The House just overwhelmingly voted to rein in the NSA

Vox wrote The House just overwhelmingly voted to rein in the NSA

"One example is what's known as a backdoor search. In this technique, the NSA engages in wide surveillance of communications that involve both Americans and foreigners. So long as the foreigners are the official 'target,' this is permitted under the FAA. The NSA sometimes stores the information it has collected in a giant database. And the agency has taken the position that it can search this database for information about Americans without running afoul of the no-targeting-Americans rule."

Congress is considering a bill to fund the military for the 2015 fiscal year, and that includes funding for the National Security Agency. The amendment offered by Sensenbrenner and his colleagues and Lofgren prohibits the NSA from using any funds provided in the bill to 'query a collection of foreign intelligence information' acquired under the FAA 'using a United States person identifier...The legislation also effectively bars the NSA or the Central Intelligence Agency from forcing device manufacturers to install technical "backdoors" in their products."

"By itself, the amendment falls short of the kind of sweeping NSA reforms some civil liberties groups support. But the vote represents the first time a house of Congress has voted to curtail the controversial practices revealed by Ed Snowden last year. It will give NSA critics renewed political momentum and may force President Obama to make further concessions to critics of the NSA."

Spencer Ackerman has a little more in The Guardian House of Representatives moves to ban NSA's 'backdoor search' provision.

Bruce Schneier points out, More Details on NSA Tapping the Internet Backbone. "It's a measure of the popular interest in this issue that the German/Danish story isn't being reported by the US press, and I had to search to find the Congressional vote on the New York Times and Washington Post sites. Only the Guardian had it as a home page headline. No one is reporting today's renewal of the telephone metadata program."