An American government review has called for the reigning in of the NSA – it was revealed that the legal and intelligence experts ordered by Obama to review NSA practices called for a sweeping overhaul of the local surveillance programs. They also called for reforms at a secret national security court and demanded to end a bulk store age of phone “metadata” by the agency.

Although the President doesn’t have to obey the report, such move will open him up to the same sorts of allegations of Constitution breach that have dogged the American government since Snowden revelations. The experts’ report called for “significant steps” to protect the privacy of non-US people and recommended better cooperation with allies in order to avoid the diplomatic fallout from revelations of American intelligence gathering.

However, the government committee report keeps silence about many apparent problems: for instance, it steered away from bans on spying on foreign leaders, only saying that such things should be approved at the highest level.

The review board pointed out that while they didn’t claim the struggle against terrorism was over, the mechanisms should be more transparent and with more independent oversight. The key recommendation was to reform the legislation which allowed the National Security Agency to hold phone records on millions of calls worldwide. It is clear to everyone that the storage by the government of bulk metadata is a potential risk to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

The experts believe that metadata should be held by private providers or another 3rd party, and the government can get access to it if “justified”. In addition, the secret court handling foreign intelligence requests are recommended to have a “public interest advocate” to let it hear more than just the government’s arguments.

The most curious part of the report was when the panel agreed with tech giants that have been seeking to release more data on the numbers of NSA and other parties’ requests they receive. Moreover, the panel recommended the government to be issuing figures of its own. That’s fair – people should know what the companies and the governments are busy with.