Lawyers for the Obama administration have presented four possible methods for retooling the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. While Obama had set a date towards the end of March to be presented with these options, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department have completed the assignment well ahead of schedule. 
 
 Here are the four options Obama has apparently been presented with: 
 
 Phone companies retain the data. Under this plan, phone companies control their data and allow the NSA to access certain information upon request. 
 
 Under this plan, phone companies control their data and allow the NSA to access certain information upon request. Another government agency retains the data. This would provide another separation of power, instead of concentrating both the investigators and the data being investigated inside one organization. Candidates could include the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 
 
 This would provide another separation of power, instead of concentrating both the investigators and the data being investigated inside one organization. Candidates could include the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court A non-telecommunications and non-government agency retains the data. This one is unlikely. Obama on the matter last month: “Any third party maintaining a single, consolidated data-base would be carrying out what is essentially a government function with more expense, more legal ambiguity, and a doubtful impact on public confidence that their privacy is being protected.” 
 
 This one is unlikely. Obama on the matter last month: “Any third party maintaining a single, consolidated data-base would be carrying out what is essentially a government function with more expense, more legal ambiguity, and a doubtful impact on public confidence that their privacy is being protected.” Scrap the program. A daring proposal, but come on, this one's a pipe dream. 
 
 Obama’s own remarks last month lean heavily towards one of the first two options, but it is unclear exactly when a decision will be reached. ||||| President Barack Obama on Friday will try to put the ongoing surveillance controversy behind him, laying out reforms to U.S. intelligence-gathering activities aimed at reassuring Americans that his administration will right the balance between civil liberties and national security. 
 
 But Obama’s powers have significant limits. 
 
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 reset Obama defends NSA call-tracking database 
 
 Many of the key reforms he’s expected to endorse — including changes to the National Security Agency’s practice of gathering information on telephone calls made to, from or within the U.S. — will require congressional action. Like the public — and seemingly the president himself — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are divided on what needs fixing and how to do it. 
 
 “If he punts the ball 16 blocks, all hell’s liable to break loose on the Hill,” said former NSA Director Michael Hayden. “There will be people who will be voting against it because Obama’s reform plan doesn’t go far enough and people voting against it because it doesn’t defend us enough and other people voting against it because it outsources espionage.” 
 
 It’s another challenge for a White House eager to clear the decks for issues that aides want to highlight in Obama’s State of the Union address later this month, such as income inequality and immigration. 
 
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 The snooping saga has been a loser for Obama in nearly every respect. Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked a trove of top-secret documents detailing the surveillance, is still camping out in Russia. The activities angered the international community. And disclosures that widespread and intrusive surveillance continued into Obama’s presidency undercut his reputation as a reformer who would end over-the-top anti-terrorism practices and civil liberties violations many liberals — including Obama and Vice President Joe Biden — denounced under President George W. Bush. 
 
 As commander in chief, Obama could abandon certain surveillance practices altogether. For instance, he could simply shut down the so-called 215 program to collect telephone data in the U.S. so it can be used to trace potential contacts of terrorism suspects. 
 
 But the president has said he’s considering replacing that program with a private-sector-based arrangement that provides the government with similar information on a case-by-case basis. That would require Congress to step in, officials said. 
 
 There’s “going to probably have to be some statutory — and very likely some court — involvement in order to set up the legal framework to achieve that,” outgoing NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis told NPR News last week. “But that’s not abandoning the program. That’s implementing it a different way.” 
 
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 Obama does have unilateral authority to impose dramatic reforms overseas, since surveillance of foreigners abroad is essentially unconstrained by U.S. law. And the White House has signaled that much of Friday’s address will be aimed at the international audience. Obama has personally fielded the complaints of foreign leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was livid over reports that the NSA had effectively tapped her personal mobile phone. 
 
 Administration officials say Obama is likely to embrace many of the recommendations put forward last month by an outside panel he set up to dig into the issue: the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. 
 
