President Obama to work with Congress to reform NSA's Fisa court and Patriot Act but made clear that mass surveillance would continue.
Obama insisted the programs were not being abused and gave no indication he was to end the mass data collection.
Barack Obama announced the first public review of US surveillance programs since 9/11 on Friday, in what amounts to the president's first concession that the mounting public concern in response to disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden justifies reform.
After weeks in which the Obama and senior intelligence officials have insisted
that the privacy of US citizens was sufficiently protected, the president announced a series of measures aimed at containing the controversy prompted by the Guardian's revelations.
At a White House press conference – his first full question-and-answer session in three months – Obama said that revelations about the National Security Agency's activities had led Americans to question their trust in government and damaged the country's reputation abroad.
But he made it clear that the programs themselves would remain in place. Announcing that a panel of independent figures would "review our entire intelligence and communications technologies", reporting before the end of the year, Obama said: "We need new thinking for a new era."
In an apparent reference to the series of disclosures by the Guardian over the last two months, the president said the "drip by drip" cascade of stories based on documents providedby Snowden had "changed the environment" and impacted public perceptions.
"It is not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well," he said.
Obama began his press conference by announcing what he described as "four specific steps" designed to reassure the public and improve the US's reputation abroad. The proposals included a commitment to work with Congress to "pursue appropriate reforms" to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which has been used to authorise the bulk collection of millions of US phone records.
He said he would work with legislators to revamp the secretive foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which grants the NSA legal authorization for its mass collection, to make it more adverserial. Obama conceded the court worked on the basis of biased proceedings which "only hear one side of the story" and "may tilt it too far in favour of security,may not pay enough attention to liberty".
Obama's suggestion that "privacy advocates" would be introduced to some Fisa court proceedings was not unexpected. Three senators, Richard Blumenthal, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, last week introduced a bill to create such an advocate – a proposal that appears to have wide support.
Nothing Obama announced is likely to materially alter the NSA's ongoing mass collection of phone data and surveillance of internet communications in the short term.
Neither did thepresident exhibit much appetite for significantly altering the surveillance capabilities of the US intelligence community, saying at one point the aim might be to "jigger slightly" the balance between the intelligence and "the incremental encroachment on privacy".
But the announcement, made shortly before the president departed for his vacation, represents a significant climbdown for the White House, which for two months has maintained that it has struck the right balance between privacy and security.
Democratic senator Ron Wyden, a leading critic of the NSA's bulk surveillance powers in the Senate, welcomed Obama's proposals, but called for greater detail. "Notably absent from President Obama's speech was any mention of closing the backdoor searches loophole that potentially allows for the warrantless searches of Americans' phone calls and emails under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Wyden said.
The senator was referring to a disclosure in the Guardian based on a top-secret document which indicates the NSA has a secret backdoor into its databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant.
The document, published on Friday three hours before Obama's announcement, contrasts with assurances that president and senior intelligence officials have previously given that theprivacy of US citizens is protected from dragnet surveillance programs targeted at foreigners. "I believe that this provision requires significant reforms as well and I will continue to fight to close that loophole," Wyden said.
Obama acknowledged that Snowden's disclosures had triggered a public debate, but insisted the whistleblower was "not a patriot" and claimed that the reforms might have been implemented if the leaks had not happened. "There is no doubt that Mr Snowden's leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than would have been the case if I had simply appointed this review board, if I had sat down with Congress [and] worked this thing through," he said.
Throughout his press conference, Obama said there was no evidence that the intelligence agencies had "abused" their powers, insisting he was instead addressing a problem of public perceptions.
"If you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person, and you start to see a bunch of headlines saying 'US, Big Brother, looking down on you, collecting telephone records, etc', well, understandably people would be concerned," he said. "I would be too, if I wasn't inside the government."
Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, took issue with the president's stance. "The intelligence agencies say you can't point to instances of abused authority," he said. "The fact that the government is collecting all this information is itself a form of abuse. But even if you take their narrow definition of abuse, wedon't have the information to evaluate that. It's all secret."
The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, who has defended the NSA, said the review announced by the president would be the "primary order of business"for the committee after the summer.
Like Obama, she framed the review as a measure that would address public sensibilities rather than in any way rein back NSA surveillance. "To the extent possible, I hope these hearings will better delineate the purpose and scope of these programs and increase the public's confidence in their effectiveness," she said.
In his remarks, Obama said the White House was having to respond to a "changed environment" where disclosures being released "drip by drip, you know, one a week, to kind of maximise attention, and see if they can catch us on some imprecision on something".
He said: "In light of that, it makes sense to go ahead, lay out what exactly we are doing, have a discussion with Congress, have a discussion with industry, which is also impacted by this, have a discussion with civil libertarians, and see if we can do this better."
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