President Obama will require intelligence agencies to obtain permission from a secret court before tapping into a vast database of telephone data, but he will leave the data in the hands of the government for now, an administration official said. Mr. Obama, in a much-anticipated speech on Friday morning, plans to pull back the government’s wide net of surveillance at home and abroad, staking out a middle ground between the far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and the concerns of the nation’s intelligence agencies. At the heart of the changes, spurred by the disclosure of surveillance practices by a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, will be an overhaul of a bulk data collection program that has swept up many millions of records of Americans’ telephone calls, though not their content. Read more http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/u...in-speech-on-surveillance-aides-say.html?_r=0
