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Even the Author of the Patriot Act Is Trying To Stop the NSA
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner will introduce an anti-NSA bill tomorrow in the House, and if it makes its winding way to becoming law, it will be a big step towards curtailing the NSA's bulk metadata collection. Wisconsin Rep. Sensenbrenner, along with 60 co-sponsors, aims to amend one section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, in a bill known as the United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring Act — also known by its less-clunky acronym version, the USA Freedom Act."
Just like CEOs who take the credit for the $ savings of outsourcing, then take the credit for improved service by bringing the work back, but somehow keep their jobs. Or the dorks who think centralizing IT assets (hello Mainframe) is good, then later decide that distributing all the computing (hello desktop) is good, claiming credit for being revolutionary twice.
Do people really fall for this?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
... In other news, senators stopped short of repealing the Patriot Act, likely aware that without deleting the entire act, all they're accomplishing is switching the data collection activities to another agency, which will then perform the role the NSA currently has.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We also need a law prohibiting all these fucking acronym law names... fucking seriously...
It's good that this is getting publicity and that people are trying (or at least appear to be) to stop this nonsense, but there is no way the people who voted for the Unpatriotic Act the first time around (nearly every person in congress) did not know what would happen. No government in history did not abuse its powers, and the Unpatriotic Act pretty much spelled out how it was going to violate people's freedoms. They're just playing politics now that they've been found out.
Sheesh. How many interns did it take to come up with that acronym?
Better known as 318230.
Wait until Merkel, Kristina and half a billion women find out about any upskirt pics...
Just repeal the damned PATRIOT act. IT was supposed to be a temporary measure and it needs to go away now.
Why dont these senators have any backbone or honestly left in them and just repeal it?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This isn't new. The author of the Patriot Act (Jim Sensenbrenner) has been campaigning against Surveillance State since the beginning of the Snowden fiasco.
He probably decided he doesn't want to go down in history as the man who turned America into a Dystopia.
Good for him. It won't get past the executive branch though, assuming it gets through the ridiculous house. Why would we want to retain our 4th amendment right when terrorists are on the loose? Yeah, we're just monitoring terrorists, right?? :-\
Obamacare is the real threat to this country, and will destroy us through wealth redistribution and bankrupting the country we leave to our chiildren. We need to focus our efforts to end the Socialist agenda.
Hmmm. Healthcare for all Americans, or eavesdropping for all Americans. Is there even a debate here?
Isn't that what the Constitution is supposed to be?
We don't need another Law. The Laws that made this garbage legal are unconstitutional and criminal.
We don't need another Law. We need to hunt down and incarcerate the criminals who created this mess.
We don't need another Law. We need to hold government officials personally accountable for their flagrant and criminal violations of the Constitution.
We don't need another Law. We already have a USA Freedom Act. It is called "The Constitution of the United States."
Isn't this the same guy and attached the Real ID act to some armor for soldiers bill so no one could oppose it?
Several Congressmen were rushed to the hospital after suffering severe cases of acronym overdose.
Acronym abuse has been on the rise in Washington lately. Many researchers attribute the problem to inflated egos, which most politicians also suffer from.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
So they are calling it the "USA Freedom Act" - whatever the actual content that's as much of a lowdown weasel act as the naming of the "Patriot " act. If you question it the weasels will say you oppose freedom.
How about getting these rat fucking weasels away from the process and give the acts numbers instead, and get rid of the bullshit of riders that have nothing to do with the bill while we are at it.
In related news Dianne Feinstein has turned around her opinion and stated she is now 'totally opposed' to NSA surveillance of US allies.
Quite surprised at this, hopefully it is not empty rhetoric and actually goes somewhere. Very interested to see what the two leading goons of the NSA have to say for themselves in front of the House intelligence committee on Tuesday.
Peace,
Andy.
Something titled USA Freedom Act seems to reek of more BS. This whole situation would be laughable if it wasn't so real and these names seem like something from Metal Gear Solid. Why do they need to pass more laws? Aren't there already laws on the books that cover this abuse? Or is this one of those situations where it's done "on the internet" so we'll need to get together and figure something out with lots of fine print? I think I'll make a script to generate some act names but USA Enduring Patriotic Democracy Internet Freedom Fries Soaring Literacy Majestic Eagle Act does have a nice ring to it...
