NSA reform is not going away, even if officials in Congress and the White House are praying it does. The NSA’s staunchest defenders are currently making one last attempt to kill any meaningful restrictions on surveillance, but in the process, they’re are on the verge of painting themselves into a corner they can’t get out of – just as even more secret spying on Americans comes to light.

As members of Congress fled from DC a week early last month to avoid voting on war with Isis before the midterms, they also abandoned all but the faintest hope of passing the USA Freedom Act – the watered-down reform bill that has been the focus of so much debate about what to actually do about the NSA – before the end of 2014.

NSA defenders may think they’re successfully running out the clock on reform efforts, but it’s about to come back to haunt them. As the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman explained on Friday, if Congress refuses to vote on the USA Freedom Act when they come back for their lame duck session after Election Day, their strategic cowardice will set up a showdown come June, when Congress must re-authorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act – the law allowing the NSA to vacuum up every American’s phone records.

The law will expire altogether if Congress doesn’t affirmatively vote “yes” on it, which should effectively shut down the NSA’s domestic metadata spying program. And it’s pretty clear the House doesn’t have enough votes to pass any re-authorization.

“Section 215 sunsets next June, and given the administration’s staggering misinterpretation of the law, the House is highly unlikely to reauthorize it absent significant reforms,” Rep Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the Patriot Act, told Ackerman.

Sen Dianne Feinstein is reportedly working on “compromise” language for the USA Freedom Act that might be voted on in the lame duck session this December, but considering the bill is already a compromise of a compromise, you should expect many civil liberties organizations to drop their already-tepid support and strongly oppose the bill if it’s watered down any further. And with the deadline in June 2015 looming, this should spark an all-out fight to kill Section 215 completely.

Meanwhile, the steady stream of NSA news shows no sign of stopping. A week from now, the long awaited documentary about Snowden and the NSA by Laura Poitras, the filmmaker whom he he first spoke to at length, is set to debut in New York ahead of its nationwide release later this month. Whether the movie will bring new revelations remains to be seen, but it will certainly expose a whole new audience to the plight of the American whistleblower and to why Snowden risked so much to give us what he did.

In addition, important new documents released this week by the ACLU shed disturbing light on the NSA’s surveillance practices, this time under a secretive Executive Order – known as “12333” – that many have long suspected is authorizing much of the NSA’s overseas surveillance, but which also sweeps up data from countless Americans.

The NSA used that very legal authority to break into the links between Google and Yahoo data centers and siphon off huge amounts of data without the companies’ knowledge. It’s also the same authority that the State Department’s recently departed internet freedom chief ominously warned in the Washington Post was allowing Americans’ data to be captured under the auspices of “foreign” data collection. It’s also a legal authority that is exempt from oversight by Congress or the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, meaning we know even less about it than the other NSA powers that have been dripping out over the last year and a half.

If the government’s mass phone surveillance program was the leak ’round the world last year, 12333 is going to be the magic number our lawmakers get forced to reckon with next year.

Currently, the USA Freedom Act doesn’t touch 12333 surveillance, and you can bet the more people learn about how the NSA is abusing yet another power, the bigger the push will be next year to have it included in any meaningful Congressional reform.

There are also at least four major challenges to NSA surveillance authority in courts around the country right now, and ff Congress doesn’t pass USA Freedom those lawsuits will all stay alive. Many of them have a good shot at striking down the NSA’s authority for their phone surveillance program that has caused so much consternation over the past year. As Snowden’s ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said in an interview this week: “People see courts and Congress as these isolated institutions that do what they’re going to do, and it’s really not true. They’re very sensitive to the public and the zeitgeist.”

And we’ve seen everyone from the attorney general to the FBI director have a coordinated caniption fit over the past week about the changes tech companies like Apple and Google are making to their products – changes that are making people’s privacy rightfully protected with encryption by default. But it’s the US government that forced the hand of these companies by refusing to pass any surveillance reform legislation, despite the fact that nearly everyone agrees the NSA’s practices are not just devastating for privacy but the US economy as well. In fact, Sen Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is holding a panel next week with some of the biggest names in tech that aims to highlight how the refusal to reform the NSA is hurting American business. You can expect even more technology drive privacy moves like this over the next year.

So, NSA defenders, please keep stalling all you want. The prospects of deeply curtailing the NSA’s powers much more than you ever wanted may be getting stronger every day, and when it happens, you’ll have your own inaction to blame.