 The committee urged ending the NSA’s program that has collected information on billions, perhaps even trillions, of U.S. telephone calls. A federal judge ruled last month that the metadata program — aimed at running down leads about potential terrorist plots — was most likely unconstitutional, but other judges have concluded that the effort is lawful. The panel urged that much of the same data be stored at the phone companies and available to the government on a case-by-case basis with individual court warrants, something likely to require Congress to impose new requirements on the firms. 
 
 The review group also recommended assigning a public advocate to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so judges could hear from an attorney advocating for privacy rights and other constitutional protections for Americans whose data is swept up in surveillance programs. And the panel urged changing the way judges on the court are appointed, so the chief justice no longer has the sole power to make such picks. Those changes, too, would need legislation. 
 
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 All five review group members are set to publicly promote their plans at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. 
 
 “There are a few big things you really need Congress to do. If you want to change the appointment mechanism for the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] or do any kind of structural reform of the FISC, you need it. If you want to continue the metadata program in some form, but reform it in any way, you need an act of Congress,” said Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution. 
 
 Some technical aspects of the call-tracking program could be achieved through updating mundane regulations the Federal Communications Commission imposes on telephone companies’ retention of billing records. But Obama lacks the power to simply order that body to make such changes. 
 
 The review group’s report hinted at a more cooperative solution, suggesting “it would be in the interests of the [telecom] providers and the government to agree on a voluntary system” to replace the current bulk collection of phone data by the NSA. However, those companies and technology firms are now extremely skittish about appearing in any way to be collaborating with the government on programs at least some Americans and many foreigners regard as a huge violation of privacy. 
 
 Another challenge for Obama will be explaining how such a private-sector-based system would work and why he thinks it’s feasible. Experts who’ve consulted with the NSA on the subject believe it could take one to two years to set up the interconnections that would allow queries of call data held by various companies to ping pong back and forth in a rapid way. 
 
 As a result, many analysts expect Obama to announce plans to move toward keeping the data in the private sector but to be vague about the mechanics — just as the review group was. 
 
 “On 215, he can adopt a direction he wants to go and then it will take time to say how,” former Justice Department attorney Carrie Cordero said. “It would be reasonable for him to hold off on providing details on precisely how the changes will be implemented.” ||||| The National Security Agency may keep the e-mails and telephone calls of citizens and legal residents if the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence” or evidence of a crime, according to classified documents that lay out procedures for targeting foreigners and for guarding Americans’ privacy. 
 
 Newly disclosed documents describe a series of steps the world’s largest spy agency is supposed to take to keep Americans from being caught in its massive surveillance net. They suggest that the NSA has latitude to keep and use citizens’ communications under certain conditions. 
 
 The papers, made available to The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, are the first public written documentation of procedures governing a far-reaching NSA surveillance program authorized by Congress in 2008 to gather the e-mails and phone calls of targets who are supposed to be foreigners located overseas. 
 
 In recent days, the Obama administration has defended the program as critical to national security, saying it has helped foil more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad. 
 
 President Obama said after the disclosures that NSA domestic activities “do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court, that is entirely consistent with what we would do, for example, in a criminal investigation.” 
 
 The new documents show that the NSA collects, processes, retains and disseminates the contents of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails under a wide range of circumstances. 
 
 NSA Director Keith B. Alexander described the program as “limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight.” Testifying before Congress, he said “the disciplined operation” of this and a related surveillance program “protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.” 
 
 A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the documents Thursday. 
 
 Privacy advocates expressed concern about what they viewed as rules that leave much wiggle room for NSA analysts to monitor Americans’ communications. 
 
 “These documents confirm what we have feared all along, that the NSA believes it can collect Americans’ international communications with little, if any, restriction,” said Alex Abdo, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Its procedures allow it to target for surveillance essentially any foreigner located abroad — whether or not they’re suspected of any wrongdoing, let alone terrorism.” 
 
 Administration officials say the surveillance program does not target Americans anywhere without a warrant. Still, said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, “there’s a lot of leeway to use ‘inadvertently’ acquired domestic communications,” for instance, for criminal inquiries. 
 