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
You can't control a pack of dogs after they get a taste of blood.
Follow the money.
You can dance if you want to.
Posting as Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Yeah, sometimes I forget my password too.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Sure, as long as you also ignore the 145 Democrats in the house and 48 Democrats in the senate that voted for the Patriot Act in 2001. Their record for reauthorizing it in 2006 is only slightly better.
Except the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government's powers of taxation is what allows them to compel you to purchase a product. It is not voluntary.
get that this is the feeling of much of /. but what example can you cite?
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
As per my citation above (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Parliament#Titles_and_citation_of_Acts), I'm in agreement about the name. Let's go back to letting uninterested clerks generate the reference name - I'd expect it to end up with a much more descriptive title that way.
The parrot speaketh.
"United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring Act — also known by its less-clunky acronym version, the USA Freedom Act."
Actually, the acronym of that title is USA FREED COMA
I was at the stopwatching.us rally in DC Saturday. And the lobby day on Friday. For the lobby day, we focused on USA FREEDOM Act. A bunch of us met with members of Congress or their staffers and pushed for this. Then the rally where we delivered over half a million signatures on a petition was on the TV news the next day.
The 2 big pitfalls are:
1: Getting it as a standalone bill instead of rolled into an appropriations/authorization bill. Part of why Amash-Conyers amendment to defund these operations failed (by only 7 votes) was a procedural sticking point about those kinds of bills.
2: NSA is doing their own fake reform/dodge bill through Feinstein in the senate.
What a deal eh?
History shows that the more socialist a country is, the more authoritarian it is as well. Socialism is a system that must be imposed, authoritarianism is the vehicle that accomplishes that.
You may be pretty close to being right. Even if this bill is passed and becomes law, how would we know the spying has actually ended? They may just keep doing it and keep lying about it.
This might seem to pass but will change nothing. The surveillance will just be driven further into the dark where it cannot be tracked or controlled.
This no longer is relevant to any actual terrorist threat. You've reached a point where the government is absolutely terrified of its own citizens and so will do anything it can to protect itself from its own citizens. All this current business about monitoring other world leaders is just a smoke screen to divert people's attention for the surveillance on themselves.
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
By removing permissions to do those things?
How does that get stitched into another agency?
You removed the permission, and you add a whole bunch of shall nots, so that there is nothing left to stitch.
Most of these things that you object to, limitless authority, gag orders, etc are the spawn of section 215.
This is the first of 12 such bills waiting in the wings.
This bill probably doesn't go near far enough, but Section 215 is one of the most dangerous sections of the entire law. Any amount of crippling that can be done to it is long overdue. I don't trust Sensenbrenner to do enough, and I hope his efforts aren't a sop to divert attention with the appearance of doing something.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Cant help but read that headline and make Lord Of The Ring references in my head.. the fit.. it is so tight..the shoe..it laces up so well..
Using "freedom" or "patriot" in something is a dead giveaway. Anything like that is bound to suck. This extends to the formal name of the government. Anything that is a "democratic republic" is almost always a totalitarian state. God help us if we ever pass a "Glorious Free Democratic Republic Patriot Act".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's the logic of accountability.
If I tell you that I am going to lock the front door until all the votes have been counted, you have a perfect right to demand that all exits be locked. You don't have to prove that anyone intends to remove ballot boxes. You don't have to know how many other exits there are.
Dealing with secret agencies, it can hardly be encumbent on the public to name the organizations or the methods by which the law could be circumvented. It might even be illegal to say what one knows.
The right question is, "How do we know this spying is not continued under different rubric?" The answser is we don't know, and until we do know, we'd be fools to think it isn't being renamed rather than ended.
After all, reorganization, renaming, and privatization have been the methods that the so called "intelligence" services have always used to expand when ordered to cut back.
Better stop 'em now before they get so much dirt on us that we can't really stop them anymore without fearing that they'll end our career instantly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The agency you ask about would be the DHS. That agency is itself a Frankenstein's monster. It has swallowed old established agencies, and spawned new agencies, and hopes to swallow more agencies in the future. There is no limit to what can be created under the auspices of "homeland security".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The NSA's surveillance didn't happen because of the Patriot Act. Mass surveillance of Americans already started before 9/11, both planning and implementation, both recording of phone call meta data and of e-mail.
