The US Patriot Act, which gave the agencies the right to be overheard, suspended its validity

Senator Rand Paul / John Pemble

The US Senate did not extend the federal law, known as the Patriot Act, which was passed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist act. The law had a limited duration, and since its extension was not passed in the Senate, the law was terminated on the night of June 1. The NSA (National Security Agency, NSA) suspended a massive wiretapping, which she conducted in connection with the operation of this law, 4 hours before midnight in advance.

Instead of the Patriot Act, proponents of privacy advocacy have been promoting the USA Freedom Act (“ US Freedom Act ”) since 2013. His name is an acronym, which stands for “The Act of Uniting and Strengthening America through Observance of Rights and the Termination of Eavesdropping, Mass Data Collection and Online Surveillance.” The act corrects many provisions of the laws that allowed the PRISM program to work - in particular, it bans mass tapping and obliges special services to receive warrants to eavesdrop on specific people.
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Due to the specifics of the work of the Senate, any senator can block the adoption of the law. In this case, Senator Rand Paul, who has long opposed the practice of mass surveillance, has distinguished himself. He recently announced his intention to participate in the 2016 presidential race. In this regard, the current US President Barack Obama accused Paul of trying to "score political points" in this matter.

The patriotic act, or rather, the act of “rallying and strengthening America by providing the appropriate means required to curb and prevent terrorism” dated 2001, was adopted shortly after the notorious terrorist act, which, according to the official version, the Arab terrorists from Al-Qaeda "with the help of two hijacked planes collapsed the building of the World Trade Center, conducted a third plane into the Pentagon building, and the fourth plane, where passengers rebelled against the seizure, fell into the field.

In addition to the unprecedentedly wide powers that the special services received in connection with the adoption of this law, the PRISM system was developed and adopted in 2007, and at the time of adoption, it was completely secret. It allowed mass surveillance of a huge number of people, recording, storing and filtering their conversations over telephone networks and the Internet. The system became known after a NSA employee, Edward Snowden , in 2013 decided to report it to the public.