In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations of bulk collection, the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence operations will have to comply with new limits on how they collect personal data, NBC News reported.

A Tuesday report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence requires agencies to focus on "new training, oversight, and compliance requirements" for handling personal data, which include "mandatory training programs to ensure that intelligence officers know and understand their responsibility to protect the personal information of all people."

The Obama administration took the unusual step of also upping protections for individuals outside the United States, whose data must now be deleted after five years if it is not relevant to any pending investigation. Information on U.S. citizens, meanwhile, must be destroyed if it "lacks foreign intelligence value," the network detailed.

Private communications data of Americans that are collected "incidentally" during foreign surveillance sweeps will have to be deleted immediately unless deemed vital for security purposes, the National Journal Group's Government Executive noted. So-called "national security letters," which compel private companies to hand over a customer's communication or financial records, meanwhile, may be disclosed publicly after a period of three years.

Critics of the administration's data-collection efforts said the new rules fail to address the main problem, which they view as a lack of judicial control, Wired reported.

Agents who issue "national security letters," for example, can do so without any court oversight, and businesses thus have no recourse to challenge an accompanying gag order that keeps them from disclosing the receipt of such notes, the Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized.

The new order "doesn't change the essential problem," said Kurt Opsahl, the the Electronic Frontier Foundation' deputy general counsel. "It is still a gag issued without court authority and can be continued indefinitely -- simply on the say of an FBI agent -- without court involvement."

Similarly, the new rules on purging bulk-collected data are far from airtight since they only apply when the information serves no intelligence purposes, Opsahl noted.

"It gives a tremendous amount of discretion keeping in mind that foreign intelligence information is a very broad term," he said.