As reported earlier, the President has a plan to take government out of the business of collecting and storing telephonic metadata. In reality, he already made some changes back in January. This plan seeks to expand on them.

For non-emergency situations, he ordered that the government can only seek Section 215 data based on national security concerns after a judge agrees and approves the particular number that can be queried. He also ordered that the result of a query is limited to two hops from the specific number.

The President indicated that he asked the intelligence community and the Attorney General to develop options for a new program that would fill the gaps that the program was designed to address without government holding the data.

More: Obama Administration Explains Changes to Meta Data Collection