The USA Freedom Act, which the House overwhelmingly passed yesterday, has been billed as Congress’ best shot at reining in the overreaching government surveillance revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But after a top U.S. court unanimously ruled last week that the NSA’s mass-collection of Americans’ phone records is illegal, it is clear that the bill’s modest reforms are both necessary and painfully inadequate.

The decision (PDF) by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals puts the rhetoric of U.S. intelligence agencies and their allies to rest, ruling that the government’s secret reinterpretation of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to justify collecting all Americans’ phone records was “unprecedented and unwarranted.” The court declared that “Congress cannot reasonably be said to have ratified a program of which many members of Congress — and all members of the public — were not aware.”

The court further agreed with what surveillance reformers have been saying for years: The program’s indiscriminate collection of metadata (which tells the government who you’re communicating with, how frequently, when and for how long) has created “a vast data bank” of Americans’ activities and associations — an archive that, despite the NSA’s initial claims, has not once helped foil a terrorist plot.

The ruling’s significance is hard to overstate. It’s an indictment not only of the NSA’s phone records program and its faux oversight regime, but also of various other government surveillance programs that have secretly ensnared millions of Americans for years. In that sense, it’s hard not to feel suddenly like the Freedom Act’s modest reforms are a bum deal. With several surveillance provisions, including Section 215, set to expire on June 1, Congress must seize this opportunity to strengthen the bill and end all of the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance programs — not just the phone records dragnet.

Surveillance reformers are in a much better position now than they were a year ago. Last year’s version of the Freedom Act was gutted behind closed doors at the intelligence community’s behest, then abandoned during a procedural vote in the Senate. The new version passed by the House would end the bulk phone records program and slightly improve oversight and transparency, while still allowing the NSA to get records from phone companies through targeted court orders.

The bill’s passage has riled Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate surveillance hawks who are trying to pass either a temporary extension or a clean reauthorization of the Patriot Act. But after the recent court ruling, a reauthorization defies all logical sense: You can’t reauthorize a program that Congress never authorized in the first place.

Even without the 2nd Circuit’s ruling, the NSA defenders’ talking points for keeping the status quo have been thoroughly debunked. Multiple courts and two independent White House panels have concluded the 215 program has never prevented terrorism, violates innocent Americans’ privacy and should end. Even the U.S. intelligence community supports the most recent version of the Freedom Act.