The Patriot Act just provided plausible legal cover.
What I'm truly worried about, personally, is the way that the Bush-era Department of Justice and now Obama's DoJ, bent over backwards to misinterpret laws to suit their ends.
The fact of the matter is, courts have _always_ given the government wide latitude for "national security" matters. The NSA program is likely to continue indefinitely under a theory of executive powers viz-a-viz national security. What has been and is supremely scary is the way that American lawyers tried to use the Patriot Act to defend the use of these surveillance techniques domestically, particularly for domestic non-terrorism and quasi-terrorism prosecutions.
The Patriot Act needs to be thrown away, and Congress should replace it with precisely nothing. The president will continue using his executive powers as he best sees fit to protect the country, but will have no ability to use them for regular domestic law enforcement. The president simply does not need Congressional authorization to investigate a terrorism plot. The only reason he would need Congressional authorization is if he wants to expand that activity into purely domestic law enforcement operations, such as drug operations.
One of the things that I find particularly amusing is that the overwhelming majority of those arguing against wealth redistribution are net receivers of such programs. Another thing I find amusing is that a substantial subset of those people will rage against anyone trying to strip away Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid benefits.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Observation shows americans have stupid paranoid about socialism, and despite not having anything like socialism, have a huge authoritarian government. Which makes you look like a moron.
By removing permissions to do those things?
Sigh. Firstly, you need to read section 215. It grants the Director of the FBI (not NSA) the ability to get ex parte authorizations for a search warrant, and the recipient is then gagged. That's it. The NSA isn't even referenced or involved, except perhaps to process the evidence gathered by the FBI. This is how they go to a bank, library, ISP, etc., and say "We want all your records on this person." and they have to turn them over and then not inform their client this happened. And they don't have to produce any evidence or give a reason to the recipient. It's just "wham, bam, thank you ma'am." ... and you better keep this between us.
The authority and power to do this is available in literally hundreds of other laws; Striking section 215 would simply mean they have to use a different administrative process to continue doing the exact same thing. This is political grandstanding -- not only is this "anti-NSA" bill not about the NSA, but regardless of whether it passes or fails, it will not change how business is being done.
Which, big surprise -- Our congress-critters are introducing a bill that accomplishes nothing, but has a nice, patriotic, sounding name. The "freedom act". Yeah. We can all get behind that! What does the freedom act do?
Nothing.
Typical.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Worried about those Canadians again, eh?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Isn't the big issue here that laws aren't stopping anyone. they find a reason around it or to reinterpret it or negate it?
For a law to stop someone, it has to have teeth in it -- penalties that are sufficient to dissuade one from running afoul of it. They have to be real, and personal, and unprotected by bureaucratic insulation.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
215 give authority to get records and a gag order.
The NSA never had that authority before, still don't. the FBI does, but its a distinction without a difference.
215 is critical, and the Patriot act would not have been passed if there equivalent provisions in "literally hundreds of other laws". You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Patriotism, or Freedom? I get that I'm meant to stand by my country, but jumping ship for Germany or Sweden seems like a good life decision right now.
You obviously have no concept of what socialism means, being an American its no surprise.
Here's a hint, you don't have any form of socialism in the US, anything you see is on your imagination.
Funny how my socialist country has one of the best economies in the world and is no more authoritarian than the US. And we even manage to have universal healthcare. The ignorance of Americans never ceases to amaze!
I can't tell if you are kidding or not. When you are forced to pay money to an entity, there are several terms that apply. Donation is not one of them.
What country might that be?
The same can be said about Capitalism. The number of totalitarian right wing states currently out number the current number of totalitarian left wing states. Thing is that when you're one of the well off cast the totalitarianism is not very visible.
