The New York Times reports: A year after President Obama ordered modest changes in how the nation’s intelligence agencies collect and hold data on Americans and foreigners, the administration will announce new rules requiring intelligence analysts to delete private information they may incidentally collect about Americans that has no intelligence purpose, and to delete similar information about foreigners within five years.

The new rules to be announced Tuesday will also institutionalize a regular White House-led review of the National Security Agency’s monitoring of foreign leaders. Until the disclosures in the early summer of 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor whose trove of intelligence documents is still leaking into public view, there was no continuing White House assessment of whether the intelligence garnered from listening to scores of leaders around the world was worth the potential embarrassment if the programs became public.

Mr. Obama publicly ordered the end of the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, saying he had known nothing about the effort — an admission that revealed the White House was not reviewing N.S.A. activities the way, for example, it annually reviews covert actions around the world by the C.I.A. The timing of the announcement about the new review process comes the week before Ms. Merkel is scheduled to visit the White House, where a long-debated arrangement for greater intelligence sharing between the countries is expected to be discussed.

Mr. Obama has never said whom, beyond Ms. Merkel, he took off the list of foreign leaders whose conversations are monitored, but it appeared that programs in Mexico and Brazil continued, while several dozen leaders have been removed. [Continue reading…]