The Senate defeated an overhaul of the NSA. Here's what's next for surveillance reform.

With the GOP set to take control of the Senate, defenders of civil liberties may have to find other ways to rein in the surveillance state

NSA
(Image credit: (Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/NurPhoto/Corbis))

On Tuesday evening, the USA Freedom Act died in the Senate, failing a cloture vote, 58-42. The bill's demise ended the legislative effort to put some limits on the National Security Agency phone dragnet first exposed by Edward Snowden in June 2013. But there are still modest steps Congress can take to chip away at the surveillance state, and other avenues that civil liberties groups can pursue.

The USA Freedom Act would have prevented the government from acquiring some subset of all Americans' phone records, and it was the only bill under consideration that tackled that aspect of NSA's enormous surveillance program. But there are two more efforts to limit the NSA legislatively via appropriations. The Massie-Lofgren amendment to the Defense Department appropriations bill would defund NSA's ability to search the content of the American side of conversations picked up under PRISM, the program that mines a massive amount of our electronic data.

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Marcy Wheeler

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including The Guardian, Salon, and The Progressive, and is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the Scooter Libby CIA leak investigation.