President Barack Obama said today he would propose reforms next month to some of the NSA’s vast spying powers, hinting he might put a stop to the agency's bulk collection of records associated with every phone call made to and from the United States.

"I’m taking this very seriously. Like I said before, this is the debate we need to have," the president said in his final news conference of the year before heading to Hawaii for a 17-day vacation.

The president, however, appeared opposed to granting amnesty to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is living in exile in Moscow and facing espionage charges in the United States.

Obama’s comments involving NSA surveillance, which took a combined 10 minutes or so of a more than hourlong question-and-answer session with reporters, came a day after a panel he commissioned recommended a radical overhaul of the NSA. (.pdf) One recommendation included closing the government's stockpile of phone metadata, and instead leaving that data with the nation’s carriers and allowing the NSA to query it via an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Obama seemed to support the idea as a way to help restore Americans’ trust in the NSA.

"The question we’re going to have to ask, can we accomplish the same goals this program is intended to accomplish in ways that give the public more confidence that the NSA is doing what it is supposed to be doing?" Obama said. Moments later, he added: "We may have to refine this further to give people more confidence."

Even if the changeover was implemented, the NSA still could query the data, believed to have 1 trillion records. It just won’t have direct access to it like it now does.

But the recommendation from the presidential panel, known as the "President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies," brings with it other privacy concerns. Among them the prospect that phone companies may be legally compelled to retain the phone-calling metadata for many years, effectively replacing the NSA's secret database with a distributed database available to anyone with a subpoena.

As it now stands, from at least 2006, the telcos have been funneling the phone metadata to the NSA on secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Under the presidential panel’s recommendation, the FISA court, as it’s known, would issue orders at the NSA’s request to the telcos to provide "information about particular individuals" if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe that the information sought is relevant to an investigation intended to protect "against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

As the program now operates, the government may query the database for any reason it wants, but has settled on a so-called standard of "reasonable articulable suspicion."

The president was also asked whether amnesty should be granted to Snowden, given that a U.S. federal judge said that the phone-metadata collection program infringes the Fourth Amendment and would render the nation's founders "aghast."

The president said Snowden amnesty was a matter for the courts and Attorney General Eric Holder to decide. But he said the leaks have hurt the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the nation's global standing.

"So I think that, as important as necessary as this debate has been, it is also important to keep in mind, this has done unnecessary damage to our intelligence capabilities and U.S. diplomacy," the president said.

Rick Ledgett, an NSA official heading a task force assessing the Snowden damage, has suggested amnesty should be strongly considered if it would put the NSA's leaked files back under U.S. control.

"My personal view is, yes, it's worth having a conversation about," Ledgett told CBS days ago. "I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part."

In light of Ledgett's statements, Obama was pressed Friday for a more definitive answer on Snowden amnesty.

"There is a difference," the president responded, "between the president saying something and Mr. Ledgett saying something."