The US Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday after congressional leaders earlier this month stripped the bill of provisions designed to safeguard against excessive surveillance of the government. The "must-pass" legislation now heads to President Joe Biden for his expected signature.

The Senate's 85-14 vote cements a major expansion of a controversial US surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Biden's signature will ensure that the Trump administration opens with the new power to compel a wide range of companies to help US spies intercept phones between Americans and foreigners abroad.

Despite concerns about unprecedented spying powers falling into the hands of controversial figures like Kash Patel, who has vowed to investigate political enemies of Donald Trump if confirmed to lead the FBI, Democrats ultimately made little effort to curb the program.

The Senate Intelligence Committee first approved changes to the 702 program this summer with an amendment intended to clarify newly added language that experts have called dangerous. The vague text was introduced into law by Congress in April, with Democrats in the Senate promising to correct the problem later this year. In the end, these efforts proved to be in vain.

Legal experts began issuing warnings last winter about Congress's efforts to expand FISA to cover a wide range of new businesses not initially subject to Section 702's wiretapping directives. While reauthorizing the program in April, Congress changed the definition of what the government considers an "electronic communications service provider," a term applied to companies that can be required to install wiretapping on behalf of the government.

Traditionally, "electronic communication service providers" refers to telephone and email providers, such as AT&T and Google. But as a result of the redefinition of the term of the Congress, the new limits of the powers of the government of the telephone are not clear.

It is widely assumed that the changes were intended to help the National Security Agency (NSA) target communications stored on servers in US data centers. Because of the classified nature of the 702 program, however, the updated text purposely avoids specifying what types of new businesses will be subject to the government's requests.

Marc Zwillinger, one of the few private lawyers to testify before the nation's secret surveillance court, wrote in April that the changes to the 702 statute mean that "any company in the United States could have its communications (intercepted) by an owner with access to office wiring, or the data centers where their computers reside," thus expanding the 702 program "into a variety of new contexts where there is a particularly high probability that the communications of US citizens and other persons in the United States will be "unwittingly" acquired by the government.