Congress decided late Tuesday about extensive changes in the rules for the intelligence the NSA's surveillance data and telecom traffic in the law that goes under the name of the Patriot Act.
The Senate voted after lengthy negotiations for the comprehensive and controversial data collection, which was enforced immediately following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 can not be done previously.
Patriot Act expired on the night of Monday, then the intelligence services were forced to stop the collection of data traffic. The new law, called the USA Freedom Act, was passed with 67 votes in favor and 32 votes against in the Senate.

They don't say what type of data NSA, GCHQ and FRA are collecting.
I Think it's message data they are going to stop collect.
But there is also a lot of metadata.
Telecom traffic with metadata are always saved for debiting and book keeping reasons (10 years here in Sweden) by the companies.
Do some cross refererences with other some databases and Voila.
It could be encrypted messages but that doesnt matter.
It's most about finding out who are talking to whom, where their locations are and when.
Then you can find out where they live, cars that they the own, business agreements, income, nationality, people they know....
It's gonna be a long list so I stop here.