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House Votes 293-123 to Cut Funding for NSA Spying on Americans.

posted by janrinok on Friday June 20 2014, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-will-find-a-way-around-this dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Whats happening? Why the sudden rush of common sense? Sincerely hope that good sense prevails and continues to move forward.

In a surprising vote late Thursday night, a strong majority of the House of Representatives voted to cut funding to NSA operations that involve warrantless spying on Americans, or involve putting hardware or software "backdoors" into various products. The amendment to a defense appropriations bill was offered by Reps. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Thomas Massie (R-KY), passed 293-123.

The amendment ( http://repcloakroom.house.gov/uploadedfiles/massie.pdf ) [PDF] specifies that, with a few exceptions, "none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by an officer or employee of the United States to query a collection of foreign intelligence information acquired under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1881a) using a United States person as an identifier."

In addition, "none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency to mandate or request that a person...alter its product or service to permit the electronic surveillance...of any user of said product or service for said agencies." Since Edward Snowden began leaking documents about the NSA's tactics in June of last year, security experts have worried about reports of intentional weaknesses left in widely-used cryptography specifications.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TK on Friday June 20 2014, @01:29PM

    by TK (2760) on Friday June 20 2014, @01:29PM (#57957)

    "none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by an officer or employee of the United States to query a collection of foreign intelligence information acquired under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1881a) using a United States person as an identifier."

    We weren't weren't collecting data on foreigners with N degrees of separation from a US citizen, we were collecting data on US citizens with N degrees of separation from a foreigner.

    "none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency to mandate or request that a person...alter its product or service to permit the electronic surveillance...of any user of said product or service for said agencies."

    We weren't telling companies to modify their hardware or software, we were modifying it ourselves.

    Not to mention none of this (quoted in TFS at least) precludes having companies do the spying then selling/giving it to a TLA.

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