My thoughts on his speech:
He starts off talking about Paul Revere and how they attempted to obtain intelligence about British attacks. He lays this as a foundation to showing how we have, do, and will need intelligence. However, here is the flaw with the analogy: the Revere group were also being spied on by the British, and the British were doing anything they could to attempt to find the traitors (or shall we say terrorists as far as the British were concerned). Would the American Revolution been able to organize and get started if the British could spy on the letters/communication systems and monitor their movements? It could be argued they could not.
He does have a valid point about the East German and the FBI cautionary tales though, but he doesn't see this as the same based on what I've seen/heard from him previously.
The 4 points he made, are true as things stand today. But that doesn't mean it's the right way to go about it or that things should not be changed. And just because they require secrecy to function does not mean that their processes or broad capabilities should be kept secret from their oversight. But more importantly, he talks about changes he made like auditing, oversight, and compliance. I want to know details about these. What was changed? How was it changed? If they sought to keep Congress continually updated then why were many in Congress surprised by the revelations?
Moving on, he talks about why he didn't shut down the programs. He didn't think they broke laws, they made us more secure, and they weren't cavalier about civil liberties. While I'm sure you know more than we do, that's the problem. We can't have an intelligent debate as a society about what kind of society we want. The problem isn't that they are reading every private email or listening to every call, although there are cases where that has happened namely from romantic relationships, the problem is that they can. And that they can from years ago. And that could be used against you to essentially blackmail a person like was done by J Edgar Hoover.
To be fair, he does have a valid point about if another 9/11 or a cyber attack happen, that the NSA (and all intelligence agencies) will be asked why they didn't prevent it.
And if you had these questions raised about privacy safeguards that were in place, why didn't you push Congress to adopt a "Cyber Bill of Rights" or issue Executive Orders to protect those liberties?
I made it about halfway through with this. But here is what I've gathered from this speech. It's a lot of fluff. I have not heard anything to make me believe that anything will change from what has happened, and instead will just morph into new forms. I can't say I'm surprised, but I am slightly saddened that we don't appear to have any kind of drastic reform.