President Barack Obama will call for the National Security Agency's ability to store phone data from millions of Americans to be ended.

Mr Obama will not say who should ultimately hold the data. Instead he will today call on the intelligence community and Congress to consult on where it should be maintained, a senior official said.

A presidential commission has recommended moving the data to the telephone companies or a third party.

The president's speech follows an internal review spurred by disclosures about the government's sweeping surveillance programs by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden.

Many of the changes Mr Obama was expected to announce appeared aimed at shoring up the public's confidence in the spying operations. That included a move to add an independent privacy advocate to the secretive court that approves the phone record collections.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said yesterday that the president believed the government could make surveillance activities "more transparent in order to give the public more confidence about the problems and the oversight of the programmes".