WASHINGTON — President Obama will lay out plans on Friday morning to pull back the government’s wide net of surveillance at home and abroad, in a speech that administration officials say will stake out a middle ground between the far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and the concerns of the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Mr. Obama is expected to outline plans to put more limits on the bulk collection of telephone calls; tighten privacy safeguards for foreigners, particularly heads of state; and propose a new public advocate to represent privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. The president will lay out the details in an address scheduled for 11 a.m. at the Justice Department.
But he will stop short of turning over the storage of phone data to a consortium of telecommunications companies, according to officials, and he will not require that a court grant permission for all so-called national security letters seeking business records.
The speech comes after months of national debate set off by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has sought refuge in Russia. Reports that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the phone calls of foreign leaders from Brazil to Germany confronted Mr. Obama with a series of diplomatic brush fires.
The president, aides said, will fuse broad principles with specific proposals — all in the service of his refrain that just because the government can do things, it does not mean that it should. He will address an audience that includes Justice Department lawyers, intelligence officials and civil liberties advocates, though his message will be watched around the world.
The White House has been tight-lipped about the specific proposals. But broad details have begun to circulate as the president has met with lawmakers and intelligence officials to brief them. Some of the tough decisions are likely to be left to Congress, which must sign off on many of Mr. Obama’s changes.
In response to the furor over Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, Mr. Obama commissioned a panel of advisers, who reviewed the N.S.A.'s surveillance practices and urged him to end the systematic collection of logs of all Americans’ phone calls, and to keep that information in private hands “for queries and data mining” only by court order.
The panel, which included five intelligence and legal experts, recommended in a 300-page report that any operation to spy on foreign leaders must pass a rigorous test weighing the potential economic or diplomatic costs should the operation become public. To prevent harm to the credibility of American technology firms, it also recommended that the N.S.A. stop weakening encryption technologies for computer networks and using flaws in common computer programs as a basis for mounting cyberattacks.
By embracing some of the proposals — stricter standards on surveillance of foreign leaders — while brushing aside others, like storing bulk telephone data with private companies, the president is balancing sometimes-conflicting demands from Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies and the pinstriped world of diplomacy.
Mr. Obama has already rejected one recommendation: splitting the command of the N.S.A. from the United States Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare unit, to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of a single individual.
The speech has been weeks in the making, the aides said, after a long Christmas break in Hawaii during which Mr. Obama weighed the 46 recommendations made by his panel of advisers.
For a president trained as a constitutional lawyer, who began his career as a critic of government spying, the speech is likely to lay bare the evolution of Mr. Obama’s thinking, after five years in which he has absorbed a stream of national security threats in his presidential daily briefing.
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