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A panel President Obama convened to assess the National Security Agency in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks has issued a 308-page report with this message: To protect privacy, civil liberties, and security, the NSA ought to be reformed.

The panel's 46 recommendations, all implicit critiques of the way the NSA operates now, would rein in the agency in many of the ways civil libertarians have urged. The timing of the report is significant, since it comes just after a federal judge issued a ruling calling the NSA's phone dragnet "almost Orwellian" and likely unconstitutional. In other words, despite surveillance state protestations that its programs are legal, unobjectionable, and subject to oversight by all three branches of government, assessments of the program after the Snowden leaks have now resulted in strong rebukes from a federal judge, numerous legislators, and now a committee formed by the president himself.

Some of the most significant reforms suggested: