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What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they — and usually it wouldn’t be “they,” it’d be the FBI — go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause…. So point number one, if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule.
He goes on to use this weird new "U.S. person" formulation a total of five times during the portion of the interview Buzzfeed excerpted.
This grates like fingernails on a blackboard. "U.S. person?" Who the hell says that? The correct term, Mr. Obama, is American citizen. But you can't bring yourself to say that any more, can you? Because you're playing to an audience that includes plenty of persons standing on U.S. soil who aren't American citizens.
Update: I can only think of one previous noteworthy instance where a phrase similar to "U.S. persons" was employed: