US parliament opposes NSA backdoors

The US House of Representatives has opposed two controversial NSA practices by banning intelligence from using its defense budget. This includes building backdoors into hardware and software.

The proposal, which passed by a vast majority of 293 to 123, would prohibit the NSA from using its Department of Defense budget to ask or even require hardware and software makers to build backdoors into their products.

In addition, the NSA is no longer allowed to search American data with the money from the budget without a court order. Although the proposal has been adopted, it will not come into effect until the defense budget itself is also adopted: the House of Representatives will vote on that later on Friday. In addition, the US Senate must also approve the proposal.

As a military intelligence agency, the NSA gets its secret budget, estimated at around $11 billion, from the US Department of Defense. It is unclear whether the secret service will be able to fund the programs that the House of Representatives has turned against through detours. What is clear is that the backdoor ban only applies to the NSA: the FBI or CIA are still allowed to do so.