House Passes Amendment Ordering Actual Restraints on NSA Searches

Tonight the House voted to approve an amendment
to a defense appropriation bill shutting down the part of National
Security Agency (NSA) “backdoor searches” that collects metadata on
Americans without a warrant. The bill was sponsored by Reps. Thomas
Massie (R-Ky.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). The Electronic Frontier
Foundation
explains:

Today, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment to
the Defense Appropriations bill designed to cut funding for NSA
backdoors. The amendment passed overwhelmingly with
strong bipartisan support: 293 ayes, 123 nays, and 1
present.

Currently, the NSA 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 block the NSA from using any of its funding from this
Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct such warrantless searches.
In addition, the amendment would prohibit the NSA from using its
budget to mandate or request that private companies and
organizations add backdoors to the encryption standards that are
meant to keep you safe on the web.

The amendment was supported by a majority of both
Democrats and Republicans, though more Republicans voted against it
than Democrats. The newly elected House Majority Leader Kevin
McCarthy (R-Calif.) voted against it.

Vox.com offers some additional
context:

By itself, prohibiting backdoor searches falls far short of the
kind of sweeping NSA reforms some civil liberties groups support.
But the vote represents the first time a house of Congress has
voted to curtail the controversial practices revealed by Ed Snowden
last year. It will give NSA critics renewed political momentum and
may force President Obama to make further concessions to critics of
the NSA.

In August, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) offered an amendment
to last year’s defense funding bill that would
have shut down a different NSA program: the collection of
Americans’ phone records. That vote failed in a razor-thin 205 to
217 vote. But the surprising closeness of the vote was widely
interpreted as a sign of congressional anger over the NSA’s
actions.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argues
that the vote is a rebuke to the House Permanent Select
Intelligence Committee. That body is supposed to serve as a
watchdog over NSA surveillance, but in recent years it has more
often acted as a defender of NSA policies. The vote, Sanchez says,
“demonstrates pretty dramatically that the gatekeepers in the
Intelligence Committee are out of synch with the sentiment of the
broader House.”

Sanchez also notes that similar language was stripped from the
USA FREEDOM Act, legislation intended to rein in the NSA that wound
up being substantially weakened during the legislative process.

UPDATE: Here is
the actual text of the amendment.