--- title: NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends description: The National Security Agency will lose the ability to collect and store virtually all of American phone records after a Senate vote Tuesday. canonical: https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/ author: Michael Scherer article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-06-02T21:27:22.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T07:44:52.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends og:description: After a 67-32 vote in the Senate, Obama signed the bill og:url: https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc635747d3e3339f7/698852b9cd1bbae68d6fb9d8/obama.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: President Barack Obama speaks following a meeting with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office of the White House on May 29, 2015, in Washington. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends twitter:description: After a 67-32 vote in the Senate, Obama signed the bill twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc635747d3e3339f7/698852b9cd1bbae68d6fb9d8/obama.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends > Sponsored content. 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TIME's Michael Scherer explains why NSA leaker Edward Snowden is on the short list for the 2013 TIME Person of the Year._ by [Michael Scherer](https://time.com/author/michael-scherer/) ## Michael Scherer Updated: Dec 13, 2023 7:44 AM UTCPublished: Jun 2, 2015 9:27 PM UTC  President Barack Obama speaks following a meeting with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office of the White House on May 29, 2015, in Washington. President Barack Obama speaks following a meeting with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office of the White House on May 29, 2015, in Washington. Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images by [Michael Scherer](https://time.com/author/michael-scherer/) ## Michael Scherer Updated: Dec 13, 2023 7:44 AM UTCPublished: Jun 2, 2015 9:27 PM UTC The National Security Agency will lose the ability to collect and store virtually all of American phone records, after the U.S. Senate voted 67-32 Tuesday to reform the secret intelligence collection programs revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. The Senate voted to pass a compromise version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that has already passed the House, with the support of President Obama, who signed the measure into law Tuesday night. Under the new law, the U.S. government would stop collecting the phone records, showing date, time and numbers connected. Instead, telephone companies will be required to keep the information, which can then be queried with a court order by intelligence and law enforcement professionals. Senate leaders, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called the vote a “resounding victory for those who plotted against our homeland,” had hoped to resist the House reforms. But McConnell failed to schedule enough time to debate a different bill before several provisions of the Patriot Act, including the phone records program, expired on Sunday night. “He put us in a position to get us something no worse than the Freedom Act,” said Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan. McConnell scheduled votes on several amendments to the Freedom Act Tuesday that would have limited the reforms, but they all failed. Nonetheless, many civil libertarians, including Amash, also opposed the Freedom Act for not going further in limiting the ability of court orders to request large numbers of documents. Under the Freedom Act, requests for information can be made based on a “specific selection term,” which can be an individual, association or an organization, a provision that opponents fear the intelligence community will interpret to once again gather vast amounts of information. At issue throughout the debate was the history of the specific telephone-record program. It was permitted under the 2001 U.S.A. Patriot Act under a vague provision that allowed the government to request “tangible things” including books, records, papers and documents for an investigation into international terror or clandestine intelligence. Until the Snowden leaks, U.S. officials had concealed the fact that this provision was used to collect records of virtually every phone call made in America. Asked in 2013 if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” National Intelligence Director James Clapper falsely answered “not wittingly,” in an unclassified Senate hearing. Snowden later said this deception was a major reason for his decision to leak classified material. The Senate vote ended a tense three days in the Senate, in which Senators arrived home over the weekend only to be forced to stand by as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, obstructed movement on a last-minute effort to pass a short term extension to several intelligence authorities so that the Senate could craft its own bill. The rebellion of Paul, who forced the expiration of several intelligence gathering powers Sunday night in protest, forced McConnell to act fast to reinstate the authorities. Paul’s procedural moves were able to delay passage of the bill, but only for a couple days. In the end, he voted against the final bill, along with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are both also running for President. Republican Ted Cruz voted for the reforms. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, who was traveling at the time of the vote, said he would have voted against the reforms. Graham also criticized Paul’s tactics. “There are lines I don’t cross, within my party or without,” he told TIME. “To me, he crossed the line here. He put the country at risk unnecessarily.” ## Transcript >> Edward Snowden made TIME's shortlist for 'Person of the Year' this year. In late spring and early summer I once known a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who was working for the National Security Agency began contacting reporters around the world saying he wanted to give them information. He basically took, as one person told me, one of everything. From the deepest, darkest safe house within the NSA describing almost everything they are doing around the world to collect information both on regular citizens and on traditional surveillance targets. The effects of these disclosures have really been earth shaking both domestically and around the world. In the U. S. there's Congressional Reform efforts President Obama has come up saying he wants to pursue reforms, there's resolutions with the United Nations that could actually change the way the world talks about privacy as a human right. And then there are a number of diplomatic crisis that have started as a result of this. The sense of the allies of the United States very upset about the surveillance that's been disclosed. And finally there's a real fear among U. S. technology created that foreign customers will not trust them now both because there are working relationships between the NSA and these companies. But also because the Snowden disclosures revealed that the NSA was also hacking into these technology companies without their knowledge. Snowden was 29 years old when he leaked this information. He has since turned 30, he's living now in Moscow on a one year asylum grant from the Russian government. He is someone who has thought very deeply about what he did. He thought very strategically about the information he leaked, and he has a cogent argument which has been spreading. And, for that reason I think that the mark that Snowden will leave on the world is that he is the person who has really introduced in a popular sense the notion that this brave new world of internet communication which gives us so much wonderful things can have a dark side. >> This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed. >> And there is a requirement among democratic states to think about the issues that arise here and figure out what rules and regulations they want to put in play. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/"},"headline":"NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends","datePublished":"2015-06-02T21:27:22.000Z","dateModified":"2023-12-13T07:44:52.000Z","description":"After a 67-32 vote in the Senate, Obama signed the bill into law","url":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/","keywords":["intelligence","Senate","Edward Snowden","Rand Paul","National Security"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc635747d3e3339f7/698852b9cd1bbae68d6fb9d8/obama.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Michael Scherer","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/michael-scherer/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc635747d3e3339f7/698852b9cd1bbae68d6fb9d8/obama.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"President Barack Obama speaks following a meeting with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office of the White House on May 29, 2015, in Washington.","caption":"President Barack Obama speaks following a meeting with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office of the White House on May 29, 2015, in Washington.","creditText":"Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/intelligence/","name":"intelligence"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/","name":"NSA Program to Collect Phone Records Ends"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Person of the Year 2013 Shortlist: Edward Snowden","description":"TIME's Michael Scherer explains why NSA leaker Edward Snowden is on the short list for the 2013 TIME Person of the Year.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cxBatp7g/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-12-11T12:42:24.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cxBatp7g.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/","duration":"PT2M26S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3906350/national-security-agency-phone-records/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```