Bipartisan majority cuts funding for warrantless spying on Americans and bans insertion of "Backdoor" surveillance measures on IT products and services
In an unexpected late vote Thursday 2014.06.19, a significant majority in the US House of Representatives voted to pass a bipartisan amendment to Military Funding Bill H.R. 4870 that defunds NSA and CIA surveillance operations targeting US Citizens except under certain emergency circumstances and to ban insertion of so-called "Backdoor" hardware or software hacks in IT products and services, which have come to haunt US IT Corporations.
The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and others, was introduced as an amendment to a military funding in a tactical move clearly designed to bypass review by the Intelligence Committee, which typically acts as a proxy to defend Intel agency interests.
While the bill still needs to pass in the Senate, where it could be defanged or rejected, attaching it to a 2015 funding bill, the sponsors have improved chances to enact the rules as at least stop-gap measures until more substantial amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which it applies to.
In essence, the bill:
• Prohibits using US Citizens as "selectors" for electronic surveillance except in the exceptional instances out lined in Section II. Notably, this does NOT apply to persons designated as "non-US persons" by the "51% rule" mandated by FISA.
• Prohibits government officials or employees from inserting, or requiring other parties to insert hardware or software to facilitate clandestine "Backdoor" surveillance used against any US persons. While this might seem to allow such methods to be used against foreign persons, in practice it would be impossible to exclude the potential impact on US persons except in very narrowly targeted circumstances.
The latter comes hot on the heels of revelations, this week, by Der Spiegal, that the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) gave plausible deniability cover to non-governmental "witting partners" in "exciting joint ventures" who aided the WHARPDRIVE program to tap optical cables, instructing them to lie and remove taps when discovered by third parties.
After the fold, the text of the bills and the usual fun poll for lovers of evil.
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