Congress Makes Deal To Renew Patriot Act For 4 Years

airfoobar writes "A four-year extension to the highly controversial Patriot Act is set to be rushed through in the coming week." Techdirt has its usual trenchant critique. I hope it's not unpatriotic to raise doubts about "one of the critical tools the intelligence community has to keep America safe."

Comments

Four More Years

[benjamindees]

Of Tyranny.

Re:Four More Years

[Ironchew]

At least we can count on both the Republicans and Democrats to stop their partisan bickering for a moment, and reach across the isle in solidarity to screw the American public over.

Re:Four More Years

[ArsonSmith]

Do we really need to wait until it gets that bad? Can't we at least try to stop it before hand? They passed this once, they took over healthcare and now passing this again. perhaps we should see the signs of Tyranny and stop it in the beginning rather than wait for people to have to die.

Re:Four More Years

[hsjserver]

It's not going to get 'that bad' and you're kidding yourself if you think otherwise. It's not in danger of happening. It won't ever be. The Affordable Care Act is hardly a 'take over' of health care in this country and even if it were, what is so goddamned scary about that? Medicare is pretty popular and seems to keep a lot of people alive. The health system we have now denies coverage to and incredibly large portion of the public and cost twice as much as the next most expensive country. Don't be thick.

Re:Four More Years

[shutdown -p now]

Come back to me when you're forced into a camp

The thing about camps is that it's kinda tricky to come back to you from one.

When?

[Daetrin]

So when do we get to question the necessity of this thing? The war in Iraq has been over for awhile (more or less, in theory, not that that had anything to do with the origins of the Patriot Act anyways) and now Osama bin Laden is dead. I realize that the government would like to keep it in effect forever just because of the power it grants them, but shouldn't they at least have to come up with some kind of new excuse by now?

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

It going to get extended forever.... Like Syrian "state of emergency", which was in place for over 20 years.OR Egypt, when it was active since 1967 - 44 years!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_emergency#Egypt

So yes, "Patriot Act", 10 years and counting!!

Re:When?

[scotts13]

It going to get extended forever.... Like Syrian "state of emergency", which was in place for over 20 years.

Here in Pennsylvania, we still pay a special tax enacted to pay for repairs following the Johnstown flood in 1889. Once they get hold of power OR money, they never let go. Ever.

Re:When?

[Daetrin]

We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect.

So if we do suffer another terrorist attack will they give up the Patriot Act as something that didn't work? Or will they demand more concessions? Are you suggesting that we can never regain lost rights, only lose more of them? (And i realize that that might be a political reality, but it seems like you may think that's the way it ought to be, which i disagree with.)

Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.

Uh, are you confused about your nomenclature, or are you actually unaware that a law can not circumvent a constitutional right? If i claim it's a violation of my constitutional rights and a lawyer can convince the Supreme Court that i'm correct, it doesn't matter how many laws have been passed about it. (Well, barring another Andrew Jackson of course.)

Re:When?

[Bemopolis]

And now you know why those of us who opposed the PATRIOT act when it was initially proposed opposed it. And were called terrorist sympathizers by FOX News and the like on top of it.

Nothing dies slower than a bad idea.

Re:When?

[ArsonSmith]

And why everyone should appose progressive ideals no matter what party they come from.

Re:When?

[flyingsquid]

We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect. I'm not saying correlation is causation, but I think claims that the law hasn't prevented at least one American death pretty dubious.

One could rephrase that argument a bit and say, "we haven't had a single terrorist attack since Apple released the iPhone, since the Chinese river dolphin went extinct, since Twitter was started, or since barefoot running became the next fitness fad. I think claims that these things haven't prevented at least one American death are pretty dubious." Logically, how is crediting the absence of terrorist attacks to the Patriot Act any different? Where's the evidence that these programs are any more effective at preventing terrorism than, say, slaughtering freshwater dolphins?

What would be evidence of the programs' effectiveness is pointing to a case where a credible threat- that is, a well-organized terrorist cell, with a practical plan and the expertise and materials to carry it out- was detected first by the domestic surveillance program. I'm sure the program's defenders would argue that it's all top-secret hush-hush stuff and that's why they can't point to any examples. But it seems to me that if the program actually worked, it would be a good idea to put the evidence out there, so that (a) the Americans would know that the program worked and would support it, and (b) the terrorists would know that the program worked, and would be deterred. Where's the evidence that all this domestic spying has actually prevented anything?

