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NSA-Reform Bill Fails In US Senate
New submitter Steven King writes with a link to The Daily Dot's report that the U.S. Senate has rejected the controversial USA Freedom Act, thus "all but guaranteeing that key provisions of the USA Patriot Act will expire"; had it passed, the bill would have allowed continued use of some mass data-collection practices, but with the addition of stronger oversight. From the article:
The Senate failed to reach agreement on passage of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to reauthorize and reform Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which the government has used to conduct bulk surveillance of Americans' phone records. The House of Representatives passed the bill last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, but Senate Democrats, who unified behind the bill, did not get enough Republican votes to assure passage. The linked piece also mentions that the EFF shifted its position on this bill, after a panel of Federal judges ruled that the Feds at the NSA had overstepped their bounds in collecting a seemingly unlimited trove of metadata relating to American citizen's phone calls.
We know how this works: Issue an emergency order until a bare-bones bill allowing basic programs can be passed by US congress. Then secretly append the nasty schedules of the failed bill into necessary bills such as bills of supply. The military-industrial complex will get the laws they want sooner rather than later.
Yes, the generation that sponsored the SR-71 to keep a close watch on godless communists and who commissioned astonishingly accurate satellite surveillance to keep the bad guys from taking over the world like a series of dominoes are also responsible for approving a system to keep close watch on the scary Muslims. The scary Muslims are even more dangerous than the godless Communists, because they don't concentrate inside any particular national boundaries. Therefore, it's necessary but unfortunate that every person on the planet be monitored in order to determine whether they are one of "Us" or one of "Them." The Cold War generation understands the "Us" and "Them" dichotomy, and invasive surveillance helps to distinguish.
They don't have to know how the technology works, and it may even help to be ignorant of the uselessness of so much data on so many innocent people. The people who designed the SR-71 are at the top end of their generation's technological bell curve. The people who sponsored it are at the bottom end.
The poster thinks that being knowledgeable about tech is knowing your memes and posting selfies of yourself regularly. I could ask my 20 year old millenial daughters how they think their phones/laptops work if you want an example of "clueless". Being a crack addict does not confer knowledge of plant alkaloids or even botany.
On the other hand people who aren't clueless about tech (and the disturbing direction it's headed in) will voluntarily use as little tech as possible...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
as it omits (this from the NYT)