The outgoing head of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, told a United States Senate committee on Thursday that he was open to government spooks narrowing the focus of the metadata that they gather.

The NSA’s chief’s brief comment (which came at 51’30” in the recorded session) was in response to a question from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, concerning how telephone metadata is gathered and stored.

At present, the NSA's dragnet metadata program routinely collects the to/from information, date, and time of all Verizon calls (and presumably calls from other carriers as well). It was the first secret scheme revealed as a result of the documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden last summer. Since then, this intelligence gathering operation has been the subject of much debate in Washington, DC.

“Chairman, I think there are three options that you put on the table,” Alexander said. “You mentioned the government holding it, the ISPs holding it. I think there is yet another option where we look at what data you actually need and only get that data. Can we come up with a capability that just gets those that are predicated on a terrorist communication? I think you have those three options that I’ve put on the table. Those are three of the ones that I think need to be clearly discussed and the merits from both sides, they have pros and cons on the agility that you would have with the program.”

In a speech in January 2014, President Barack Obama ordered the NSA to give up its vast control of a controversial (and perhaps even ineffective) database of telephone metadata. The NSA and other intelligence agencies will now be required to get a court order to access the data. The president added that the attorney general would work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to determine a new method for accessing the data before the metadata program comes up for reauthorization at the end of March.

Gen. Alexander has a notorious reputation in the intelligence community for pushing the “collect-it-all” tactic.

In a July 2013 profile of the general in the Washington Post, an anonymous intelligence official discussed how Alexander orchestrated the vast data collection of Iraqi telecommunications as a way to thwart terrorist attacks against US troops in Iraq.

“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, [Alexander’s] approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” the anonymous source said. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

Similarly, another anonymous official told Foreign Policy magazine in September 2013: "Alexander's strategy is the same as Google's: I need to get all of the data. If he becomes the repository for all that data, he thinks the resources and authorities will follow."

UPDATE Saturday 7:30pm CT: Alex Abdo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote Ars to say:

"I don't know whether it is the first time [such a reining in has been suggested], but it is certainly a good sign that the NSA is openly considering ending its bulk collection of sensitive information about millions of innocent Americans. It should do more than just consider ending bulk collection, though. It should simply end it."