On Sunday, the NSA’s domestic surveillance program went offline after the Senate failed to pass short term extensions that would allow it to continue past the expiration deadline at midnight.

Resistance, led mainly by Senator Rand Paul, pushed back against passage of the extension over the course of many attempted votes in the last few weeks. Paul’s parliamentary maneuvers, which included a filibuster, successfully stopped the Senate from allowing the NSA to continue business as usual. At 4pm on Sunday, the NSA began to take the monitoring offline in order to have it shut down by midnight. In the event the program is restarted (which is possible) it will take about 24 hours to start back up.



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The President has repeatedly urged the Senate to keep the program in place, calling it vital to our national security. He found agreement with much of Congress, including the Republicans.

The Senate is still considering a new bill, the USA Freedom Act, which would replace rather than extend the Patriot Act provisions. The bill has already passed the House, and last night the Senate overwhelmingly voted to keep debate open, so it may still pass.

But in the meantime, the program is indeed shut down. But what is it and what does it mean?

When you hear about this expiration in the news, they mostly talk about the NSA spying program. What they are referring to is section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is the one that involves bulk collection of the phone calls of Americans. It has been described as a huge dragnet. The information is gathered and sorted, and the NSA is then able to query the database on any parameter they choose. The data is mainly identifiers, such as who was on each end of the phone call, where each party was when they were on the call, the duration of the call, etc. It does not involve literally recording the content of every phone call in America.

Additionally, the NSA was able to sort through America’s emails – that’s like 1.7 billion emails a day – to be analyzed and mined for data using methods such as pattern recognition, keywords and so on.

As ABC News reports, there are other provisions too, including a “Lone Wolf” one that allows the government to monitor any individual person suspected of being a terrorist, even if there is no evidence. And of course, the roving wiretaps that seem to have little oversight.

The USA Freedom Act will not necessarily leave such provisions unchanged. For example, with regard to phone calls, under the act the data would be stored by the phone companies themselves rather than by the government directly. Then the NSA would need to get a warrant in order to access it, rather than simply typing in a query as they can do now.

The fate of the USA Freedom Act won’t be decided right away. The earliest possible opportunity for debate to end and a vote to occur is Tuesday morning. But there is no guarantee that it will happen, as it is likely the contentious debate will continue long past that time.

In the meanwhile, your phone call data and your email are not being monitored. At least… not as far as you know.