President Barack Obama's administration has quietly abandoned a proposal it had been considering to put raw US telephone call data collected by the National Security Agency under non-governmental control, several US security officials said.

Obama promised changes in the government's handling of such data in a speech a year ago after revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of the agency's electronic surveillance of Americans' communications.

President Barack Obama gives a thumbs up to Secretary of State John Kerry after his State of the Union address earlier this week, but the thumbs down to a metadata proposal. Credit:Reuters

Under the proposal floated by a presidential review panel, telephone call "metadata" generated inside the United States, which NSA began collecting in bulk after the September 11, 2001 attacks, could instead be collected and retained by an unspecified private third party.

The Obama administration has decided, however, that the option of having a private third party collect and retain the telephone metadata is unworkable for both legal and practical reasons. "I think that's accurate for right now," a senior US security official said.