Bad news

The USA Freedom Act was not perfect. Civil libertarians and privacy groups had already complained in spring that the original bill was being severely watered down in the House of Representatives and lacked the teeth to really clamp down on the NSA's surveillance activities.

But it was clear from the start that in order to have a chance at getting the bill passed by the Republican controlled House of Representatives it had to be amended. The bill that finally passed the House in May was much weaker than many civil rights activists may have wished, but as the watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation rightly said it would have been the first law to curb the NSA's spying activities in nearly 30 years.

End of mass collection

Most importantly, the Freedom Act would have ended the NSA's controversial bulk collection of telephone data. It would also have established a public advocate to represent privacy concerns in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISC). And it would have increased transparency around the NSA's requests for user information from technology companies.

While many privacy activists had grown somewhat disillusioned with the bill in the end, it was backed by Google, Facebook and most other US Internet giants. The New York Times, the Washington Post and many other influential outlets also threw their support behind the passage of the Freedom Act.

Rightly so, because the bipartisan Freedom Act, weakened as it was, would have been a first - small, but successful - stab at reining in the tremendous powers of the NSA. Even more importantly it would have carried symbolic weight. Passing the Freedom Act would have shown that US lawmakers are indeed capable of responding appropriately to the problems of NSA overreach exposed a year and half ago by the Snowden disclosures.

Inability to reform

Unfortunately, the failure to pass the Freedom Act now serves as a symbol of the inability of US legislators to take meaningful action to protect its citizens from governmental surveillance. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon. If a divided Congress in the wake of the Snowden revelations cannot pass a very modest bill to protect civil liberties why should the new fully Republican controlled Congress?

That's a shame not just for Americans, but also for Europeans who had hoped and publicly pushed for a reform of the NSA. To be sure, the Freedom Act was geared towards domestic data collection in the US. But passing it would have been a hopeful sign that if Congress can address the privacy concerns of Americans, it may also address the concerns of Europeans and others later on.

Now, Washington's message to Europe is a very different one: Congress won't curb governmental surveillance of Americans, so don't expect it to curb surveillance of Europeans. Europe should take note.