May 14th 2014 NSA reform: lawmakers aim to bar agency from weakening encryption.

US legislators concerned about weaknesses in a major surveillance reform bill intend to insert an amendment barring the National Security Agency from weakening the encryption that many people rely on to keep their information secure online, or exploiting any internet security vulnerabilities it discovers.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, told the Guardian that she and a group of colleagues want to prevent the NSA from “utilizing discovered zero-day flaws,” or unfixed software security vulnerabilities, and entrench “the duty of the NSA and the government generally not to create them, nor to prolong the threat to the internet” by failing to warn about those vulnerabilities.

Since the discovery of the Heartbleed bug afflicting web and email servers, the NSA has faced suspicions that it has exploited the vulnerability, which the agency has strenuously denied. Beyond Heartbleed, documents from whistle blower Edward Snowden have revealed that the NSA has weakened online encryption, causing consternation among technology companies as well as privacy advocates.

Lofgren intends to attach the provision to the USA Freedom Act, increasingly the consensus bill to reform surveillance in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures. The bill, mostly favored by civil libertarians and expected to go for a vote on the House floor as early as next week,does not include language stopping the NSA from undermining encryption.

In an indication of the difficulty legislators will face in recasting the USA Freedom Act to better protect privacy, Lofgren conceded that attaching the provision will be difficult, as House legislators do not want to upset a tenuous deal on surveillance reform by adding to the bill. She is currently seeking a parliamentarian ruling on the “germaneness” of her online security amendment in order to make it difficult for opponents to exclude it from consideration on the floor.

For the entirety of this article visit: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/nsa-surveillance-usa-freedom-act-encryption-amendment-zoe-lofgren?utm