Illegal and unconstitutional: that’s what a sudden, blistering report from an obscure government committee has called the NSA’s phone-record database. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was conceived in the wake of 9/11, the event we’ve used to justify almost any level of surveillance. But on Thursday, it came out with perhaps the harshest take yet we’ve seen on the NSA’s phone-record database, drawing a combination of sharp disagreement and immediate disregard from the president. In contrast to the vague promises of reform in Obama’s speech last week, though, the oversight panel’s 238-page report takes direct aim at the problems posed by the bulk collection of phone metadata — even if all it gets is a rhetorical victory.