President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to adopt legislation that would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata, a surveillance initiative exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. As it currently operates, the NSA's collection program gathers and stores the metadata of every call made to and from the United States.

President Obama's plan, proposed by a presidential panel he commissioned, would prevent the government from tapping into the trillions of records for political or other purposes. Under the plan, the NSA would be required to get authorization from a secret court before demanding that telecoms hand over calling metadata of specified terror targets and their associated contacts.

"I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk," Obama said. "Instead, the data should remain at the telephone companies for the length of time it currently does today."

Rights groups are applauding the move. But they say it’s virtually a meaningless gesture in its current form. As chief executive, Obama has the power to reform the NSA on his own with the stroke of a pen. By not putting this initiative into an executive order, he punted to Congress on an issue that affects the civil liberties of most anybody who picks up a phone. Every day Congress waits on the issue is another day Americans' calling records are being collected by the government without suspicion that any crime was committed.

“He does not need congressional approval for this,” said Mark Jaycox, an Electronic Frontier Foundation legislative analyst.

Currently, the government contends it doesn’t peek into the data unless it has “reasonable articulable suspicion” against a terror target. But until Congress acts, Obama’s proposal leaves the phone metadata in the hands of the nation’s spooks without any laws against how the database may be accessed. And who knows what other types of metadata are now treated similarly.

That means Americans have to accept, at face value, a promise from Uncle Sam that the government won’t abuse a database that includes the phone numbers of all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the calling card numbers used in calls, and the time and duration of those calls to and from the United States.

Further Reading White House to propose law to end NSA bulk collection of phone data

Ultimately, congressional action will be necessary even if the president signs an executive order on the issue. Future presidents are not bound by former presidential decrees, which means the 44th president does not have to adhere to any Obama promises of ethical and limited metadata use.

“There is real value to get Congress to be the one to write this into stone,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a cop-out that he isn’t taking executive action now.”

The president has taken some actions to rein in the bulk telephone metadata program. He ordered the nation’s spies to get approval from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to search the metadata database under the “reasonable articulable standard” that a target is associated with terrorism. (A probable-cause standard continues to be lacking, however.) Obama also dramatically reduced the number of associated calling records connected to the original target that the NSA may analyze—from three hops to two.

The president won't scrap the phone metadata surveillance altogether; it's unrealistic in today’s climate of paranoia. But Obama could turn his words into immediate reality with a stroke of his pen. An executive order would promptly end the suspicionless collection of telephone metadata, and it would finally put a treasure trove of data—detailing intimate factors about our everyday lives—at arms’ length.