Paul spoke for more than 10 hours on the floor of the Senate – and he and his colleagues reminded us the Patriot Act can collect a lot more than phone records

Republican senator Rand Paul, with the help of Democrat Ron Wyden and several others, held court on the Senate floor for more than 10 and a half hours straight on Wednesday in an attempt to grind the Senate to a halt until the part of the Patriot Act used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance expires on 1 June. (Although by stepping aside before midnight, it’s unclear if Paul did, in fact, derail the extension of the act).

Paul spent a lot of his time eloquently explaining the dangers of secret and suspicionless spying on innocent Americans’ telephone records, but he and his colleagues also made a lot of other great points often lost in the current debate. Here are five:

1. The NSA can use the Patriot Act to collect in bulk a lot more than phone records

The controversy over Section 215 of the Patriot Act centers around the NSA’s massive phone metadata program, first revealed by Edward Snowden in the Guardian in 2013, which allows the spy agency to collect the phone records of millions of innocent Americans. But as Wyden emphasized during one of Paul’s short interludes, the NSA also thinks it can use the same law to collect in bulk the cellphone location information of Americans – and it has in the past. The NSA thinks it can essentially turn all our phones into tracking devices 24 hours a day, despite the law saying nothing of the sort.

While Wyden said the NSA claims it is not doing this today, he indicated the agency thinks it has the legal authority if it wants to. He strongly suggested the agency also believes it can collect in bulk millions of innocent Americans’ credit card records, medical records, financial and bank records, and gun records, using the same law as well.

2. The USA Freedom Act doesn’t cover everything

While there’s debate about how much the USA Freedom Act – the legislation passed by the House of Representatives last week that would replace bulk collection with a system to search the data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis – actually reforms the NSA, there are major parts of the spy agency’s legal authority that everyone admits the bill does not amend.

Paul repeatedly brought up the Fisa Amendments Act, which is the law underpinning the controversial Prism program – which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats – revealed by Edward Snowden. The NSA also abuses the same law to scan large portions of emails coming in and out of the United States in secret.

The USA Freedom Act also doesn’t touch executive order 12333, which governs how the NSA can collect supposedly purely overseas communications. Whistleblower John Napier Tye harshly criticized this order in the Washington Post, saying that based on information he saw as someone with top-secret clearance as a high-ranking State Department official, “Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215 [of the Patriot Act].”

3. NSA surveillance is used for a lot more than just for terrorism cases

Government officials often justify NSA surveillance by claiming it is vital for fighting terrorism, but many of its programs are used for a lot more than just that. Paul brought up the little-cited technique known as “parallel construction”, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) gets wiretaps from the NSA and hands over the information to local cops, who then pretend they got the information from somewhere else besides the NSA. The whole point is to prevent courts and judges from ever finding out the information’s origin. Shortly after Snowden’s revelations first started in 2013, Reuters reported that the DEA had regularly laundered intelligence in this unconstitutional manner for years.

4. Using the Patriot Act for mass surveillance is illegal no matter what Congress does

Lost in much of the debate over whether or not to reauthorize the Patriot Act is the fact that the historic second circuit court of appeals opinion, released two weeks ago, ruled that it was illegal for the NSA to use the law to conduct mass surveillance at all. Paul brought the opinion up several times over the course of the day, wondering out loud how Congress could even be considering renewing an authority for a program that would be illegal for the NSA to continue anyway.

5. There are plenty of other civil liberties concerns Congress has yet to deal with

In addition to his extended criticism of the NSA, Paul touched on a number of other controversial practices of American law enforcement, including civil forfeiture, which has allowed local police to confiscate literally hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists around the country without ever charging them with a crime. Paul also brought up another less well-known section of the Patriot Act not up for renewal, known as “sneak and peek warrants”. These court orders allow law enforcement officers to essentially break into suspects’ homes without their knowledge, and were sold to the American public as being needed for terrorism but have been used more than 99% of the time in drug cases.

Congress has until the stroke of midnight on 31 May to reauthorize the Patriot Act.