Anyways if you really like right wing countries that practice capitalism due to their freedom you could move to the middle east or Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"To fix that and many other things, we first need to get money out of politics. " and "end corporate personhood" are just drippy ignorant left-wing talking points that lack any connection to reality
First, It is impossible to get the money out of politics when you have a big government - Once government gets involved in everything, it becomes easier for some to get rich or stay rich by manipulating government than by other means. As government grows, this effect only gets bigger as more and more people and companies find it easier to succeed by government action than by legitimate (heavily-regulated) business activity..... and this leads to them employing more lobbyists, creating more PACs, etc. All the largest corporations and all the richest billionaires (heard of: Gates, Soros, Buffet?) support the big government for this very reason. Big government can be bribed to make rules and laws (to keep competitors down, bail-out the rich, and maintain the status quo) and it likes big business (which supports government growth and is big enough to be convenient to work with). If you lefties want your massive government you just have to swallow all the money problems that go with it..... including its army of incompetent evil bloated crony-capitalist beltway corporations that provide "government services" like Halliburton, and the team of geniuses building the Obamacare website
Second, you guys always want to end "corporate personhood" (presumably to silence the evil oil companies and Koch brothers), but that very same legal structure enables labor unions, and many of your left-wing activist groups, and without it most of you would be unemployed and companies you like (like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc) would not be able to function. Without corporate personhood, companies could not enter into contracts with their employees, or other companies, nor could warranties on their products be enforced. Want to sue Exxon for an oil spill? You cannot without corporate personhood (you would have to sue the individual employees and none of them has enough personal assets to make it worth going after them) Wanna sue an employer for something? Good luck with that; you'll have to sue an individual and he or she might not have much cash. Do you have any CLUE about how and why corporate personhood exists and the amazing benefits the super-rich would get if you did away with it????? (hint: the super rich would hire poor temporary workers (lacking personal assets) to do all their dirty work and would be completely immune to any blowback where today at least the victims can go after a rich corporation)
Leftist thought is like the thought of a 6-year-old; there's no shred of evidence of any consideration to second- or third-order effects of the "Miss America"-style air-headed touchy-feely policies they advocate........ which is why Obamacare is causing millions to LOSE their insurance (EXACTLY as predicted by the right-wingers) and Obamabots are still in denial.
What country is this Middle East you speak of? And Russia?
"The Constitution of the Russian Federation provides all citizens right to free healthcare under Mandatory Medical Insurance in 1996. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the health of the Russian population has declined considerably as a result of social, economic, and lifestyle changes.[1] In 2008, 621,000 doctors and 1.3 million nurses were employed in Russian healthcare. The number of doctors per 10,000 people was 43.8, but only 12.1 in rural areas. The number of general practitioners as a share of the total number of doctors was 1.26 percent."
Wikipedia of course
Most of the Countries of the Middle East are pretty capitalist, especially some of the Sheikdoms and Kingdoms.
As for Russia, they've switched from their brand of Socialism to Capitalism so of course the average Russians health has dropped. As for their Constitution, they probably follow it as much as America follows theirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
... if the temperature briefly rises too quickly, it may be necessary to let the water cool before resuming the gradual increase in temperature.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
Yes I can. The patriot act is a bad law. It is also an irrelevant law regardless of what you say. There are over a hundred thousand federal laws alone. We are drowning in laws. There are entire libraries, entire buildings, filled with nothing but laws. Just the ones made by Congress, nevermind the rulings created by our courts, or administrative bodies, bylaws, guidelines. In all of that enormous complexity, there exists a 'backup copy' if you will of the Patriot Act.
The fact is the law is just a convenience for law enforcement. Its absence won't hinder them in any way -- there are a hundred other justifications already lined up and ready for use to continue their behavior.
The changing of a law means nothing if it isn't accompanied by a change of attitude, a change of focus, of perspective -- We have a culture of fear. Fear of the unknown; the terrorists, the boogiemen under our bed, whatever. We have let this fear part us from our liberty and freedom. No law, or the abolition of one, can make us whole.
For this to be meaningful, we need a paradigm shift from being oppressed by our fear to being sustained by it. We must move beyond our fear; We must conquer it. We must prove to the world that every terrorist that blows himself up on our lands, will only strengthen our resolve. It will only drive us to anger, and in our anger we will redouble every quality they hate in us. We will shine with the light of a hundred thousand suns and burn the little fuckers into dust. Our victory against them will be so complete, so absolute, that nobody will ever again test our resolve.
That is what we must project. That is the attitude; One where we will not sacrifice even the tiniest part of our culture, our freedom. We will tell them: Come. We're ready. Come and try and stop us. This is fucking America, and here, here we are free.
Attitude. That's what we need. Not laws.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Then maybe You should work to fix it instead of trying to disrupting something which helps Others? Or is Life all about You?
Ok, so I called bs on your hundreds of laws that allow wide scale wire taps without a warrant, gag orders, seizure of records, etc, and you double down and now claim hundreds of thousands of laws allow this?
Let's go for a million, nice round number, and you won't look any more foolish than you already do.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
In other news, Skynet creator have been seen reasoning with T-800 platoon to put down their weapons and shut down the network. "We we have created autonomous, self-learning killing system, we haven't actually planned on it doing any learning, killing or being independent" were his last words to journalists before approaching the robots.
Funeral rites will be held in Church of Naive Douchebags, Clueless Alley 42.
"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
I don't think so.
Why do I suspect more thought has been given to giving the bill a catchy acronym than has been given to the legislation itself?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Is the data they're collecting actually useful, or is it kind of tinfoil-hat paranoid useful where they get confirmation bias patterns out of it and believe it's useful?
And if so, what makes us think they will actually stop collecting it, especially if what they have is useful to other people (FBI, CIA, military..)? The whole operation is uber top secret and after Snowden I would imagine that they are redoubling their leak containment and secrecy. Sure, they've been able to ask/strongarm some of it and they might be impeded from doing that anymore but much of the principal job is spying -- surreptitiously obtaining and decoding information meant to be secret -- won't they just figure out how to get it through other means anyway?
Who or what can actually audit what the NSA does and what data they collect anyway? It sounds like a level of intelligence clearance and top-secretness that nobody but an insider can get and it always seems that once even an "agent for change *cough*Obama*cough* gets insight into this stuff they suddenly start being advocates for intelligence, not for change,
"The NSA has gone far beyond the intent of the Patriot Act, particularly in the accumulation and storage of metadata," Sensenbrenner said. "Had Congress known that the Patriot Act had been used to collect metadata, the bill would have never been passed."
This gentleman is either insufficiently clued -- or is acting on advice given by someone he trusts, someone who is insisting that the word metadata must be used in all Congressional inquiry.
It's a straw man, this metadata sharing agreement. NSA probably decided early on that the voluntary data-sharing plan is doomed. So they will pressure Congress to fixate on that, and they will advise them to choose their words carefully, so as not to speak of (or legislate against) interception and taps on the backbone network. If you ask Clapper whether he's tapping the Internet backbone you will get an answer about metadata.
These senators on the Intelligence Committee have probably been briefed that, if someone shakes and taps their watch and asks what time it is, they should reply "It's time to speak of metadata sharing agreements. And ONLY that.
This is item number 5 on my timeline of diversion, and we are proceeding as planned.
We must try to get our representatives to ask NSA direct questions about large scale domestic traffic gathering -- if we can.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
If you see an item sold at Harbor Freight and it's brand name includes an American city or state in the name, that's the guarantee that it has been made in China.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
No, ///some/// public schools are failing
What? A grand majority of them are, unless you consider rote memorization education to be a good thing. Public schools, at present, are unworkable one-size-fits-all solutions, and worse still, they do not facilitate true understanding of the material they claim to teach.
Ignorance is a choice
...what DID they think the politics of panic would invite?
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
"Healthcare for all Americans" came pretty much as "Oh, you can't afford insurance, so you don't have insurance? ... okay, I have a solution: We'll jack up the price of insurance, then fine you if you don't buy it. Now it's illegal to not have insurance, so you should all have insurance!"
I would have just mandated that hospitals need to increase breadth and density of clinical staff per some hospital capacity metric. Your hospital grows, you need to cover more square kilometerage and staff more clinical hours per day, plus supplies for vaccinations and clinical treatment. If there's multiple hospitals in the area, density increases to up to twice what a single hospital specifies; after that, you're displaced, so the coverage spreads further rather than winding up with 6 hospitals in the area creating a huge network of free clinics in this one tiny area.
That way the hospitals manage it, the hospitals pay for it, and what we get is basic clinical care for everyone. It's a start, but at least now everyone gets free STD tests and vaccinations and gets broken bones set (no surgery; if we can yank and set it, we do that and add a splint) and sprains mended.
