House leadership Thursday rebuffed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have prohibited the use of federal funds to compel tech companies to build backdoors into their products and drew an immediate rebuke by the amendment's author, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.).
After the House Rules Committee Republicans declined to let what he termed as “an important ‘backdoor' cybersecurity NDAA amendment come to the floor for a vote,” Lieu, a long-time advocate of bringing cybersecurity and privacy to prominence on the legislative agenda, said, “I am deeply disappointed and equally concerned that [they] continue to put politics ahead of national security.”
“It is clear that House Republicans are not prioritizing cybersecurity,” Lieu said in a statement, adding that it is “shortsighted and dangerous to let our national security be endangered by inaction on the increasingly urgent issue of cybersecurity.”