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Holder: We're on track to meet NSA reform deadline

The Justice Department and the National Security Agency are on track to meet President Barack Obama's call for officials to come up with plans to revamp or replace an NSA program which gathers massive amounts of data on telephone calls made and received by Americans in order to help investigate possible terroist plots, Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday.

"We will meet the deadline that the president has set," Holder said, referring to the March 28 deadline Obama laid out in a speech in January promising reforms to U.S. intelligence gathering practices.

Speaking at a news conference on an unrelated settlement with automaker Toyota, Holder confirmed that the White House has been receiving regular updates on the study.

"That review is ongoing. We’re in touch with the White House. I’ve been in touch with the president....The communication is ongoing on this one," the attorney general said in response to a reporter's question.

National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said in a February 14 speech that "ideas" were headed to the White House the following week, more than a month ahead of the deadline.

In Obama's January speech, he called for an end to the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata. He urged replacing the program with one that stored the data with telephone providers, or with a third-party created for that purpose, or that used other capabilities to provide a similar ability to gain insight into terrorist plots.

House Intelligence Committee leaders are working on a legislative proposal to require telephone companies to store the call data for 18 months and make details from it quickly available to the government in response to a court order. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) has said he wants to unveil the plan before the president's deadline next week.