FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: [email protected], 202.681.7582
Washington, DC — For the third year in a row, the House of Representatives is expected to vote to prohibit warrantless searches of Americans’ communications metadata and ban the government from mandating backdoors in technology products. Specifically, the House will vote on an amendment from Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren to the must-pass Defense Department Appropriations bill to prohibit the National Security Agency from spending funds for warrantless searches and technology backdoors. A broad coalition of organizations from across the political spectrum has repeatedly endorsed the effort and stated its support in a letter today to House Leadership.
Signatories include Advocacy for Principled Action in Government, American Civil Liberties Union, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Arab American Institute, Bill of Rights Defense Committee/Defending Dissent Foundation, Campaign for Liberty, Center for Democracy & Technology, Constitutional Alliance, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free the People, FreedomWorks, Government Accountability Project, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Niskanen Center, R Street Institute, Restore The Fourth, The Sunlight Foundation, and X-Lab.
The following statement can be attributed to Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal:
“The House of Representatives has the opportunity to make clear once again that the National Security Agency and other Defense agencies should neither surveil Americans’ communications without a warrant nor require businesses to build backdoors into their technology products. The Constitution’s protections afford every American a judicial check on the executive branch’s powers to intrude into their private communications, while government-mandated backdoors make the technology we rely on more vulnerable to hacking, diminishing our collective security and undermining our economy.”
While an identical amendment passed the House in 2015 and 2014 by wide margins, House and Senate leadership have stripped the language out of the final bills sent to the President.
###