If you got angry last month when the National Security Agency, the White House and Eric Cantor's spy-friendly House of Representatives took a once-promising surveillance reform bill and turned it into a shit sandwich, I've got some good news for you: so, apparently, did many members of Congress.

Late Thursday night, in a surprising rebuke to the NSA's lawyers and the White House – after they co-opted and secretly re-wrote the USA Freedom Act and got it passed – an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives voted to strip the agency of its powers to search Americans' emails without a warrant, to prohibit the NSA or CIA from pressuring tech companies to install so-called "back doors" in their commercial hardware and software, and to bar NSA from sabotaging common encryption standards set by the government.

What a difference the last year has made, you might say. Look what a little transparency can do!

But the House's support of these new fixes, by a count of 293 to 123 and a huge bipartisan majority in the House, just put the pressure back on for the rest of the summer of 2014: the Senate can join the House in passing these defense budget amendments, or more likely, will now be pressured to plug in real privacy protections to America's new snooping legislation before it comes up for a vote. This all puts the White House in an even more awkward position. Does President Obama threaten a veto of the defense bill to stop this? (The White House could always, you know, ban the bulk collection of your data right this second.)

Yes, all of these problems were exposed in some fashion by the Snowden revelations: A year ago, it was still classified that NSA was searching for the American people's data in its database of "foreign" data. President Obama said in response that NSA email and internet spying "doesn't apply to people living in the United States" – but the back-door loophole showed that it did. And the spy community's campaign for weaker encryption standards was largely in the shadows as well, Snowden files exposed it all. The public got mad, and now the House has overwhelmingly rejected those programs with legal and technical fixes, including Rep Alan Grayson's overlooked amendment to disband NSA's covert encryption sabotage campaign at Nist, the little-known government agency with a lot of power over encryption standards. (By the way, Grayson's throwing the first Congressional Crypto Party next week.)

Of course, the victory is far from permanent and could be undone rather quickly. The FBI – not the NSA – is usually the agency that tries to strong-arm companies into placing back doors in technology, and you can expect intelligence agencies to try to undo the new provision against spending money on searching for US persons in secret, with a little help from Congressional intelligence committees.

Still, the real hurdle remains in the Senate, where these strengthened provisions will still have to be adopted and passed on to Obama's desk if they have any chance of having an affect. That is still a long shot, but the pressure's not going away.

And, hey, until Friday morning, most surveillance reform advocates were worried about the Senate ramming through the currently neutered version of the USA Freedom Act as its fig leaf of reform, before going back to business as usual and proposing bills that will give the NSA more power – not less.

However, the stalwart bipartisan Senate triumvirate of Rand Paul, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall wrote an op-ed this week in the LA Times signaling that they will continue to push for full-scale NSA reform – not just tinkering but a wholesale ban on bulk collection and reform to secret courts. Wyden, Udall and Senator Martin Heinrich sent a letter to Obama on Friday, suggesting the same thing. And the president's Privacy and Civil Liberties Board is expected to issue its long awaited report on "back door" surveillance on Americans by July 2.

Oh, and speaking of deadlines: Wyden has been asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for information on how many times Americans' info has been searched through that same "back door" the House repudiated on Thursday night. As it happens, Clapper promised a response to Wyden by the very same day. Time's up, Jim: