Slashdot Mirror
Broadcast Flag Sneak Not Attempted
Trizero writes "THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet has shown that no amendments occured to the CJS Appropriations Bill. Monday, Slashdot covered the EFF announcing a rumor that a senator was attempting to sneak an amendment to bring the Broadcast Flag into law. From THOMAS (scroll down to the bottom): "6/21/2005:
Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Approved for full committee consideration without amendment favorably." Translation: No one attempted to sneak the Broadcast flag into law." Update: 06/22 18:55 GMT by J : The EFF's new Activism Coordinator, Danny O'Brien, sees this as a victory for swift citizen action. Impressive numbers. Nice work by EFF and Public Knowledge, and everyone who raised their voice.
Don't start jumping up and down. This won't be the end of the broadcast flag...
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Did the massive phone campaign advocated by Public Knowledge manage to dissuade the senators?
No, see below.
Did the senators decide against this course of action on their own?
Senators don't have free thought. They are paid by corporations to think/act like the corporations tell them to.
Or was this just an unfounded rumor to begin with?
Probably unfounded or at least only partially true. If anything, there was something far more insidious going on elsewhere and this was an attempt to divert the all powerful Slashdot crowd's attention to something worthless.
Discuss.
I'd prefer to just joke about it thanks.
Whether this is similar to Y2K ("Nothing happened! Complete waste of time!" "Idiot! It only didn't happen because we did all that work!") or like the Tiger Repellant ("What's that?" "A tiger repellant" "What for? There are no tigers in Atlanta" "Exactly. Works pretty well, huh?") is difficult to tell from the point of view of an outsider.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I mean, you're basically getting a national ID card based on a rider. Shouldn't you all be lobbying your senator and congressperson to have this nonsense stopped?
Deleted
Why ask hard questions? It was presented as a rumor, and due to the seriousness of it, it needed to be published. It's not like any harm came out of it. And more likely, it may have actually prevented harm by keeping the sneak from occurring.
The RIAA did something similar in the 90s when it snuck in "work for hire" legislation, which made all recording artists mere "work for hires" without any right to retain or obtain copyrights on their songs.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Or maybe the senator-in-question decided not to try and sneak it in given that the EFF raised a ruckus and he'd actually be doing it in plain sight rather than "sneaking"? Are you so resigned to not being able to affect what congress does by writing and calling your senators?
>So which bill....?
Exactly. Some MPAA congresstooge will slip it in under the cover of night, as it were.
On the other hand, consider the possibility that the story was leaked as a trial balloon, to see how much attention it would get. They'll put it out again every couple of months, until we all decide that a broadcast flag is inevitable.
Considering how many people think digital TV is some kind of constitutional right, I suspect we'll get a broadcast flag along with subsidized digital TV -- to protect our way of life, fight terrorism, and to save the children.
The MPAA will get their broadcast flag, and the government will borrow money from my kids to pay for it.
sigs, as if you care.
1984 didn't happen, at least not in 1984, because Orwell's book was so frightening. Too bad the fear lasted less than 21 years. Should be required reading in high school. (I thought it frequently was.)
Y2K didn't happen because everyone feared it, and did a heck of a lot of work to prevent it, possibly fueling the dot-com boom. (and bust, when Y2K dollars were finished being spent.)
Maybe the Broadcast Flag didn't happen (this time) because the EFF was on guard, and alerted the most obnoxious people they could find, for the response.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you
Perhaps it is time for those of us who care about preserving fair use, and copyright reform, to stop being reactionary and be proactive. Perhaps it is time to put our energies, and (more importantly) monies into lobbying for the legislation we want, and not just stopping the ones we don't.
I'm not saying it would be easy, just that it is time to add this to the conversation.
What do you know I wrote a novel
illegal legislation
I have to call you on that one. If Congress passes the law, and the president signs it, it is by definition legal. There ain't no such thing as illegal legislation. There is such a thing as unconstitutional legislation, though, which is maybe what you were thinking of.
I am officially gone from
Attaching an ammendment like Real ID or Broadcast Flag will not slow the process. So maybe the CJS Appropriations Bill was not an ideal carrier for Broadcast Flag since appropriations bills tend to be the most debated and delayed.
"Why do we, as American citizens, have to keep a close eye on everything that our elected officials do so that they do not sneak unlawful provision into law."
Complete the well-known phrase or saying: "The price of freedom...."
Great, now I sound like a crackpot to my senators.
I wouldn't put it past passive-aggressive corporations to create a rumor like this for EXACTLY that purpose: to make opponents sound like crackpots crying wolf.
The courts have already decided this. More than once. The Betamax decision should have already decided this over 20 years ago. The FCC does not have the jurisdiction in the eyes of the federal court. Tough luck. Now, get over it!
Seriously, why should American's rights be trampled upon because the MPAA and the networks are all crying?
Can we fire all of congress and start anew somehow? Perhaps these 80+ year old senators need some goddamned term limits. I remember watching an interview with one of the oldest Senators (forget which one) from the 80s and when asked if he knew how much a trillion dollars even was, he didn't know. He said something to the extent that it seemed like an awful lot of money, but he had no idea how much.
Secondly, we need to close this stupid awful back door policy. We need to stop adding sections to bills that are wholly unrelated, especially since lawmakers have so candidly told us that they don't even have time to actually read what they are voting for, but at the same time, they can waste days and days of congress sessions for filibusters on Supreme Court nominees.
Well, I guess nobody would ever say that big government is efficient.
That's all I gotta say for now, but I could definately ramble on about the feds for days and weeks and still never exhaust my discontent with the state of the union.
zosxavius photography
> Senators don't have free thought. They are paid by corporations to think/act like the corporations tell them to.
I would say most of them are simply just highly attached to their own prejudices, many of which are ignorant, superstitious, and bigoted, while the rest are idealistic without the benefit of either pragmatism or human empathy. And without exception, they hunger for more power. Most corporations prey on these attributes first before falling back to naked avarice.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
That is just a symptom of Amercian-style representative "democracy." A good percentage of legislature at the federal level is hardly beneficial to the nation and its people.
Every time one of these controversial rider bills comes up it should underscore to everyone the need for a line item veto on for the Federal executive. And this shouldn't be a partisan issue; I want this for the Prez regardless of which party controls which branch.
1) Restate article summary
2) Ask obviously implied questions
3) ???
4) Karma!
The mods here are idiots.
It's really what I think of as the Louisiana Purchase rationale. A law is enforceable so long as it hasn't been declared unconstitutional. Only the courts can make such a declaration, and they have to have a relevant case in front of them to do so. In order to bring a suit against the government, you need to have standing to do so; i.e., you have to have been directly harmed by the government action or law in question. There was no reasonable cause of action regarding the Louisiana Purchase (you aren't allowed to claim a general harm based on how your taxes are used), so it was effectively constitutional even though there was no grant of power in the Constitution allowing the federal government to purchase additional territory.
Therefore, if a law can't be shown to have a specific harm to a person or other entity capable of bringing suit, it's effectively constitutional regardless of the enumerated powers in the Constitution.
Of course, IANAL, so feel free to disregard any of this as you see fit.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Unconstitutional legislation is illegal legislation. Perhaps an oversimplification on my part but a truth nonetheless.
The solution is simple. Pass an amendment giving the President a line-item veto. Let each item stand on its own merit. Perhaps a line-item veto could be overturned by a simple majority rather than a supermajority as with normal vetos. In other words, prevent Congress from blackmailing the President and each other with these (usually spending) bills that normally would never pass.
But I suppose making things more efficient and effective isn't The American Way (TM).
How long till someone proposes a whole year's worth of legislation as one bill... up or down? And voting down means depriving war orphans of free milk, which makes you worse than Hitler (at least according to Senator Durbin), whereas voting up cedes citizens' rights to the **AA, insurance companies and other large, rich corporations, buried so deeply in the legislation no one even knows it's there.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I wasn't aware that anyone in the US was chained to their screen and literally forced to watch. Of course there's a choice - kill your television.
This is not to say that I'm indifferent to the broadcast flag - I think it's a terrible idea. But you do have a choice. You can vote with the power button on your remote.
Sean
Better idea: pass an amendment that prohobits "riders", like what Minnesota has done (or so I've heard).
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
1) Restate article summary
2) Ask obviously implied questions
3) ???
4) Karma!
The mods here are idiots.
Yes, but karma, like most of the posts, is inherently worthless. Kinda like this post!
