President Obama managed to deliver 5,354 words on reforming NSA surveillance this afternoon without actually saying anything at all.

In his first major speech responding to the spy scandal, the president was careful to toe the line, defending US intelligence operations while recognizing Americans deserve civil liberties and transparency. But instead of introducing concrete actions to curtail government spying, the president offered up a cocktail of ambiguous proposals, explained with carefully chosen vague language riddled with qualifiers and escape clauses that leave a lot of wiggle room for the NSA to continue business as usual.

The devil hidden in the details of the president’s reform policy isn’t in what he said, but how he said it. Check out these sneaky linguistic loopholes.

For one, nowhere in the 45-minute speech did the president actually admit that the government spying on its citizens threatens Americans’ civil liberties. Instead he talked about the “possibility” that we’d lose some of our core liberties in the pursuit of security, including “challenges to our privacy.” Amazingly, he stopped short of admitting the intelligence community was doing anything wrong at all—it only had the “potential” to abuse its bloated powers.

One of the biggest criticisms of the PRISM program is that its sole justification is a faulty claim that snooping on hoards of electronic data is necessary to stop terrorist attacks like 9/11. In reality, the NSA’s domestic surveillance has foiled a total of zero terrorist plots—a fact the president didn’t dispute today, saying that surveillance “may thwart” potential threats. The real issue is here is that “if” there’s another 9/11, the intelligence agencies don’t want to suffer the embarrassment of missing it again.

The biggest policy news today was the president’s decision to “end bulk metadata collection.” That sounds pretty good. But, the proposal lost any meaning after being qualified with “as it currently exists.” Suddenly “end” means “change” or even “tweak.”

The president was even less clear on how to go about doing this. He said the government would continue scooping up torrents of private data, but wouldn’t have unfettered access, instead would only query the data vault “as needed.” According to who? Needed for what? Well, “if and when” there’s a “reasonable suspicion” that someone maybe be linked to a terrorist group, a “judicial finding,” or a “true emergency.”

Step two, instead of the NSA holding on to all that data, a third party would be responsible for keeping it. Who? No one knows. But don’t worry, there’s a plan. The attorney general and NSA will come up with some options and report back to the president who “will consult with the relevant committees in Congress to seek their views, and then seek congressional authorization for the new program as needed.” Clear?

To deliver on his promise of greater transparency, the president relaxed the controversial gag orders stopping tech companies from reporting national security-related requests for user data. “This secrecy will not be indefinite, and will terminate within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy,” Obama said. In other words, now tech firms don’t have to stay mum forever, unless they do.  

Perhaps the most concrete reform was the decision to stop spying on friendly foreign allied governments, but that too, was qualified with “unless there is a compelling national security purpose.”

The upshot of ambiguous language is it avoids getting you into political trouble, by not ruffling feathers too much on either side of the isle, or pissing off the intelligence community. The problem is it leaves the door wide open for interpretation, which is easy to abuse, and is what got us in this surveillance-state mess in the first place.