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Patriot Act Spy Powers To Expire As Rand Paul Blocks USA Freedom Act Vote
Saturday, we mentioned that three major spying powers that the U.S. government has exercised under the Patriot Act might be nixed, as the sections of the Act granting authority to use them expires. The Daily Dot reports that Senator (and presidential contender) Rand Paul today used Senate rules to block a bill which would have extended those powers, which means that as of midnight Sunday on the U.S. east coast, sections 206, 207 and 215 of the Patriot Act will have expired. Says the Daily Dot's article, linked by reader blottsie:
The reform bill, which the House passed before leaving town for a week-long recess, would end the government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records under the Patriot Act's controversial Section 215 but leaves the other two provisions intact. ... Sunday's procedural meltdown was the second narrow defeat for the USA Freedom Act. In a late-night session on Friday, May 22, the bill fell three votes short of an initial procedural step after [Senate Majority Leader] McConnell lobbied hard against it. The Senate's failure to meet its deadline was a blow to President Obama, who on Friday had warned lawmakers that the country would be vulnerable if the USA Freedom Act did not pass.
I am so jittery... as the clock strikes Midnight I will no longer bask in the protective glow of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. I cannot fall asleep without the reassuring sound of telephone records being gathered. Surely something awful will happen tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I will try to organize the neighborhood for a continuous vigil until the Act is restored. But first, I'll just turn on the radio and catch some news...
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he's got my vote.
That's a good first move. It'd be entertaining to watch and see a Libertarian fuck up a country, too.
Just a couple weeks ago, a US Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA was violating the law. It doesn't matter what's legal and what's not, they'll just do it. c.f. "above the law".
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It is the right thing to do. You and Ron Wyden are about the only reps who seem to honestly give a shit about the constitution. Nice work. Keep it up.
They'll still collect if they want to, and they'll label it important to security, and they'll do it in secret. This is all just for show and you're all eating it up.
The Huffington Post was live updating the proceedings, and said this:
USA Freedom Act advances 77-17
In a stunning reversal from last week’s drama, the USA Freedom Act was passed by a vote of 77-17. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly several weeks ago will now move forward and is likely to receive a final vote on Tuesday.
The bill fell three votes short of the needed supermajority to advance last week but with the clock ticking on controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, supporters of NSA surveillance thought that the proposed reforms were better than letting the program expire entirely.
Rand Paul stated that the Freedom Act will likely get passed on Tuesday.
Wait... did we win or not? Isn't this just a 2-day repreive?
If it dies, it's because they already have something to replace it. We will be informed on a 'need to know' basis. They will decide when we 'need to know'.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So he did one thing you agree with. The rest of his profile is just bat shit crazy.
That's a useful technique - agreeing or conceding the immediate issue, while making nebulous unsupported statements about everything else. Look to see this for the next year or so. "I agree with him on this issue, but everything else is crazy".
...problem is, that "agreeing on this one issue" seems to happen a lot. Like, for most issues.
Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)
In order to keep America safe, does anyone know where I can send my emails and phone records to until this whole misunderstanding is resolved? I'd hate for a terrorist to get me because my information was private.
This would have a lot more meaning if the NSA had anything to fear if they break the law.
You really think they will stop just because the legal justification they claimed is gone? They will just invent a new legal theory to justify what they have always done, what they always do, and what they have always been planning to do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Patriot Act was in the end largely an expansion of existing government powers. This did not create the CIA, FBI, or NSA. They will still exist even if the Patriot Act is not extended at all, and they will still have a lot of power to spy on Americans. In the end, this is a great move of political posturing, but it doesn't really help us as much as a certain presidential candidate wants us to believe.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The Huffington Post was live updating the proceedings, and said this:
USA Freedom Act advances 77-17
In a stunning reversal from last week’s drama, the USA Freedom Act was passed by a vote of 77-17. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly several weeks ago will now move forward and is likely to receive a final vote on Tuesday.
The bill fell three votes short of the needed supermajority to advance last week but with the clock ticking on controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, supporters of NSA surveillance thought that the proposed reforms were better than letting the program expire entirely.
Rand Paul stated that the Freedom Act will likely get passed on Tuesday.
Wait... did we win or not? Isn't this just a 2-day repreive?
Please note this [1] is one of the bills being proposed (by the sitting Senate Intelligence Chair, no less):
The bill Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr released last Friday is bad enough for the way it expanded the existing illegal dragnet. I argued here Burr’s bill would give the Intelligence Community everything they lost in 2009 and 2011. [...]
