Obama panel: To call for NSA overhaul

A presidential panel calls for the U.S. National Security Agency to be run by civilians instead of the military, people familiar with the panel's report said. The five-person advisory group of intelligence and legal experts says in a still-being revised report the spy agency's controversial program to collect data on nearly every phone call made in the United States should continue, the officials told the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. But it recommends new limits on how the electronic information is gathered and held, they said. For instance, it recommends the so-called metadata the NSA collects be held instead by a phone company or a third-party organization, people familiar with the recommendations told the Journal. The committee's report, to be given to President Obama Sunday, also argues in favor of codifying and publicly announcing the steps Washington will take to protect the privacy of foreign citizens whose phone records, online communications or movements are collected by the NSA, the officials told the Times. Obama established the task force, known as the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, in August in response to disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "I'm tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities, particularly our surveillance technologies," Obama told a news conference Aug. 9. "And they'll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy, particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public," he said. The group would provide a final report by the end of the year "so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy and our foreign policy," Obama said.