WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency considered abandoning its secret program to collect and store American calling records in the months before leaker Edward Snowden revealed the practice, current and former intelligence officials say, because some officials believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits. The internal critics pointed out that the already high costs of vacuuming up and storing the "to and from" information from nearly every domestic landline call were rising, the system was not capturing most cellphone calls, and program was not central to unraveling terrorist plots, the officials said. After the program was disclosed, civil liberties advocates attacked it, saying the records could give a secret intelligence agency a road map to Americans' private activities. Responding to widespread criticism, President Barack Obama in January 2014 proposed that the NSA stop collecting the records, but instead request them when needed in terrorism investigations from telephone companies, which tend to keep them for 18 months. Alexander argued that the program was an essential tool because it allows the FBI and the NSA to hunt for domestic plots by searching American calling records against phone numbers associated with international terrorists. Civil liberties activists say it was never a good idea to allow a secret intelligence agency to store records of Americans' private phone calls, and some are not sure the government should search them in bulk. A presidential task force examined NSA surveillance and recommended ending the phone records collection, saying it posed unacceptable privacy risks while doing little if anything to stop terrorism.