House votes to further rein in NSA, in sign of continued momentum

House lawmakers voted to further rein in the nation’s spies, in a signal that legislators aren’t yet done reforming surveillance law. A bipartisan amendment to add new limits to the National Security Agency (NSA) passed 255-174, slightly more than a week after President Barack Obama signed legislation ending the agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. While the move appears largely symbolic, given the overwhelming opposition to further spy reforms from leadership in the Senate, it nonetheless makes clear that a significant bloc of lawmakers aren’t settling with that first batch of reforms, called the USA Freedom Act.

The measure, which was attached to the fiscal 2016 defense appropriations bill, tackles two separate “backdoors” into people’s communications about which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised alarms. One provision of the amendment would ban the government from forcing tech companies to build weaknesses into their security systems so that police and federal agents can access people’s data. While the FBI has asserted that it needs that power to go after terrorists and criminals, critics say it would weaken digital security for everybody. The second part of the amendment would ban the NSA and FBI from accessing Americans’ data without a warrant through a “loophole” in federal law, known as Section 702 of a 2008 update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).