It's like cockraoches in the night.. They disappear as soon as you find the lightswitch. That doesn't mean that they're gone, though. They just don't like the light.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The EFF said it was a rumor, which means that they're not sure if it's true or not. This isn't anything like the Bush administration because Bush didn't come out and say "I heard a rumor that them thar' terrorists is gonna blow s**t up again."
Um... that's because it's not a rumor. They have blown stuff up again (know anyone that lives in Madrid?), and keep saying how they're going to do more of it, and death to America, etc. It's not really a matter of rumor when you can follow the money from shady businesses to people buying and selling weapons, to the people who are actually, demonstrably tied to people that are blowing up restaurants, chopping off heads on video, and saying they won't rest until democracy (a "true evil") is banished from the world. Come on, now, the fact that these clowns are out there, and willing to kill/die working against basic stuff like represntative government or women being allowed to work if they want to... that's not rumor. It's just medievalist jackasses with enough cash to buy decidedly post-medieval weapons and enough young people in their thrall to talk them into shredding themselves in a restaurant and taking innocent people with them.
Calling it a rumor is like saying that crackers and blackhats are a rumor, just because you've never personally had your box owned. Any chance that you've never had malware running on your machine not because there's no such thing as crackers, but because you're careful, and can think abstractly about the consequences if you were to let your guard down? National security has become just like that. And since our public memory is about 12 minutes long, all of that post-9/11 caution is regarded as "Bush=Nazi," and very few people can think abstractly about the consequences of not fending off the bad guys. You'd think, after watching New York, or that Beslan school in Russia, or the trains Madrid, that it would be a no-brainer and everyone would get that there really are people that happy to kill - but since most of us can't think like those people, it's hard to imagine that their past acts are anything other than an abberation. But they're not, and they're not going to be for a long time. Generations, probably (since that how long it will take for all of the kids in the middle east and other oppressive places to shake off the whole doom-and-gloom as a way of life thing). Generations before the whole 70 Virgins concept starts to look a little shaky as a reason to kill police cadets as they eat their lunch.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That is not a good solution. Congress and the Senate should be voting on what they want passed, not voting for something in the hope that the president will veto it later.
It is better to simply not allow riders so that each bill survives on its own merits.
I'm not sure how exactly you would phraze the ammendment, but yeah, I agree that a "one law, one vote" ammendment would do wonderful good for America. Just make it so that anything added into a bill where it doesn't belong is declared unconstitutional as soon as anybody challenges it. While we are at it, we should also have an accuracy in naming clause in the ammendment. So, you can't have a bill that does something terrible, and call it, "clean skies bill," or "school lunches for poor minorities act" which make use of torture illegal.
Yes, the Minnesota constitution requires that any bill be about one thing. As such, the recent handgun permit law that was tacked onto something else was held unconstitutional soley on those grounds.
Basically, if they want to pass the handgun law, they need to have it voted on on its own merits.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
There is one fallacy in your argument, just because a law is written, doesn't mean it is legal. If that were true, the court system would not be able to invalidate laws.
Let's be clear about the distinction between "illegal" and "unconstitutional." There are plenty of laws that have been found, appropriately, to be unconstitutional. Those, at that point, are no longer laws. Until the court says they're not, though, they are laws, and describe how the legal system works. Years can go by between a law being created and judicial action undoing it. In the meantime, it's legal, by definition. Let's also not confuse "legal" with "morally right." Plenty of laws, even those that pass consitutional tests, are just plain wrong-headed. But that won't keep you out of jail if you break them. Only changing the law will do that... and if the law in question passes a challenge at the court, then only legislative actions will be able to change the law. So, vote! Your elected congressional and senate representatives are the people that make the laws, and are the people that can un-make them when they no longer mesh well enough with society.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
How does a passer-by (or a police officer) know that the person walking by is both responsible and a citizen?
I don't know. But, how do you do that in your state with people who (as far as you know) aren't carrying guns? Presumably you don't. But neither do you know that the person next to you on the freeway is responsible (or even licensed) driver. And yet most of us make it to work each day. At some point, you just need to have a little faith in your fellow man, or if you can't stomach that; at least be willing to put his freedom over your comfort.
You have a valid point, although I have to wonder about a criticism of American education with so many spelling mistakes. But perhaps English is not your first language.
However, your conclusion is quite possible. I actually predict it is likely the U.S. will not survive the 21st century in one piece. Hopefully it won't be another Civil War, but I can't imagine this country remaining united for another 100 years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.