A panel of presidential advisers has urged the White House to rein in the National Security Agency, and recommended a set of expansive policy reforms that would check the agency’s broad surveillance powers, including an end to the bulk collection of virtually all American phone records. At the same time, the recommendations also leave in place most of the NSA’s surveillance programs.

In a 300-page report released by the White House on Wednesday, the panel calls on President Barack Obama to increase transparency and accountability at the NSA, taking aim at the controversial spying programs that have been revealed by the slow trickle of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Taken together, the proposed policy changes would improve oversight of the NSA, and implement a system of outside approval aimed at checking the Kafkaesque system of secret courts and self-regulation empowered by the Patriot Act.

But the report offers only vague guidelines on the thornier constitutional and diplomatic issues surrounding bulk metadata collection and mass surveillance of foreign targets.

Rather than providing definitive answers, the report’s 46 recommendations serve as a jumping off point for what is sure to be a long, protracted debate over NSA reform. Here are the highlights:

• Congress should enact legislation that ends government storage of bulk telephony metadata, and transitions it to a private system that the NSA can access with a court order that is “reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.” More broadly, the panel recommends “that, as a general rule, and without senior policy review, the government should not be permitted to collect and store all mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.”
• The FBI should no longer be allowed to issue National Security Letters on its own. The panel also recommends restricting non-disclosure orders, and allowing companies to reveal general information about the requests they get from the government for customer information.
• Executive oversight over the use and limits of surveillance on foreign leaders and in foreign nations.
• The NSA and Cyber Command should be separated into two separate entities. The Director of the NSA should be allowed to be a Senate-confirmed position, and civilians should be eligible for the job.
• Congress should create a Public Interest Advocate position to represent privacy and civil liberties interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (Currently, only Department of Justice lawyers are allowed to argue before the court.)
• The NSA should stop trying to undermine global encryption standards, and should be barred from asking companies to build “backdoors” into their software. The government should also stop secretly collecting “zero day” flaws and using them to mount cyber attacks.
• Background checks on intelligence personnel should be conducted by the US government and not for-profit firms, and personnel with security clearances should be continuously monitored in an effort to prevent future leaks.

Politically, the panel’s recommendations present an awkward problem for the White House, which has persisted in defending the NSA’s surveillance programs as vital to national security interests despite mounting backlash from civil liberties groups, lawmakers, and the tech industry. Although Obama has so far indicated that he is unlikely to make major changes to the nation’s surveillance programs, the report will undoubtedly add to pressure on the White House to rein in the spy agency.

“Knowing that the government has ready access to one’s phone call records… can significantly undermine public trust.”

Of particular significance is the panel’s recommendation that the government end its massive collection of all US phone records, one of the most contentious programs revealed in Snowden’s cache of documents. On Monday, US District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the program is likely unconstitutional, and called the technology that the NSA uses to build and search its database  “almost Orwellian.” Several civil liberties groups have filed lawsuits to end the bulk data collection, and the issue is almost certainly heading to the Supreme Court.

In their report, the five presidential advisers reserve some of their harshest criticism for the NSA’s telephony data collection:

“In our review, we have not uncovered any official efforts to suppress dissent or any intent to intrude into people’s private lives without legal justification. NSA is interested in protecting the national security, not in personal details unrelated to that concern. But as as Justice Sotomayor observed about GPS monitoring of locational information in Jones, telephone calling data can reveal ‘a wealth of detail’ about an individual’s ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’ It can reveal calls ‘to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour-motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar, and on and on.’”

“‘Knowing that the government has ready access to one’s phone call records can seriously chill ‘associational and expressive freedoms,’ and knowing that the government is one flick of a switch away from such information can profoundly ‘alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to society.’ That knowledge can significantly undermine public trust, which is exceedingly important to the well-being of a free and open society.”

But the panel stops short of calling for an end of bulk data collection altogether. Instead, the report recommends that the data be housed by telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and that the NSA be required to get a court order each time analysts want to access the information “for queries and data mining.” It’s an imperfect solution—civil liberties groups object to any mass data collection, and it’s unclear if telecom companies would be willing to do the NSA’s dirty work.

“We’re concerned that the panel appears to allow the NSA to continue the mass collection of emails, chats and other electronic communications of Americans under the pretext that the NSA is ‘targeting’ foreigners overseas,” Trevor Timm, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement responding to the report Wednesday. “While we’re happy that the panel acknowledged that foreigners abroad need some additional privacy protections, mass surveillance isn’t acceptable for Americans or foreigners.”

Meanwhile, White House officials have indicated that Obama is unlikely to embrace any changes to the phone records collection program at all. But still, the panel’s suggestion does open up space for a compromise between the administration and Congressional lawmakers who have pushed for an end of bulk surveillance, and could potentially provide political cover for the White House to allow NSA reform legislation to move forward in Congress.

On the issue of encryption, the report responds to a recently disclosed NSA program called “Bullrun,” which seeks to undermine global encryption standards and the security of commercial software. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the panel recommends that the government stop doing this. The report suggests that the US “make clear” that it will not demand that companies build “backdoors” into their software to allow the NSA to access encrypted communications, or secretly stockpile “zero day” flaws, noting that it weakens confidence in American products and could have broad ramifications on the global data security.

Most policy experts expect that the administration will reject any major changes to US surveillance programs.

Although the report does not suggest an enforcement mechanism—a notable oversight, given that the NSA continues to deny that it has tried to undermine international encryption standards—it is nevertheless significant, coming just one day after tech industry executives met with the President to express complaints that the NSA’s programs are undermining US global competitiveness.

The White House said Wednesday that Obama is currently reviewing the panel’s recommendations, and will announce his conclusions in January. The President is free to accept, reject, or modify any of the proposals, although some recommendations would require legislation from Congress.

Perhaps predictably, White House officials have said that they expect resistance to many of the report’s conclusions from the NSA and other intelligence agencies (already, Obama has rejected the panel’s recommendation to separate the NSA from US Cyber Command), and most policy experts expect that the administration will reject any major changes to US surveillance programs.

But the report does make it more difficult for the White House to resist the growing call for reforms at the NSA, raising the burden for Obama and intelligence officials to provide justification for their vast data collection and mass surveillance beyond 9/11 fearmongering and vague assertions about counterterrorism. Because every time Obama rejects attempts at reform, his opponents will be able to point to the words of his own advisors.

@grace_lightning