Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power

In May 2013, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.

During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades.

The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's history.

"This is not how American democracy is supposed to work," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who had supported the bill but ultimately voted against it.

Senior leaders at the agency say that Snowden thrust them into a new era. James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said the intelligence agencies need to grant a greater degree of transparency or risk losing public confidence permanently. But exactly one year on, the agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data.

Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data. There are no other mandated reforms. President Barack Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans' "personal information", but that has not been codified in law.

The coalition of large Internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers’ email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort.

A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. While there have also been significant commercial changes brought by companies that fear the revelations imperiling their businesses -- Google's Gmail service broadened its use of encryption, will soon present end-to-end encryption for its Chrome browser; and after the Washington Post revealed that the NSA intercepts data transiting between Google and Yahoo storage centers, Google expanded encryption for Gmail data flowing across the Internet and Yahoo implemented default email encryption -- the bitterest disappointment has been the diminished ambitions for surveillance reform contained in the USA Freedom Act.

"That," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said, "was a very frustrating process for us."