That's a huge step up in public health, giving us a system to build on. Trying to deploy a giant 100% complete system in one shot was a mistake.
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"Helps Others" is a fancy term. If it hurts 10 billion people but helps 10 thousand, people will say it "helps others". With no qualifiers, people will say something that seems to have an ideal of helping others "helps others".
It's not a "show me one person helped by this" thing; it's a "Show me that this doesn't do far more harm than good" thing.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Think of it as a worldwide life-alert system! Except that they won't send an ambulance if they hear you having a heart attack.
I hear a voice in the back of my mind:
"Hi Everyone. Letâ(TM)s Pitch in âNâ(TM) Get Cracking Here in Louisiana Doing Right, Eh? Now Then, Hateful, Rich, Overbearing, Ugly Guys Hurt Royally Everytime Someone Eats a Radish, Carrot, Hors dâ(TM)ourve and Never Does Dishes. Eventually, Victor Eats Lunch Over Peoria Mit Ein Neusberger Tor."
And yet these public monstrous institutions work elsewhere in the world, the public benefits from them and live/learn much better. The problem isn't "Public". The problem is the "American Public", or rather, the half that won't allow these things to work because of propagands they hear on radio, tv, and internet.
It's time to abolish the insurance companies. And if hospitals/drug companies can't control prices after that, then there need to be investigation into the prices and possibly legislation to address it.
A lot of us protested the passage of the bill at the time, knowing that its prohibitive length and ridiculously short consideration period guaranteed there was no effective review by Congress even if there could be "good" ideas in it. Not enough, and nobody was listening in October 2001, but enough to knock that second number down a bit (and that said, Russ Feingold was admittedly on his own in Congress). Still, as someone who was downtown during 9/11 and then spent seven years vigorously protesting that administration's policies, you're welcome to make that "cowards" comment to my face and see what it gets you. But what's truly appalling is not the initial passage of the bill during a time when the whole country was traumatized, but the subsequent extensions of what were originally provisions supposed to sunset in 2005. The current administration's Patriot Act extensions in 2011 sailed by the Senate 72-23, with no discernible partisan division and little outcry from the public. For those who follow civil liberties, the "most open and transparent administration in history" has turned out to be worse in many ways than the previous one, which at least pretended that its wholesale revocation of the 4th Amendment was provisional.
That again is a huge step. Clinical care is a smaller step with less economic impact, but more direct impact on healthcare availability and thus a huge impact on public health.
You're trying to say, "People need to be able to get healthcare. This is why people can't get healthcare. Let's change this." I'm trying to say, "We have a public health issue. Here is the smallest step that will make the biggest immediate impact (=ROI) on public health with the smallest economic impact and the least risk. Let's do that first."
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The law will have zero effect on the NSA. It will merely push what they do, and will continue to do, further into the dark recesses of their operation. It's like laws claiming to regulate banks' behavior. They can't work.
I opposed it from the start. Me and many others pointed out the many faults. Now that the lies are falling apart and the faults are coming to fruition, you expect me to work to fix it? The time for that was before the law was passed. Screw you.
just slip in the repeal of the patriot act into some other bloated bill like they do with all sorts of stupid crap. i mean, do you think they would vote for the patriot act AGAIN?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Are you trying to petition the corrupt (according to your post above) legislators to pass a constitutional amendment aimed at stopping their corrupt practices?
Well, good luck with that...
'USA EPDIFFSLMEA'? That will never do!
(mumble mumble caps filter)
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
"[...] post-9/11 federal spending on homeland security exceeds $790 billion. That's larger than TARP and, when adjusted for inflation, the New Deal." And that is just one random mainstream media source ... but you get the point.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
You're kidding. Ever heard of Saudi Aramco? State-owned resources are a central tenet of socialism. As is "free health care".
I don't know what was in the man's mind when he helped start this mess. He may well have had good intentions, I don't know. But he made a mistake and is now trying to correct it. At least he is not trying to cover it up. Others have already done that enough. It's like Shakespeare said "the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray". I hope this problem can be fixed, because we all realize it is out of control now and being abused on a epic level. At this point unfortunately he may be the little dutch boy putting his finger in the dike. I hope not.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
Australia actually.