The recommendation from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to abandon the NSA's phone surveillance was more sweeping than Obama's decision to curtail the program and a similar proposal from another panel of experts. The oversight board's new 234-page report - a copy of which was obtained by the AP - contained strong dissents from two members of the five-member board - former Bush administration national security lawyers who recommended that the government retain its broad phone surveillance authority. The recommendation to purge the phone database tackles one area that Obama sidestepped in his speech - what to do with hundreds of millions of files already in government hands. National security officials have said the duration of data retention should be addressed by a legal review to be completed by March. The board concluded that the phone surveillance did not have a "viable legal foundation" under the Patriot Act, which was used to provide legal backing for the operation after it was secretly authorized by President George W. Bush. The board also said the surveillance raised constitutional search and free speech concerns. Two federal judges have split in recent rulings over the constitutionality of the phone sweeps. A White House official said Thursday that the Obama administration disagreed with the oversight board's stance on phone sweeps. "The administration believes the program is lawful," said national security spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden. She added that Obama "believes we can and should make changes in the program that will give the American people greater confidence in it." The NSA's surveillance programs and other data mining operations began coming to light last year, and drawing intense criticism, after revelations fueled by an estimated 1.7 million documents taken by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden and handed over to several journalists around the world. The board called for special attorneys to provide independent views in some proceedings before the secret spy court, as opposed to Obama's plan for a panel of experts that would participate at times. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the board's report would "add to the growing chorus calling for an end to the government's dragnet collection of Americans' phone records." Leahy is co-sponsoring a bill that would shut down the phone program. Civil liberties groups applauded the board's report. "We agree with both its analysis and its principal conclusions," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jaffer has pressed one of the lawsuits against the government seeking to shut down the bulk phone collections. Meantime, the Justice Department accused the company that handled a background check on National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden of defrauding the government by submitting more than 650,000 investigations that had not been properly completed. That figure, the Justice Department said Wednesday in a civil complaint, amounted to 40 percent of the cases the company, U.S. Investigations Services Inc., sent to the government over a four-year span ending in September 2012. In response, the company said that integrity and excellence are core values at USIS, which has 6,000 employees. The government said that USIS engaged in a practice known inside the company as "dumping" or "flushing." It involved releasing uncompleted background cases to the government and representing them as complete in order to increase revenue and profit. AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace and AP writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.