Recommended NSA Overhaul: Civilian leadership replaces military, tighter standards to get phone records from companies

President Obama’s task force has put forth their recommendations to overhaul the NSA surveillance program in the wake of Edward Snowden’s public revelations.

The Wall Street Journal was given a preview of the suggestions, noting that the The experts recommended forbidding the US from collecting and storing millions of phone call records of Americans. Instead the records would be held by phone companies or a third party, with NSA receiving access to select data after meeting a new higher standard of proof.

The task force also suggested changing NSA leadership from military to civilian. Currently the agency is part of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, the main military cyber-warfare unit.

Another suggestion is to separate NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, the part responsible for code-making, from the rest of the agency. This would help to avoid a conflict of interests, in which one component of the agency is developing and promoting new encryption methods and other communication security protocols while another is tasked with cracking them.

The panel suggested reviewing NSA’s procedures for issuing security clearances. The intelligence agency came under fire after it was revealed that Snowden was given his clearance, which allowed him to leak classified documents detailing the surveillance programs.

The members of the task force are Richard Clarke, a longtime US counterterrorism chief; Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director; Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor; Cass Sunstein, former White House regulatory official; and Peter Swire, a former economic and privacy official.

The report is due Sunday, but may not be public at that time.