NSA bill blocked by Senate Republicans

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

last updated 10 January 2015

On Tuesday, a bill that would have ended the National Security Agency's program that collects the phone records of Americans in bulk stalled in the Senate.

The bill was supported by the Obama administration and technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Microsoft. It fell two votes short of the 60 necessary to pass, with Democrats and a few Republicans voting in favor.

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Under the bill, most records would have stayed with the phone companies. An analyst would have had to get a new type of court order to obtain records, and they would only have access to records up to two degrees away from a suspect, The New York Times reports.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.