So think about it - is this just a 2 day reprieve or 2 days so they can rollback more restrictions and make things worse than they are now?
[1] https://www.emptywheel.net/201...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I have been an American citizen for over 30 years ever since I took my oath back in the 1980's
This is the day I can say that I feel proud as an American for at the very least the politicians in Washington D.C., for once, are doing something that the PEOPLE want them to do --- to kill that goddamn draconian bill that allows the government of the United States of America to act much like a totalitarian regime
I think I am not the only one in America who will keep note of who is voting to keep American under the dictatorship of Obama - and we will make sure that all the supporters of dictator Obama will get booted from the Capitol Hill
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dunno what else he stands for, but he just made a huge "hell ya" in my book. I'm sure I'll find out in the next few days he's a misogynist endangered species farker.
Seriously, dunno what else he stands for but his efforts to let this abomination die wins him major points in my book.
Does anyone really think they, the NSA, is not going to spy, with or without approval? We have no way to control them, they hold all the cards!
So he did one thing you agree with. The rest of his profile is just bat shit crazy
Even if that Rand Paul guy has done only one thing right that ONE THING still represents one thing MORE than all the other congress-critters (plus senate critters) on the Congressional Hill!
Hey, as a citizen of the United States of America I do understand the problem with the devoid of quality of the congress-critters, and I know I do not have any more option to pick and choose --- whoever does anything right in the Congress in this days has become a RARITY, something that the People can appreciate, and we do appreciate that gesture, whether it is genuine or not, very much!
Yeah, call me bat shit crazy all you want - as long as we can dump that motherfucking law out you can call me anything you want!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
. In the end Rand Paul is just another fascist conservative running under the "libertarian" banner even though his notion of liberty is quite twisted
Excuse me?
Who the fuck are the REAL fascists here??
The ones who UPHOLD the spirit of the Constitution of the United States of America, or the ones who STEPPED ON IT??
Other than name calling what else you fascist liberals can do?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Seriously, some people are pro the "USA Freedom Act" because they think it's a start on the path to reigning in the "Patriot Act", and then again others with same agenda are con the "USA Freedom Act" because they would rather have the "Patriot Act" expire.
And on the other side, people who want more surveillance, are also split between the two, either seeing "USA Freedom Act" as the only way to avoid everything expiring. Or seeing the "USA Freedom" act a blocker for getting the "Patriot Act" re-authorized.
It's sad you can't just agree to disagree and then vote on the subject (perhaps compromise), rather than playing games trying to out smart each other.
Please spare me the history lesson, dude
I do need to ask you a question, tho ...
Who is the one coming out asking the Congress to extend the Patriot Act?
Was it Cheney Rumsfeld Bush and Co., or was it Obama?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... in a few weeks the powers that be will let (if necessary, "encourage") an act of extreme terrorism on US soil succeed. Then they will go back to the well, and congress will enthusiastically vote us all into chains at the same time they increase the budget and personal power of all of the shadow spooks keeping us safe.
Well, probably not a few weeks -- that would be too suspicious. But look for it within the year, especially if they can find a poster-child terrorist they can point at and say -- look, if only we were tapping everybody's phone (including yours) we could have found him in time to prevent this tragedy...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I'm a little bit afraid of what our Intelligence Apparatus will do if backed into a corner.
I'd feel a lot better if Senator Paul was fighting for increased oversight over the NSA's off-the-books budget. I mean, we already know that they don''t give fuck-all about the law.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The provisions expire midnight Jun 1, 2015, not May 31, 2015.
So, as of right now, and as of the time you posted, the provisions have not expired.
However, the program is already in shutdown, as they had to start turning it down early in order to be in compliance with the midnight expiration
Even if that Rand Paul guy has done only one thing right that ONE THING still represents one thing MORE than all the other congress-critters (plus senate critters) on the Congressional Hill!
While I applaud him for so openly opposing the bill, he's not the only one in Congress who has. There were 121 votes against the bill in the House.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Does anyone really think they, the NSA, is not going to spy, with or without approval? We have no way to control them, they hold all the cards!
The have always spied and that part will never cease. But it's time to shake them up a little.
1. If it can and will be abused, refrain from building it in the first place.
2. If it has been built, see that it is laid bare to the greatest extent possible and dismantled.
3. For egregious offenses, the offending Agency must be completely disbanded, its assets liquidated, and formed anew.
4. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. (only joking!)
The United States is presently under attack, by itself, in a way even Stalin was unable to achieve given the limited technology of his time. Due to a lack of transparency and believability, a technological renaissance with (apparently) no moral compass steered by Charter, the NSA has likely deployed assets and capabilities for domestic surveillance. The following attack vectors cannot be ruled out:
There is an unknown, possibly massive tapping of the backbone network occurring. Utah Data Center's central location is a clue. Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of especial note, for it is he who revealed the existence of Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that EFF took almost to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case on the basis that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. A law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. To any future despot this means that the United States may be prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave. Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing, unless they were insane? James Bamford hinted at the possibility that NSA was 'going domestic' in his 1982 book Puzzle Palace as he suggests its interest in developing technology for bulk microwave gathering. That is to be expected as this technology was deployed worldwide. But the way they wished to go about it was a bit... peculiar:
Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
NSA should not have wanted th
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I've always considered the "Patriot Act" to be a mockery of American values of honesty. The DOJ's disenfranchisement of all Americans is as worthless as those who would wish us to be gone. Grinning Showoffs have profited greatly from this baseless fear. Some showoffs have stopped grinning, and a few can never grin again. If the West wishes to stop more grinning show offs, the easiest solution is large scale, ocean based environmentally sound desalination plants pumping water to the dry areas of this planet. Powered by Solar and Wind. It's off the self technology and cheaper than the life of one american.
Who is the one coming out asking the Congress to extend the Patriot Act?
Was it Cheney Rumsfeld Bush and Co., or was it Obama?
This argument is exactly the argument they want. because this argument leads nowhere.
The patriot act was promulgated by Cheney Rumsfeld Bush and Co. under a republican controlled congress. And it was backed by Obama under a democratically controlled congress, and - if not for the exception of one guy with a backbone - almost got pushed through a Republican controlled congress by a Democrat president again. So you are both right. What are your points?
The one thing that you two probably agree with, the one thing that polls have shown like 80% if Americans agreeing with, is that the Patriot Act is nonsense and needs to be repealed. Yet, over 99% of the elected representatives seems to want the Patriot Act passed.
Meanwhile, armchair yahoos such as yourselves are busy arguing about which politician is to blame? Balderdash! How about blaming all elected officials, except for maybe Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders? If you can only think of this through the lens of political parties, how about going with the vertebrate and invertebrate parties? I know, without their own news channels, it is hard to imagine....
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
So who is going to jail for violating it when it's off the books? The same guys that didn't go to jail when they were caught breaking the law by torturing people?
I think the reality is that all of the wiretapping, spying, etc. is going to continue, but the results will be much less visible. Countries have been spying on each other forever, and most spy on their own citizens to some extent.
One thing I have to wonder is this -- whether you like the President or not, he's pretty much the only person in the world who knows most of what is going on in the military and intelligence community. So I've always been curious about the real state of affairs...none of us have access to the information he does. It must be interesting getting back from the inaugural ball, waking up the next morning and walking into your first daily briefing where you find out the difference between what made the news that morning and what's actually going on in the world. "Good morning, Mr. President -- here's your nuclear launch codes, your security detail, and the four scenarios the Joint Chiefs have worked up for a possible land invasion of China...choose one." There's a reason heads of state age prematurely -- and I'm guessing this is a large part of it. I know I'd be a little worried about being the ultimate authority responsible for 300 million people. Like the sign on the desk says, "The buck stops here." So, for example, if the President chose to continue the Patriot Act data collection, there was probably a reason for doing so, especially since he campaigned on rolling back a lot of this. Whether this was done by his military/ntelligence advisors to keep things easy, or driven by something else is the question.
All I'm saying is that none of us knows what's actually being done with this information. I'm of the opinion that, while the threat may be overblown, some of the intelligence gathered through this program at least helped connect the dots on a few things. No one just walks into an Internet forum and announces they want to join ISIS and are looking for something to blow up. We'll see what happens...it's probably nothing, but it will be very interesting to go back late in my life and see what was declassified from this time period.
Some terrorist(s) will kill many dozens or hundreds in the US and everybody will want snooping back. Just you watch and see. Bookmark my post. I've been around long enough to notice political patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
The law was bought in to give them permission to do something they always did anyway, you think a politician can stop them now ?
Until one of them goes to Jail nothing will change.
I do not like it but I am not a woman and I have no say in the matter. The majority want it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
are carefully selected by corporate money/the rich who own them then there is no real change since it's the same hand up the ass of both party puppets.
can't the senate get anything done? ... oh wait!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
this won't stop the NSA and FBI, CIA, etc from continuing their unconstitutional surveillance state...
What I'm expecting is that if Hillary gets in, many woman voters are going to see her as a saviour only to be sorely disappointed when she either ignores any prominent womens' issues or outright craps on them, especially issues she's promised to address (similar to how Obama did to many of his supporters).
Your comment made my day! :)
Paul B.
Which anthrax attack are you talking about? The one many years ago, or the attack from a few weeks ago, where our own government sent live anthrax spores through the postal system to unsuspecting labs, exposing dozens of people at minimum, to test if they were ready for just such an attack? (Yes, this really just happened, and it hasn't gotten nearly the airtime it deserves, since it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by the government)
Normally, I wouldn't have problems w/ wiretaps, if we didn't have recent cases like the IRS auditing people based on their political beliefs, as came out. But I do have problems, and here it is.
Who are the vocal supporters of continuing all this? It's the Bush Republicans - I mean guys like McCain, Gramm, McConnell, Christie, Rubio, Santorum, et al. Aside from Paul, real Conservatives like Ted Cruz have expressed reservations about this. Also, I'd take the jibes of the McCains more seriously if they supported other secutity measures.
Since 9/11, what has been the biggest gaping hole in our security? It's been allowing Muslims to continue to come to this country, no questions asked. While it's tough for people from Mexico, China or India, people from Saudi Arabia - the country of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers - can get visa stamps on their passports from their travel agents. Not just that, Mid East Muslims coming here is as easy as taking a flight from SFO to JFK. And Muslim immigration has increased to the point where they dominate cities like Dearbornistan.
So all the Republicans concerned about our security - why aren't they publicly opposing Muslim immigration? The last major Republican to have done that was Tom Tancredo, and his candidacy in 2008 went nowhere. McCain and Gramm, as well as a lot of the mainstream candidates, including the Pauls, have supported amnesty. While the primary beneficiaries of them may be Mexicans, there are a huge number of Muslims too in the mix, who won't be subjected to any deportation despite participating in terror threats or other criminal acts.
And the rhetoric about ISIS - let's revisit why it became an issue in the first place. Some journalists captured in Syria were beheaded, and that's when the collective blood of the media began boiling. But if members of the media are stupid enough to believe in their own lies about how benign Muslims are, why should American - or any non-Muslim troops from anywhere - be responsible for their stupidity? The whole issue would never have happened had Western journalists stayed out of Muslim countries following the so-called 'Arab Springs' and let them run their own civil wars. While I don't support Obama's anti-Israel policies, at least his policy of not sending US ground troops there is a sound one. In fact, he needn't even conduct bombing operations there.
Also, this policy of blocking US and other Muslims who want to go to Syria to join ISIS - my question - why stop them? Let them go, but revoke their citizenship the moment they are in Syria - or even Turkey. Let them join ISIS, and fight in battles in Raqqa, Tadmur, Ramadi or Tikrit. Why are we howling over (un)Americans who want to go and wage jihad/taqfir wars? Let them go and die there, and meet their 72 virgins or whatever.
Also, in all the arguments about the situations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and so on, or on what should be our policy towards ISIS, when two or more of your enemies are fighting each other, what does one normally do? The sensible response is to get into the seating area of the theater and open the popcorn. Why is the West agonizing over supporting Iran, or Syria, or Yemen's government or anybody else for that matter? Just let the Shi'ites and ISIS fight it out, and if we have to do anything at all, it should be to supply each side adequately so that the war never ends. Hopefully, that should drain out all Jihad-minded Muslims into battlefields in Iraq and Syria, and we'll have less of them in our countries.
All of this is moot. ...unless you actually believe that we haven't invented quantum computing already.
This is moot unless you believe quantum computing isn't already here.
You are in a little twisty maze of quantum computing, spooky at a distance..
You are in a twisty little maze of quantum computing, all entangled.
You are in a little twisty computing of quanta, all moot.
You are in a moot of quantum twisters, all charmed.
There are some keys on the ground here.
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I would love to see you stop bulk collection in foreign countries too...