Dustin Volz

A bill that would effectively end one of the National Security Agency's most controversial spy programs is finally getting its day in congressional court.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a markup of an amended version of the USA Freedom Act, a surprising and sudden move that would essentially nullify the government's ability to collect bulk metadata of Americans' phone records. The maneuver may also be a counter to plans the House Intelligence Committee has to push forward a competing bill that privacy advocates say would not go far enough to curb the government's sweeping surveillance programs.

The Freedom Act is sponsored by Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the one-time mastermind behind the post-9/11 Patriot Act, from which both the Obama and Bush Administrations have derived much of the legal authority for their surveillance programs.

Rep Sensenbrenner has vocally condemned NSA spying since Edward Snowden's leaks surfaced last June. The bill has long been supported by privacy and civil-liberties groups who view it as the best legislative reform package in Congress.

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans that the US government's surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.

"Do you think it's right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?" Snowden said. "Because that’s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting US data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

"US government policy directed by the NSA ... is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications," Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.