obama says that while he "can't confirm or get into the details of every aspect of what the NSA does," Edward Snowden's disclosures of classified documents "have identified some areas of legitimate concern." But he doesn't specify. What are the NSA behaviors about which the public is legitimately concerned? (For the subset of leaked documents related to those areas of "legitimate concern," why isn't Obama treating Snowden as a legitimate whistleblower?)  

Now for the misleading rhetoric.

In part two of his answer, Obama says that some of Snowden's revelations have been "highly sensationalized" and "painted in a way that's not accurate." He implies but does not state that the inaccuracies relate to spying on Americans: "The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the content of their phone calls."

Wheeler explains why that is inaccurate:

... It is false to say NSA does a very good job of not engaging in domestic surveillance. They’ve been caught doing so, on a programmatic scale, under Obama’s Administration, twice. At least one of those programs simply moved overseas after being caught.

more @ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/how-president-obama-misled-chris-matthews-about-nsa-surveillance/282179/