[tahanteada]

US House votes "overwhelmingly" to cut funding of NSA surveillance

A strong majority of the US House of Representatives on Thursday night voted to cut funding for surveillance on citizens.

The vote came in at 293 to 123 in favor of an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would cut funding for National Security Agency (NSA) operations that include warrantless spying on Americans or installing hardware or software backdoors into products to enable communications interception.

The NSA currently collects emails, browsing and chat history under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and searches this information without a warrant for the communications of Americans - a practice known as "backdoor searches".

The amendment would forbid the NSA to use any of its funding from the Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct warrantless searches.

It would also disallow the agency to use its budget to get companies and organisations to add backdoors to their encryption standards.

The NSA has attempted to thwart encryption by, for example, peeling apart the layers of the Tor anonymizing service.

The agency has also routinely received - or intercepted - routers, servers and other computer network devices as they're being exported from the US to international customers.

As Glenn Greenwald recounted in his newly published book - No Place to Hide - the NSA then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on, thus giving it access to entire networks and all their users.

The provision approved by the House on Thursday was originally a central component in the original version of the USA Freedom Act - legislation the House passed last month to curb NSA spying and end bulk data collection.

The provision was stripped out of that earlier act during negotiations among congressional leaders.

The amendment states that, with a few exceptions, the NSA can't fund its agents' running of database queries that specify a US person as a target:

Edasi juba lingil:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/06/23/us-house-votes-overwhelmingly-to-cut-funding-of-nsa-surveillance/