Not like anyone paying attention didn't already know this. Obama and Clapper parsing their words in their public statements in a way that (almost) anyone would know meant that they were lying. Unless of course you were an Obamabot and thought the savior could do no wrong.  Even the ACLU thinks it's a horrific abuse of power.

Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

http://circa.com/politics/barack-obamas-team-secretly-disclosed-years-of-illegal-nsa-searches-spying-on-americans

Excerpts:

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.

Speaking Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said there was an apparent effort under the Obama Administration to increase the number of unmaskings of Americans.

"If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power," Paul said. “This will dwarf all other stories.” [Wanna bet? The MSM will never have a problem with anything Obama did... much less feature his criminal acts...]

The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington.

This is exactly why we can't trust government to follow the rules when they ask to violate our freedoms in the name of safety.

Just like RAPBACK and any other information-gathering tool for the government, abuse of those systems is the threat.  Laws do not matter to people who think they are acting for the greater good, or it it offers themselves and their parties some political advantage.

"The ends justifies the means" is a dangerous mindset.