A report by a panel of outside advisers has urged President Obama to place a number of restrictions on the NSA. Commissioned by President Obama back in August, the report is a response to the outrage inspired by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing of the agency’s spying methods. The advisers are calling for greater congressional oversight and presidential approval for spying on national leaders. They also want to see the agency give up its cyber-spying on American hardware and software.

According to The New York Times, the panel argues that in the past dozen years, the agency’s powers have been “enhanced at the expense of personal privacy.” The article says the panel “recommended changes in the way the agency collects the telephone data of Americans, spies on foreign leaders and prepares for cyberattacks abroad.”

The most significant recommendation, NYT says, was that Mr. Obama “restructure a program in which the NSA systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts.”

That information, the panel of intelligence and legal experts recommends, should “remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium,” thus requiring a court order if the agency wants to investigate any individual.

“If Mr. Obama adopts the majority of the recommendations, it would mark the first major restrictions on the unilateral powers that the NSA has acquired since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” reports NYT.

The experts made 46 recommendations to the President who, according to one senior administration official, is “open to many” of the changes. He has, however, rejected one recommendation calling for separate leaders for the NSA and the Pentagon-based United States Cyber Command.