It makes the criticism of "But you said X!" irrelevant.

Oh, sure it does. "Technically, if you parse my statements with the help of a lawyer, I didn't say X at all!"

That's extremely satisfying, isn't it?

You really don't need a lawyer to understand the difference between a wiretap and collecting telephone metadata.

I strongly disagree. People did not take that statement to mean "we will do basically the same stuff, but slightly better". This is essentially just a loophole, which we should not tolerate.