Obama Signs USA FREEDOM Act, Ending NSA Bulk Metadata Collection

President Barack Obama signed the USA FREEDOM Act into law on June 2, 2015, representing the most significant reform of U.S. surveillance programs since the 1970s and a direct response to Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA mass surveillance. The Act prohibited bulk collection of all records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, ending the NSA’s authority to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk and requiring intelligence agencies to obtain specific court orders targeting particular individuals or groups.

The bill passed the Senate 67-32 after a dramatic showdown in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell attempted to extend the PATRIOT Act without reforms but was blocked by a coalition of privacy advocates including Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden. The legislation allowed three expiring PATRIOT Act authorities—Section 215 bulk collection, “lone wolf” surveillance, and “roving wiretap” provisions—to lapse briefly before reinstating them with new restrictions. Under the new law, telephone companies would retain metadata, and the NSA would need to request specific records through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rather than collecting everything in bulk.

The USA FREEDOM Act also increased transparency requirements for surveillance programs, mandating declassification of significant FISA court opinions and requiring intelligence agencies to report statistics on surveillance activities. It created a panel of outside legal experts (amicus curiae) to argue before the FISA court in significant cases, addressing longstanding criticisms that the secret court heard only from the government.

Privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations offered mixed assessments of the reform. While groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU praised the Act as a historic first step toward reining in mass surveillance, they noted it left many NSA programs untouched, including PRISM and upstream collection under Section 702 of FISA. Critics argued the reforms were modest compared to the scope of surveillance revealed by Snowden, and some surveillance hawks in Congress attempted to water down even these limited protections. Nonetheless, the passage demonstrated that Snowden’s disclosures had fundamentally shifted the political debate, forcing Congress to impose meaningful limits on intelligence agencies for the first time since 9/11. The law represented a partial vindication of Snowden’s decision to expose mass surveillance, though he remained in exile facing Espionage Act charges.