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NSA: Obama to get call data ideas next week

President Barack Obama is likely to get ideas next week for how to restructure the National Security Agency's telephone metadata program under which the National Security Agency gathers vast amounts of so-called metadata on phone calls made by Americans, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said Friday.

"As you know, the president has asked us to look at an option where the govenrment no longer holds this data. We do have some ideas," Alexander said during a speech in Chicago. "The good news is we have some ideas that we're going to push out to the interagency that they're working to get to the president next week."

"We think there's a couple better things that we can do that will help this. None of it will be perfect," he added.

During a speech last month, Obama instructed Alexander and Attorney General Eric Holder to come up with a plan by March 28 for how the call data could be moved out of government hands—either by leaving it at phone companies, creating a new entity to hold it or by using other intelligence programs to do the kind of terrorist tracking the current call database is aimed at.

Responding to a question about recent reports that the NSA collects data on only 20% to 30% of calls involving U.S. numbers, Alexander acknowledged that the agency doesn't have full coverage of those calls. He wouldn't say what fraction of the calls NSA gets information on, but specifically denied that the agency is completely missing data on calls made with cell phones.

"That part is not true," he said. "We don't get it all. We don't get 100% of the data. It's not where we want it to be, but it has been sufficient to go after the key targets that we're going after."

The NSA director, who is expected to retire within weeks, indicated that some of the gaps in coverage are due to the fact that the NSA "paused any changes to the program" during the recent controversy and discussions about restructuring the effort.

During his remarks, Alexander also said that the call tracking program is aimed not just at Al Qaeda, but also at terrorist groups supported by Iran. The targets of the program beyond Al Qaeda have rarely been discussed and are often blacked-out in court documents related to the surveillance.

"I have to have a relevance standard to say that this number is associated with Al Qaeda affiliates or other terrorist groups, Iranian-based. We show that first. If we can prove that, then we take that number to see where it's calling into the United States," he said.

Alexander spoke at an event sponsored by the Chicago Council on Public Affairs in association with the University of Notre Dame. You can listen to his full remarks here.