Obama To Reveal Curbs On NSA Spying

United States President, Barack Obama, is to announce changes to the country’s electronic spy programmes after revelations made by ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The BBC reports that he aims to restore public confidence in the intelligence community.

Mr. Obama is expected to create a public advocate at the secretive court that approves intelligence collection.

His proposals come hours after United Kingdom media reports that the US has collected and stored almost 200 million text messages per day across the globe.

A National Security Agency (NSA) programme extracted and stored data from the SMS messages to gather location information, contacts and financial data, according to the Guardian newspaper and Channel Four News.

The report is the latest in a series of revelations from files leaked by Mr. Snowden, a former NSA contractor charged in the US with espionage and currently a fugitive in Russia.

The NSA told the BBC the programme stored “lawfully collected SMS data” and any implication that collection was “arbitrary and unconstrained is false.”

Mr. Obama’s speech on Friday at Department of Justice comes after a five-person White House panel given the job of reviewing US electronic spying programmes in the wake of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures presented their report in December.