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NSA Surveillance Reform Bill Passes House 303 Votes To 121
First time accepted submitter strangeintp (892348) writes "The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121. The bill's authors concede it was watered down significantly in recent days but insist it will still outlaw the practice of bulk collection of US telephone metadata by the NSA first revealed by Snowden."
*clap* *clap* *clap*
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Wait.
Even serfs had the right to have their own advocate.
You're not serfs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As watered down as the bill may be, it's nice to see congress at least trying to push things in the right direction for once. Will this bill have a major impact? Maybe. Does it pave the way for more laws against mass surveillance? One can hope.
last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act
Instead of the NewSpeak "intelligence community loyalists" how about we call them what they really are: Enemies of the People.
Another case of the fox guarding the hen house.
We need to fire everyone in Washington DC and reform the crap out of everything. Both sides are wrong here - why vote for a flawed by design bill? It only exists for political posturing for elections.
We need to remove the bureaucracy, scrap the tax law and start over, zero base budget every agency, and force everyone in DC to work for an amount that is equal to the mean wage of the nation, since they're supposedly volunteers. On top of that, Obamacare should apply to them and pensions should be removed for all of them, past present and future.
My theory is that any legislation will just put the covert back into intelligence gathering.
Everybody wins here, a bunch of people get to say they did something in the fight against the NSA. The Executive branch and those in the house who support invasive domestic spying get to keep the majority of their surveillance programs, and most importantly there isn't much more meaningful oversight so who actually knows if the NSA is following the rules. The Executive still gets to hide themselves behind national security letters, "state secrets", and special secret courts.
However I do not feel like this caused any meaningful change. Hopefully the nation remains outraged at the NSA and this is just the first step in fixing our domestic spying programs, but I feel like we get a few meaningless bills passed and then this issue goes away until the next Snowden.
They know everything about you; all it takes is a "gentle reminder" and this bill is turned into a termite-eaten stack of drivel.
I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...
If it really meant anything, this bill would have contained a passage giving Snowden immunity, as long as he testifies against everyone else inside the Govt that violated the constitution with respect to their illegal activities.
"It's not illegal when the President does it!" didn't work for Nixon, it should not have worked for Bush or Obama. Everyone should be in Jail, at this point, lol.
WTF has our country become?
.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Justin Amash voted against his own bill. In an article for "the Hill" (http://thehill.com/policy/technology/206929-house-votes-to-limit-nsa-spying) he is quoted as saying:
“This morning's bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program,” he wrote in a post on Facebook.
Changes to the language, for instance, would allow the government to obtain data about a broad section of phone records such as "area code 616" or "phone calls made east of the Mississippi."
“The bill green-lights the government's massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans' records in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he added.
Seems that what was actually passed should actually be called the "Placate the Plebs while Continuing to Screw Them Act of 2014"
The bill basically says that metadata and data should not get collected without a warrant except when one thinks one has a reason. What kind of reason would count as an exception is not actually specified.
So while the previous practice was clearly illegal, this bill makes everything legal since it only applies the "but only if you think this a good idea" metric and clearly everybody already thought it was a good idea to spy on everyone without warrant.
Hehe, this...as well as the bureaucrats. We have a lot of bureaus that don't actually do anything other than hire people and spend money, left over from times when they were actually needed. It's like half the daemons in ubuntu, actually.
... the NSA has just freed up a bunch of server capacity for spying on _you_.
From what I've heard of what passed, not only does it NOT have any teeth to it, but it is written so broadly that with secret judges giving secret interpretations (even the secret judges don't consult with each other I"m led to believe), this could likely give the NSA and other TLA agencies *more* leeway to get creative in the work of crushing the US citizens' rights.
C'mon folks, no matter who is currently in office, D or R, please this time around vote for anyone other than the incumbent, and let's sweep the house and senate clean over the next couple years and start from scratch.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
We need to fire everyone in Washington DC and reform the crap out of everything. Both sides are wrong here - why vote for a flawed by design bill? It only exists for political posturing for elections.
Remember, term limits and "voting out the bastards" doesn't really mean much if lobbying (aka Bribery) is still funding their replacements. We need to fire everyone, and then keep moneyed interests from simply installing newly-bought idiots.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Stuff like trying to protect your freedom you idiot!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Some of them were thinking that the bill was so watered down that it actually authorizes spying, and weren't fooled into approving it.
And you were suckered into thinking that they were the bad guys. The establishment wins again.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
they are not going to stop any of that spying, they are going to collect as much data as possible on as many people as possible, either the bill gets watered down to the point that it is useless, or it gets passed but ignored or a work around renders it useless, those fascist kleptocrats are not giving up anything
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This reminds me of the CAN SPAM act. Can our congress do nothing to control the smoke filled room policy making? I'm disgusted.
It still needs to make it through the Senate.
There's Security Theater, and now we have Legislative Theater. Arguing about whether the law could have been "better" or "stronger" is just playing their game. IT DOESN"T MATTER what the law is. The ruling class--like every minority ruling class in history--will do whatever it needs to to stay in power.
Over the decades when exposed and required to be shut down: The main operational software and hardware is removed and the teams reassigned.
The methods, data gathered and backups just end up at a different site, branch, agency under as a new or old project.
The classic "Total Information Awareness" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... would be a public example of this.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Techdirt has a good writeup about the various things done to water-down this bill. Including legalizing things that had previously been illegal and that the NSA was probably already doing anyway.
Start thinking locally. ...
Do you need that chat or VOIP product known to decrypt your messages on your computers?
Do you need that free or consumer OS known to decrypt your messages on your computers?
Do you need to invite that hardware vendor known to backdoor your servers next upgrade?
Do you still trust that crypto vendor known to trapdoor your communications system?
Are your staff really fully aware of what tame academia, hardware and software providers offered as robust crypto standards?
Does your historic database really need to be on a cloud with a vendor known to share access to your data?
A whitebox solution with regional expert staff will run hot, be very expensive and you still need a CPU vendor.
If your nations political leadership, tame academics, mil staff are happy to see your productive entrepreneurship given to 5+ other nations for free over decades
not much you can do but rethink your own network and computer use.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
On the plus side, anyone who voted for it cannot support anti-Snowden actions without looking completely stupid. That might have meant something back in the days when media asked questions.
But in the days when unlimited funds can create attack messages for anyone, this vote basically says yes to Snowden, and no to either the Obama administration or the Presidency in general depending on which party they want to appeal to.
The political process is slow, and I honestly did not expect even this much so far. I guess that's the power of not just the same story, but evolutions of the same story over the span of months.
And that to me is the real story here. A Friday news flash that gets buried by entertainment news won't do it. But here's a good example of what does work.
After everything that the U.S. has been willing to do in the past decade or so, you still think that members of congress are off limits to the NSA and CIA?
No, I don't.
Unfortunately, I do also believe most of them are spineless, corrupt cowards. A true legislative would go public at the first sign of such attempts and disband the agency in question, with any and all funding withdrawn, effective immediately.
I believe there is a natural tendency of governments towards higher concentrations of power, because of a) human desires and b) higher efficiency (at the low cost of democracy, human rights and such things). So to keep working, the different branches of government need to ascertain their independence from each other regularily.
Unfortunately, no western democracy really has its branches seperated. Judges are appointed by politicians, the executive is elected from among the members of the legislative in many parliamentary democracies, or is a member of the same party as the legislative in republical systems.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org