US Lawmakers Pass Bill to Curb NSA

Local Editor

The US House of Representatives approved a bill that would restrict the electronic surveillance powers of the National Security Agency [NSA] in the United States on Thursday.

The margin was wide, 293 to 123, for the bill attached to the war budget for 2015, which begins October 1.

For now, however, the bill will have no effect on the NSA as it has not been debated by the Senate.

Yet, the message from the lower house is clear. It wants to embrace a court ruling and bar the NSA from using personal electronic information from US citizens without a prior court order.

Thursday's amendment would bar the NSA from carrying out any search without a court order, including information from Americans, even if their communications were picked up inadvertently.

The bill would bar the NSA and the CIA from including secret "back doors" allowing the NSA to skirt coded gateways and gain access to users' personal data. The NSA is accused of having done this for several years.

As it currently stands, under the so-called Prism program, the NSA focuses on foreign targets on the Internet via Facebook, Gmail and other services.

However, the NSA has acknowledged it used information taken from the servers of such companies, without approval from a judge.

Moreover, the Constitution and US laws require that the government obtain a court order before searching among data of US citizens.

Congress is still debating how to reform US surveillance programs a year after the revelations made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team