 And the rules show that the communications of lawyers and their clients may be retained if they contain foreign intelligence information, although dissemination must be approved by the NSA general counsel. 
 
 President Obama said the National Security Agency’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens and...people living in the United States.” (Thomas LeGro/The Washington Post) 
 
 Congress authorized the collection program amid a great debate about the degree to which the government was expanding its surveillance authority without sufficient protection for Americans’ privacy. 
 
 Authorized by Section 702 of the amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the program did away with the traditional individual warrant for each foreign suspect whose communications would be collected in the United States. In its place, the FISA court, which oversees domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes and whose proceedings are secret, would certify the government’s procedures to target people overseas and ensure citizens’ privacy. 
 
 It issues a certificate, good for one year, that allows the NSA to order a U.S. Internet or phone company to turn over over e-mails, phone calls and other communications related to a series of foreign targets, none of which the court approved individually. 
 
 “What’s most striking about the targeting procedures is the discretion they confer on the NSA,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program. 
 
 In figuring out whether a target is “reasonably believed” to be located overseas, for example, the agency looks at the “totality of the circumstances” relating to a person’s location. In the absence of that specific information, “a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person,” according to rules on the targeting of suspects. 
 
 Nonetheless, the documents contain a series of steps the NSA may take to determine a foreigner’s location. Agency analysts examine leads that may come from other agencies, including from human sources. They conduct research in NSA databases, scrutinize Internet protocol addresses and target “Internet links that terminate in a foreign country.” 
 
 “When NSA proposes to direct surveillance at a target, it does so because NSA has already learned something about the target,” according to the targeting rules. Often, that lead comes from the CIA or a law enforcement agency. 
 
 The NSA uses whatever details are contained in that lead to make an initial assessment of whether it is being asked to eavesdrop on an overseas target. But the agency then takes other steps depending on the circumstances, such as scanning databases “to which NSA has access but did not originate” for clues about location. 
 
 To prevent U.S. citizens and legal residents from being targeted, NSA keeps a database of phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with people thought to be living in the country. New requests are compared to records on the list. Matches are signals to put the surveillance on hold. 
 
 The NSA then goes through a sequence of potential additional checks, according to the document. It may look at area codes and the ordinary data packets that accompany e-mails as they cross the Internet. And it may check contact lists associated with e-mail accounts, as well as massive “knowledge databases” that contain CIA intelligence reports. 
 
 After it begins intercepting calls or e-mails, the NSA is supposed to continue to look for signs that the person it is monitoring has entered the United States, which would prompt a halt in surveillance and possibly a notification to the FBI. 
 
 The document on “minimization” spells out rules for protecting privacy, some of which have been described publicly. The rules protect not just citizens, but foreigners in the United States. 
 
 If domestic communications lack significant foreign intelligence information, they must be promptly destroyed. Communications concerning Americans may not be kept more than five years. 
 
 If a target who was outside the United States enters the country, the monitoring must stop immediately.
– President Obama asked White House lawyers last month to come up with ways to reform the National Security Administration's phone-surveillance program and they have delivered four options, insiders tell the Wall Street Journal. One option—and probably the least likely to be adopted—is scrapping the program altogether, while the other three involve taking the vast amount of phone data currently being gathered out of the NSA's hands. Sources say the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department have presented Obama with the following options for shifting the phone data: Having phone companies retain the data. Under this option, the NSA would contact phone companies when it needed specific searches of phone records. Telecommunications firms, however, are firmly opposed to this plan. Having another government agency retain the data. The FBI has been spoken of as a possibility for this role, though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is also being considered. Having a non-government, non-phone company agency retain the data. This option is also seen as unlikely. Privacy groups say any such agency would become a mere extension of the NSA. Obama said last month that any such third party would be carrying out "what is essentially a government function with more expense, more legal ambiguity, and a doubtful impact on public confidence that their privacy is being protected," the Wire notes.