AP
There are no US citizens who are publically known to be in the captivity of ISIS, the jihadist group that notoriously broadcast the execution of a number of American hostages over the internet last year. But according to CNN, there are still 30 US citizens held hostage by other groups around the world.
The announcement included one fairly important shift in the US government's generally attitude towards hostage cases.
Obama twice clarified that the "US government" would not pay ransoms, arguing that this "risks endangering more Americans and funding the very terrorism that we're trying to stop."
This is an important qualifier: the US authorities won't pay or facilitate ransom payments.
But the Justice Department apparently won't actively stand in the way of a family that wants to negotiate or even pay such a ransom, even if a US-designated terror group is the recipient.
Big business
In recent years, hostage-taking has become a major source of terrorist income, with Al Qaeda and its affiliates taking in $125 million in ransoms, according to the New York Times.
Various European governments' follow unacknowledged policy of making and facilitating ransom payments, with France alone reportedly paying nearly $60 million.
The US, on the other hand, has followed a strict policy of not paying ransoms.
"It's a collective action problem," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for
In other words, the willingness of other governments to pay ransoms has created a lucrative market for hostage-taking to which the US government is now adapting. The US's compromise is to disallow government payments but not to explicitly stand in the way of private ones.
The announcement comes after Lawrence Wright reported in The New Yorker that the family of Steven Sotloff, a freelance journalist that ISIS executed in September of 2014, was repeatedly threatened with prosecution for trying to negotiate a ransom amount - even though an FBI agent assigned to the handling of Sotloff's captivity implied to the captured journalist's parents that such a prosecution was extremely unlikely.
American journalist Steven Sotloff (center)
Obama said that the US government would not threaten to prosecute family members of hostages who attempted to negotiate or pay ransom demands with terrorist groups.
"No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying ransom for their loved on," the president said, according to CNN. "The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain with threats like that."
'A new level of pain for the rest of society'
The new policy tries to address a wrenching moral and legal dilemma for US policymakers: Should the US stand in the way of a family that is attempting to recover a loved one if it means preventing the transfer of money to a terrorist group? Are there limits to how far the US should go in recovering hostages - and in how far the US government should let private citizens go?
Dane Egli dealt with these questions as head of National Security Council's Hostage Working Group from 2004 to 2006, overseeing the working group at points when there were as many as 50 US citizens held abroad. During his tenure, the George W. Bush administration came down against the payment of ransoms.
Today, Egli is concerned that any change in policy that makes it easier to pay ransoms will end up benefiting terrorist groups.
In saving a life in exchange for enriching a terrorist group, Egli says that,"You've relieved pain for one family, but you've created a new level of pain for the rest of society."
'We need to place the good of the nation higher'
Egli says there are better ways of facilitating hostages' releases, like raising the incentives for rank-and-file hostage-takers to turn on their commanders - a tactic that Egli says was successful with FARC militants in Colombia.
For Egli, it's important that policymakers approach hostage issues with a society-level view.
"When it comes to hostages we don't' just recognize the family or the individual good," says Egli. "We need to place the good of the nation higher."
Egli described any increased willingness to pay ransoms as "an insidious spiral into a new market" - a chance for terror groups to enrich themselves on a nationality of hostages that's historically been unwilling to comply with ransom demands.