Slashdot Mirror
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...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
he's got my vote.
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?
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.
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 !
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 !
fascism would mean bigger federal government (as you said, centralizing power)
Wrong. Fascism does not require a bigger federal government, in fact a larger government is generally the opposite of fascism. Fascism requires more power in the hands of fewer people. There are many ways to de-centralize power - including growing the federal government. Centralizing power - such as aspiring to the "government you can drown in a bathtub" principle - is a giant step towards fascism.
And more power in the hands of fewer people - at the expense of the rest - is a fundamental characteristic of what both Ron and Rand support.
if you are gonna make a statement, at least have SOMETHING to back it up
Pretty much everything either of them have ever supported supports my statement of them being fascists - particularly if you use a definition of fascism that makes sense rather than just one that is used as a generic label and put-down for anyone who you disagree with.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There are many different sorts of government that feature "extreme concentration of power in the hands of very few people", and that condition is not at all the defining characteristic of fascism (which is a particular variety of regimented society).
Of all major politicians of the last 50 years, the Pauls stand out as the obvious promoters of freedom, enemies of regimentation and concentration of power.
Your complete absence of understanding is on display here; the goal is to remove power because power causes abuse.
"for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson - illustrates the proper attitude.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You do not know the meaning of fascism. Instead, you're using the term as a mere epithet.
Fascists have a view of world history in which ethnic or national groups are primary. They have a Hobbesian theory of society and the State where the nation must be reified as an individual, where disagreement and competition must be forcibly suppressed. Economic ideology is corporatist: having nothing to do with business corporations, but rather a form of guild socialism - central planning, where market competition is suppressed by the State, and sectors of society and the economy, such as agriculture, business, labor, etc. are regimented into organizations under a single governing body and forced to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of each organization and the body as a whole.
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.
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.
The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.
I stand open to correction here, but my understanding was that Jefferson inherited the vast majority of the slaves that he owned, and his only known purchases of slaves were in order to reunite family members who had been separated by sales to different masters. It's true that he didn't free many of his slaves, but that was (apparently) because life for an ex-slave in Virginia in the 18th century was arguably nastier than being nominally "owned" by a caring owner. He also attempted to pass laws through the Virginia state legislature that would have abolished slavery (his bill was defeated), and included an anti-slavery diatribe in the original Declaration of Independence, which was cut by the committee before it was published.
When you get right down to it, there is not a lot one man - even a President of the United States - can do when the culture of the time is against him. But he seems to have done about as much as he could in the circumstances, so criticising him from a perspective more than two centuries later seems a bit unfair.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --