Through a House vote, legislators aimed to block the National Security Agency (NSA) from funds it uses to further its warrantless search of communications data.
On Thursday, lawmakers passed an amendment to a 2015 defense appropriations bill.
According to a blog post by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the amendment would force the NSA to look outside of its defense appropriations funding to engage in “backdoor searches” – where the intelligence agency taps into foreign communications, such as emails or phone calls, to indirectly access information about Americans (under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act).
The bill must also pass the Senate in order to become law next year.
Another provision of the amended bill would help stifle NSA's alleged practice of snooping on citizens' data via backdoors in widely used security mechanisms, like encryption standards, EFF's post said.
