One year ago Thursday, the House of Representatives nearly cut the purse strings for the National Security Agency’s bulk collection and five-year retention of U.S. phone records with the so-called Amash amendment.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose leaks exposed the program a month earlier, was stuck in Moscow’s international airport, his passport canceled, as the Obama administration feverishly pleaded with House members not to kill the dragnet it claimed was needed to prevent terrorism.

The anti-surveillance camp, led by Michigan Reps. Justin Amash, a Republican, and John Conyers, a Democrat, came within 12 votes of a win.

“The Amash amendment really created some momentum that has carried through, it helped rally the public behind our effort,” Amash tells U.S. News. He believes there was majority support for the amendment, but that House leaders strong-armed members.

“I feel very confident going forward, I think the message has been sent to people in leadership,” he says.

Congress seems to have grown more critical of the NSA since the July 2013 amendment vote, but legislative action to limit mass surveillance remains just out of reach.

The USA Freedom Act, which would end the automatic bulk collection of phone records, has the best chance of any stand-alone bill of becoming law in this session of Congress.

But time is running out. The Freedom Act likely needs Senate approval before the monthlong August recess – after which the November election will slow lawmaking to a crawl – to have a fighting chance of being matched with a House version and sent to President Barack Obama this year.

The House passed a compromise version of the Freedom Act on May 22 that lacks privacy protections in the original bill, disappointing Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who vowed in a news release to strengthen protections in his Senate version.

Leahy “is close to an agreement” with fellow senators, the Obama administration and the intelligence community on changes to the Freedom Act, according to a judiciary committee aide, but there’s no timetable yet on when the Senate will vote on a revised version.

Obama defended the phone program for months before pivoting in March, after two executive branch review panels concluded it wasn’t essential to preventing terrorist attacks. White House spokespeople frequently urge the Senate to pass the Freedom Act.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who drafted the House version of the Freedom Act, remains optimistic the bill will be sent to Obama’s desk during the current session of Congress, according to his spokesman Ben Miller.

Sensenbrenner is warning that Congress may let Section 215 of the Patriot Act expire next year if surveillance limits do not become law. For nearly a decade, NSA lawyers have persuaded Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges that Section 215 allows the NSA’s phone record collection.

“The administration needs to push the Senate to act or it risks losing the authority altogether,” Miller says.

The battle lines have shifted since July 2013. Many of the Amash amendment’s most enthusiastic backers, including Amash himself, voted against the House version of the Freedom Act after it was weakened at the behest of the Obama administration and more hawkish members. Meanwhile, eight members who voted against the Amash amendment co-sponsored the Freedom Act.

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“The House version of the Freedom Act, as reformed, was so compromised that it takes us in the wrong direction and actually puts more Americans at risk of having privacy violations,” Amash says. “It was a step in the wrong direction, not a baby step in the right direction.”

He says changes to the bill show the continued power of House leadership to stymie reform.

“They have codified in law practices that are unconstitutional,” he says. “They wrote the legislation to allow the government to collect on the basis of a discrete term, but discrete term is so broad that it could include things like area codes or east of the Mississippi.”

Leahy’s game plan to enhance the Freedom Act may be complicated by senators reluctant to bend to public pressure and pass any surveillance-reforming bill. During a June 6 Senate intelligence committee hearing on the bill, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Dan Coats, R-Ind., said the public misunderstood what the NSA does and that their actions should not be guided by misinformation.

“Unfortunately, there are more privacy advocates in the House than there are in the Senate,” Amash says. “I remain cautiously optimistic, but it remains to be seen what product comes out of the Senate.”

Amash and the diverse cohort of congressional privacy advocates aren’t alone in their skepticism of the House-passed Freedom Act. Civil liberties groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, have said changes to the bill diluted oversight requirements and included loopholes that would enable the NSA to continue broad surveillance using vague selection terms to scour phone records.

The 2013 Amash amendment showed surveillance reform was an urgent issue and “almost certainly” encouraged House leadership to take up the Freedom Act, says Harley Geiger, a senior counsel at the center. His group and others are pushing to strengthen the bill's privacy and transparency requirements, and Geiger says pressure from the public and every level of government offer “reasons for optimism” that an effective bill will clear Congress.

“It’s just a race against the clock to hammer out details,” he says.

The NSA will lose one of its top supporters in January as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., departs to become a radio host, but the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, will remain a staunch advocate for the agency’s powers. Ruppersberger stands by his vote against the Amash amendment, and says the proposal “would have taken a hatchet to our intelligence collection tools and made our country less safe.”

The ranking member, whose district houses the NSA’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, says the House version of the Freedom Act contains “provisions to enhance privacy and civil liberties” that Amash’s proposal lacked while maintaining the government’s surveillance tools.

“I am hopeful that the House and the Senate will be able to come to an agreement this year on how to protect our national security while increasing transparency and civil liberties,” Ruppersberger says.

Though Leahy wants to strengthen the Freedom Act before it’s sent to Obama, House surveillance foes sought a different route to plugging its holes, winning a series of amendment votes June 19 to a defense spending bill.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Sensenbrenner won 293-123 support for blocking the NSA from forcing product redesigns on tech companies and requiring a warrant for access to U.S. Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A unanimously adopted amendment by Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., would ban the NSA from weakening encryption standards and a unanimously accepted amendment from Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., would boost the budget of the one-man intelligence whistleblower office by $2 million. The White House did not immediately take positions on those reforms, and the underlying spending bill is awaiting Senate action.

As the 2014 and 2016 elections approach, surveillance reform will likely become an issue in some races, with candidates hoping to mimic the success of new wave conservatives like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a staunch privacy advocate who filed a lawsuit to end the NSA phone program.

The June 10 primary election defeat of anti-Amash amendment House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., by Dave Brat may provide a template for upstart Republicans seeking to unseat more mainstream GOP incumbents.

“Dave Brat took a strong pro-privacy stance on surveillance reform, and contrasted his position with that of Eric Cantor,” Geiger says.

Amash says the House leadership shake-up after Cantor’s defeat may benefit surveillance foes.

Recently, however, the efficacy of any congressional action was called into question by John Napier Tye, a former State Department official who worked to promote Internet freedom abroad.

Executive Order 12333, a 1981 presidential directive that authorizes the warrantless collection of communications overseas, allows the NSA to collect U.S. electronic communications routinely stored on foreign servers, Tye said.

“There are massive, widespread constitutional violations going on every single day,” Tye told U.S. News on Monday, after warning Friday in a Washington Post editorial about “the possibility that Section 215 collection does not represent the outer limits of collection on U.S. persons but rather is a mechanism to backfill that portion of U.S. person data that cannot be collected overseas under 12333.”

Executive orders cannot be rescinded by Congress.

“I don't know to what extent I could talk about that order because of the classified briefings I’ve had,” Amash says. “But I will say there are tools that the NSA and other government agencies may be using that would undermine our reform efforts, so that even if we stop one method for obtaining information on Americans in violation of the Constitution, they may still use other methods.”