In the words of one NSA official, privacy advocates got a "nothing burger" with passage of the USA Freedom Act. Patrick Semansky / AP

With a 67-32 vote in the Senate this afternoon, Congress finally passed the USA Freedom Act, a surveillance bill being hailed on the Hill as the biggest effort to rein in the intelligence community since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“This is historic — the first major overhaul of government surveillance laws in decades,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who championed the legislation.

The Senate adopted the House version of the bill, which had been watered down at the behest of intelligence agencies, and President Obama signed the Freedom Act into law later this evening.

While far from what most would recognize as “reform,” at the end of the day, the bill is probably more of a victory for transparency than it is for privacy.

That's because the Freedom Act has focused almost exclusively on ending one single National Security Agency program under one single authority: The secret bulk collection of Americans' phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, revealed almost exactly two years ago by Edward Snowden.

Section 215 and two other “emergency” post-9/11 surveillance provisions briefly lapsed Sunday night after the Senate failed to reauthorize them. The new law replaces the NSA’s bulk data collection with a program that requires telecom companies to retain the data and grant access to intelligence agencies through more targeted court orders.

The other surveillance powers — roving wiretaps and the so-called lone wolf provision — remained unused even as surveillance hawks raised apocalyptic warnings about letting them expire.

Two independent White House panels have found that the metadata collection program has never helped to foil a terrorist plot. A major appellate court decision also ruled the program was illegal, and that it merely served to create a “vast data bank” of extremely sensitive information — specifically, phone numbers and when and how often they were called — about millions of innocent Americans.

In other words, the bulk phone records program was on its way out no matter what.

The court ruling could have been a big opportunity to push for an end to all domestic bulk collection under the Patriot Act, not just phone records. But additional privacy protections had been negotiated away in the House, and Senate advocates were not given a chance to add them back. The result renders the Freedom Act a missed opportunity to address countless other NSA authorities, such as Executive Order 12333 and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, ones we know (again, thanks to Snowden) continue to collect many other types of data.

In fact, the bill was so laser-focused on phone records that it failed to address the other forms of mass data collection that previously took place under Section 215. Of the 180 court orders issued by the secret FISA surveillance court last year, only 5 related to the phone records program. What did the court authorize under the other 175? Were they targeted surveillance orders or more give-us-everything-all-the time-mandates similar to the phone records dragnet?