Panel hands Obama US surveillance report: Official

The report contains more than 40 recommendations the White House will consider

A review panel handed President Barack Obama a report on surveillance by US spy agencies in the wake of explosive revelations on vast phone and Internet sweeps by fugitive Edward Snowden.

The report submitted yesterday contains more than 40 recommendations the White House will consider, and Obama will make a speech after a full-scale internal review of US eavesdropping activity concludes in January, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

The report is said to recommend a continuation of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs, which have alarmed US allies and civil liberties groups, but with some new privacy safeguards included.

The White House will study the work of the five-man panel and decide which recommendations to adopt, which require further study and which will be discarded.

The report looks at how, following technological advances, Washington can use its intelligence capability to guard national security while maintaining public trust.

Obama said last week that he would introduce some restraints on the NSA following the review.

A flurry of intelligence leaks from Snowden, who is living in temporary asylum in Russia, lifted the lid on a vast global spying network.

Tens of thousands of documents leaked by Snowden to The Guardian newspaper and other media outlets have detailed the scope of the NSA's shadowy activities.

Snowden's revelations made it clear that metadata and information from millions of emails and phone calls, some of it about American citizens, has been systematically raked in by the NSA.

The leaks have provided a rolling embarrassment for the White House and damaged US national security, while the scale of the eavesdropping has shocked and angered US allies.

The New York Times reported that the review panel would recommend making public the privacy protections foreign citizens can expect when their telephone or Internet records are gathered by the NSA.

Separately, a US official said the White House had also decided to maintain the "dual-hatted" arrangement that sees a single military officer head the NSA eavesdropping service and US cyberwarfare operations.