Source Control For Bills In Congress?

grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"

Comments

alternatively...RTF(_)

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony of slashdot telling people to RTFB is black hole massive.

Re: Very Simple To Do

[DumbSwede]

Has I understand it, it should be simple enough to just have somebody just slip this new Mandatory Read law in.

Anyone here at Slashdot know someone on the inside?

I think I can see it now...

[Kadin2048]

The legal system on an index card, volume 1:

1) Don't be a twit.

Sincerely,
        Congress

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