A presidential advisory committee set up to examine the National Security Agency (NSA) is recommending the continuation of "a program to collect data on every phone call made in the United States," but with new restrictions "intended to increase privacy protections," The New York Times reported yesterday.

The report by the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, expected to be delivered to the White House by Sunday, wasn't released publicly, but officials described its contents to newspapers. The group concluded that NSA surveillance programs are legal but recommended various changes to their structure, transparency, and security.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the panel's draft proposals "would change the spy agency's leadership from military to civilian and limit how it gathers and holds the electronic information of Americans. The task force, for example, proposed that the records of nearly every US phone call now collected in a controversial NSA program be held instead by the phone company or a third-party organization." There would be "stricter standards" for allowing NSA officials to search the data.

The report also addresses surveillance of foreigners. The committee "argues in favor of codifying and publicly announcing the steps the United States will take to protect the privacy of foreign citizens whose telephone records, Internet communications, or movements are collected by the NSA," The Times wrote. "But it is unclear how far that effort would go, and intelligence officials have argued strenuously that they should be under few restrictions when tapping the communications of non-Americans abroad, who do not have constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment."

The report will also recommend that Obama and senior White House officials "review the list of foreign leaders whose communications are routinely monitored by the NSA." In October, it was reported that the NSA was tapping the phones of 35 world leaders.

The report is also "likely" to recommend "the creation of an organization of legal advocates who, like public defenders, would argue against lawyers for the NSA and other government organizations in front of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," The Times wrote.

Obama recently said he plans to propose "some self-restraint" on the NSA, but didn't detail any specific limits.

The presidential advisory committee includes former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, former White House official Cass Sunstein, along with legal experts Peter Swire and Geoffrey Stone.

The report's recommendations are likely to meet resistance from intelligence agencies.

UPDATE: A story published this morning in the Washington Post says the Obama administration "has decided to preserve a controversial arrangement by which a single military official is permitted to direct both the National Security Agency and the military’s cyberwarfare command." The decision was made despite the draft recommendation "that a civilian head be installed at the NSA, effectively splitting the roles."

In response to the report's recommendations, ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said, "Nothing short of stopping the mass, suspicionless surveillance of Americans is acceptable. We look forward to evaluating the report's details and whether the reported 'stricter rules' for obtaining US records are a meaningful and substantive improvement. In the end, however, Congress must pass legislation to end bulk collection of Americans’ sensitive call records. Requiring third parties to store Americans’ records for the government is not a solution."

The ACLU is hoping Congress will support recently introduced legislation to shut down the NSA's call records program and "prohibit the bulk collection of all other American records."