from online.wsj.com: President Barack Obama outlined a plan to sharply curtail the government’s collection and use of American phone data, part of the most significant revision of U.S. spying practices in a decade and an outgrowth of the world-wide backlash over revelations about U.S. surveillance programs. The most immediate changes to spy operations affect a National Security Agency program that collects data on nearly all U.S. phone calls. Under the new presidential directive, intelligence officials must now obtain approval from a secret national-security court for government searches of phone data, and the scope of individual searches has been scaled back.