Obligatory stat

[antifoidulus]

SUVs kill many more Americans every year than died in the September 11 attacks. And yet we are willing to sacrifice our freedoms to ostensibly prevent terror but are not willing or wanting to do anything to prevent those monstrosities from killing a massive number of innocent people every year.

Re:Obligatory stat

[bug1]

If all that years drowning victims died in just a couple of hours, would swimming pools be more dangerous ?

Re:Obligatory stat

[element-o.p.]

Just shows you why you shouldn't trust statistics. 3443 is in exactly the same ballpark as the number of people who died on 9/11 (which I believe was your point). How many other people died in the U.S. in 2001 of terrorism? You might include the Anthrax victims, but that was just a handful of people (I don't have the exact number, and I'm honestly too lazy to look it up), but that number is trivial compared to the 9/11 death toll, so for all intents and purposes, we can call the number of people that died in 2001 of terrorism in the U.S. to be roughly 4,000.

So, if you want to consider a yearly sample, that's 3443 deaths in swimming pools to 4000 deaths due to terrorism...pretty much equal...makes me think that maybe we should pay roughly the same amount of attention to deaths in swimming pools as we do to terrorism.

But you argue that the death toll on 9/11 happened in a few hours. Okay, that's true. So somewhere on the order of 1,000 deaths per hour, then? Yes, many died in the initial four plane crashes, but the WTC didn't fall for a while longer -- call it four hours from the first impact (again, I don't remember the exact number, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but this is close enough to make my point). In swimming pools, that's (3443 deaths / year) * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 0.39 deaths per hour. Whoa! That means that terrorism is roughly 2500 times more common than deaths in swimming pools!!! Obviously, we need to spend much more time combating terror than we do combating deaths in swimming pools!

But wait...we can look at it another way, too. Since 9/11, we've had the Ft. Hood shootings and a several other attempts, but the numbers are essentially unchanged since 9/11; there have been no other terrorist attacks in the United States that caused even one order of magnitude less deaths than 9/11. By that metric, then, it's roughly 4000 deaths due to terrorism in the U.S. in TEN YEARS, meanwhile, roughly 3000 people per year are dieing in swimming pools. That means you are approximately nine times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a terrorist act in the U.S., and by that standard, GPP is correct: when compared to any other mundane risk we accept without thinking about it, the time, effort, money and liberty that we are throwing away fighting terrorism is absolutely absurd .

Veto

[Animal Farm Pig]

Any chance Obama is going to veto this? He's Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In, right? Waiting on the change...

Patriot Act Renewal

[hackus]

Nobody is really surprised right?

All told, there is now about 2-3 Trillion in revenue going to a huge bureaucracy now that is supposedly protecting us from Mr. Goldstein. If any of you actually think that this will be peacefully dismantled, I you are living in a dream world.

Folks it is time to face the unpleasant facts, this government is not going to stop there, it will continue. If any of you out there are angry, I would advise you to be very very careful about what you say and do moving forward because we are way past the point of making any sort of changes using the voting box.

Meanwhile we will have endure:

1) Endless wars...Pakistan is now up to bat.
2) 1/3rd of the human population in the US on food stamps. At the rate it is increasing, half of all Americans will be on public assistance in just 4-5 years.
3) Rampant destruction of our currency by foreign interests.
4) Our cities crumbling, once shining jewels of industry and innovation and opportunity for the future of children, now destroyed by this government and its policies to the fascist corporate state. Our youth will know no security, will own no home and will have no food let alone a career.
5) Congress is plotting with the centralized agricultural fascists to make it illegal to grow food. This government has blown up levies and damns and has siphoned away millions to destroy private farmland to protect commercial real estate for the bankers. Meanwhile food prices have hit record all time highs in wheat, corn and more Americans everyday can't feed themselves.

The Europeans get it. The Icelander's got it. Americans unfortunately don't get it yet. I am left wondering when they will?

Maybe when half of the population is on food stamps, will that be what it takes?
Watch your kids die with rationed health care?
Maybe it is the 27 trillion in currency maniuplation illegally transferring the wealth of the country to the Black Nobility in Germany, Great Britain?
Maybe it will be the fact the brightest spotlight this year in jobs was McDonalds hiring 50,000 workers?
Or maybe watching our wife and kid be sexually molested in public by the TSA?

