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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 20 2014, @01:46PM
Spying on allies is and has always been common practice. It's a different sort of spying, but at the very least you want enough spying to know if your ally is considering not being your ally anymore or not doing what you'd like them to do (e.g. trading with an enemy of yours that isn't an enemy of theirs).
That's obviously a different sort of thing than trying to, say, bust Iranian centrifuges with Stuxnet, but it's not uncommon at all for this kind of spying to happen in friendly countries. I'm sure the US has at least a couple of spies focused on the UK, for example, even though we've been close allies since WW I.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.