Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., left, talks with Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., before the senate luncheons in the Capitol. USA Freedom Act vs. USA PATRIOT Act A look at how the two measures differ.

Rand Paul was able to block the Senate from passing a surveillance reform bill Sunday, forcing the expiration of key parts of the PATRIOT Act. But the Kentucky firebrand can’t stand in the way forever.

If supporters of the USA Freedom Act can get 60 lawmakers to back the bill, the Senate could approve the measure this week. The bill, first proposed in 2013 by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is chiefly designed to block the intelligence community from collecting millions of Americans’ phone records every day — the first and most salacious revelation from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.


Under the PATRIOT Act, passed amid demands for new surveillance mechanisms in the wake of 9/11, the intelligence community is allowed to collect business records — anything from a flight manifest to phone logs — as long as those records are “relevant” to a national security investigation. The FBI often uses that kind of authority early on in investigations to help figure out what it should focus on.

But the government also argued that nearly all Americans’ phone records were relevant to national security because scanning phone records to find links between suspects required a massive database of phone call data. As intelligence officials have told members of Congress over the last two years: If you’re looking for a needle, you need the haystack.

The USA Freedom Act would put new constraints on how the government could obtain records under the PATRIOT Act and other national security laws. Instead of obtaining massive troves of data in bulk, the NSA could only ask companies for data on a specific entity like a person, account or device. And the government would have to show that the individual is associated with a foreign power or terrorist group.

Some argue that the bill would still allow the government to acquire data on a somewhat large scale — perhaps thousands at a time — but supporters of the bill maintain it would shut down the massive phone records and quash any similar programs.

Separately, the USA Freedom Act would require the intelligence community to be more transparent about how much data it’s collecting, and allow private companies — especially the technology sector — to be more open about how often they turn over information to the feds. It would create a new opportunity for civil liberties defenders to lobby the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and force the government to declassify major new opinions from FISC judges.

The measure also would change the law to allow surveillance to continue on terrorism suspects after they enter the U.S. And the bill would extend two other parts of the PATRIOT Act set to expire at midnight — “lone wolf” provisions designed to target terrorists acting individually, and “roving wiretap” provisions that let surveillance follow suspects even if they frequently change communications devices.