Or maybe, just maybe....it will be when the government declares everyone in the USA a terrorist if you disagree with these outcomes?

-Hack

Re:Patriot Act Renewal

[hsjserver]

1. Pakistan is not, nor never will be up to bat. They have nukes, and that's a good deterant. The military there knows they need us as we need them. Our combat in Afghanistan and Iraq will end, though we'll probably have an influence there for quite some time (as we should, we broke it, we should fix it) 2. The increased use in food stamps is due to continued economic stagnation of the middle and lower class. The recession will end, the numbers will go down. Food stamps are useful for creating economic growth. For every $1 of food stamps creates ~$1.40 in economic growth while the economy is slouched. 3. What? No. China is manipulating their currency to keep exporters in their country happy, which is why they have out of control inflation. We need our dollar to lose some value in order to increase exports here, and restore jobs (the lack of which is the main reason for economic troubles here, not debt). 4. Our cities are crumbling, that's why we need a renewed investment in infrastructure. It creates jobs and has a stimulating effect on local economies. It will cost us, but it will cost us more if we don't. 5. I don't take anyone who can say "Congress is plotting with the centralized agricultural fascists to make it illegal to grow food." seriously. I would love to see some evidence of this, because there is none. As for blowing up levies? Which is harder to replace and costs more money? Farmland, or cities? It was a tough choice, but the answer is clearly cities. Commodity prices always go up, that's the cost of countries like China and India entering the first world, and freak weather damaging crop output in the Ukraine. Also, rationed health care? What? I didn't realize it was a scarce good, and for many Americans rationing would be an improvement, as they have zero health care now. You're a fucking clown pal.

patriotic acts

[epine]

In the unsurpassed words of Hermann Goering as cribbed from http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

That quote alone was worth winning the war, for which America was justifiably proud. Gosh it's hard to remember that far back.

All my life I struggled to identify myself on the liberal/conservative axis. It wasn't until I read Tibshirani and Hastings on PCA that I figured it out. The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits. In other words, the axis of ideology can be projected in many different ways, most of which are valid to the same approximate degree. When you subtract out whichever one you pick first, you've grabbed most of the explanatory power of the entire bundle.

One meme about conservatism is that it is more threat sensitive. I don't agree with that. Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within. In one case, you want to defeat the Nazis; in the other case your wish your own society not to become the Nazis by succumbing to the same Patriotic tendencies.

Re:patriotic acts

[shadowofwind]

The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits.

That makes sense. Though it seems that for the traits to be aligned, they must be different facets of the same trait.

Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within.

Granted that the sensitivity to 'threats' is directed differently in Liberals and Conservatives, the within/without division doesn't seem to me to stand up very well. For example, conservatives are obsessed with the cultural rot that they call liberalism. That's a threat from within. They're also at least as afraid of expanded government power as liberals are, but they're concerned about it in different areas.

  It seems to me that the whole liberal vs conservatism ideological split is not much more than a costume for a power struggle. Conservatives don't worry about government power when they see it acting in their own interests relative to those of other groups. Likewise for Liberals. Yes there are cultural an psychological differences, but these don't seem adequate to explain the actions or rhetoric of liberals and conservatives. Bush was hated by liberals, but most are merely disappointed in Obama for advancing the same policies. Likewise people like Bill Clinton, Obama, and Janet Reno have been hated by conservatives for things that they have only mildly criticized in people like Gringrich, Bush, and Rumsfeld.

"Highly Controversial" is a bit myopic

[Wrath0fb0b]

Don't get me wrong, I'm with most of /. on here but you have to understand that it's not really all that controversial in the context of the vast majority of American voters -- i.e. in the context that ultimately counts. We tend to surround ourselves with people that are ideologically similar to ourselves (not a bad thing) but when we then mistake our particular choice for the populace at large we get a myopic view of the whole political spectrum (bad).

This isn't a partisan complaint. I used to live in rural Idaho and was shocked to be confronted by some (not all) residents there didn't realize how far to the left of them much of the rest of the country was. Similarly in Boston I am continually shocked not by the lefty politics but by the complete lack of perspective that some (not all) on the far left have regarding how far out of the mainstream they are.

I wouldn't for the world give up having a country with widely diverse viewpoints, which I think are essential to a healthy democracy -- I'm not out to make us all fickle and bland. Rather, I just want people to get a realistic handle on where there views on a particular topic fall relative to the other electorate. This is descriptive/empirical matter, not a normative/evaluative one -- it doesn't make you wrong to be to the left or right of 70% of the country on some topic but it is foolish not to be aware of where you stand.

See, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal for details on where Americans actually stand. Of course, I would still like to see it defeated, but I'm skeptical that will happen given the poll numbers -- after all, it is a representative government (modulo some unconstitutional elements enjoined by the courts) and even if the votes aren't directly related to poll numbers, there is strong coupling.

right and left are upset about the police state

[decora]

if you explained to the average person that part of the reason they are patting down babies at the TSA is because of the patriot act, they will begin to understand it.

if parts of the PATRIOT act applied to gun owners, they would be outraged.

parts of the PATRIOT act apply to librarians, they have been outraged.

everyone, in general, in america, supports their own civil liberties, and when they understand that civil liberties in general are under attack, they can come together once in a blue moon.

Re:A challenge for the slashdot community

[Anonymous Coward]

"Common sense" would be not having to pursue drug lords in the first place because if you didn't have radical and unpopular prohibition of drugs YOU WOULDN'T HAVE DRUG LORDS IN THE FIRST PLACE. (or the associated violence, the creation of most stronger and more dangerous drugs, the erosion of civil liberties, expansion of the police state, having to show ID and be entered in a database to buy cold medicine, the huge population of nonviolent convicts, etc.) That these things are used as justification for a law as disgusting as the Patriot Act only shows how far we've fallen.

The unthinking and unquestioning nature of statists and corporatists never ceases to amaze me.

Relax everyone!

[feepness]

They'll repeal it the second we get Osama.

Are you fsking insane?

[element-o.p.]

Your post is so full of holes and dubious logic, I don't even know where to start, but here goes anyway.

We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect. I'm not saying correlation is causation...

We haven't had a Martian elected president since then either, but somehow I think the two are pretty well unrelated. However, even that counter-argument is giving you too much credit, because not only is your conclusion false, but your premise is false as well. Since the poorly-named PATRIOT Act went into effect, we have, in fact, had some well-known terrorist attempts (underwear bomber, the kid who wanted to blow up a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Portland, IIRC). The underwear bomber was thwarted because 1) his explosives didn't work and 2) the people on board the airplane beat the living crap out of him (which, I believe is a far, far better way to handle terrorist attacks than giving power to unchecked government bureaucracies). The Christmas Tree kid was just flat-out stupid.

...but I think claims that the law hasn't prevented at least one American death pretty dubious.

So what? I think that the FBI and local police forces are probably more than capable of detecting and catching would-be terrorists without subverting the Bill of Rights, and I think that I'd rather run the risk of the 1 in 20-30 million chance of dieing in a terrorist act than run the risk^Wcertainty that a government not bound by the law WILL eventually abuse its own populace. It's happened throughout history; it can happen here, too.

They don't need a new 'excuse' because it's not being used to monitor the porn you're downloading and I assure you the Government has bigger fish to fry.

I'll ignore the assumption that everyone on-line is downloading porn 24x7, since we all know what they say about assumptions. However, given that most people have things they would like kept private, even if it has nothing to do with sexual fetishes, and given that a Google search will turn easily turn up many, many news stories of LEO's using public records for personal gain (IIRC, there was a story here in Anchorage a few years back of LEO's using their access to criminal records databases to dig for dirt on political candidates), your "assurances" really aren't worth squat. The moment you become "interesting" for one of any number of reasons, you suddenly become that big fish that "government" wants to fry.

Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.

Even by /. standards, that's an incredibly inane position to take. You do realize that the "constitutional rights" you so easily dismiss ARE the law, don't you? Congress can pass whatever law it wants, and the President can sign the bill, but if it violates the Constitution, IT AIN'T LEGAL! Right now, we're basically just waiting for some of the laws to be challenged in court, and GWB did a pretty good job of making that a difficult proposition by dragging people who might have had a case to overthrow the PATRIOT Act off to Guantanamo and denying them their day in court. While I'm no fan of Obama either, he at least starting putting some of these alleged terrorists on trial.

If your post is any indication of how blase and naive the American public has become, it's no wonder our country is so effed-up.

Re:Unalienable Rights

[digsbo]

Are you defending the court briefs, or simply stating fact? Law ought not be complex. It is an affront to citizens that lawyers are required for simple matters of basic rights.