Obama Says NSA’s Mass Collection of U.S. Phone Data Will End

President Also to Require Court Order for Search of Information.

President Barack Obama’s plan to curtail the government’s mass collection of American phone data shakes up U.S. spying practices amid a world-wide firestorm over revelations about the nation’s surveillance programs.

But Mr. Obama, promising a continued review, left large swaths of the surveillance programs unchanged, and many of his proposals for overhauling them still face congressional debate and approval.

The president’s plan, which drew mixed reactions from both sides of the surveillance debate after he announced them in a speech Friday, sets the stage for possible conflicts with intelligence officials and their allies in Congress.

In one of the biggest changes, he said the government would stop storing huge amounts of telephone data in NSA computers, but he hasn’t determined where the databases will be located, such as at phone companies. Instead, he asked the attorney general and intelligence officials to work with Congress to come up with alternative locations within 60 days. That could prove difficult.

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