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Senate Rejects FBI Bid For Warrantless Access To Internet Browsing Histories (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet:An amendment designed to allow the government warrantless access to internet browsing histories has been narrowly defeated in the Senate. The amendment fell two votes short of the required 60 votes to advance. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) switched his vote at the last minute. He submitted a motion to reconsider the vote following the defeat. A new vote may be set for later on Wednesday. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the amendment as an add-on to the commerce, justice, and science appropriations bill earlier this week. McCain said in a statement on Monday that the amendment would "track lone wolves" in the wake of the Orlando massacre, in which Omar Mateen, who authorities say radicalized himself online, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in the Florida city. The amendment, which may be reconsidered in the near future, aims to broaden the rules governing national security letters, which don't require court approval. These letters allow the FBI to demand records associated with Americans' online communications -- so-called electronic communications transactional records.
John McCain never misses an opportunity to attack our liberties.
> killed 49 people at a gay nightclub
What does the fact that the nightclub was oriented towards gay people have to do with the nutjob whacking 49 people in it?
How is "killed 49 people at a gay nightclub" any more informative than "killed 49 people at a nightclub".
Only records approved by a judge with probable cause can be demanded.
This NSL shit has got to stop.
A clear violation of the 4th amendment.
The founders would be rolling in their graves if this passed.
If there is evidence that Achmed is a terrorist, go before a judge, prove probable cause, then all his stuff will be inspectable, including his home.
Don't think for a second that they're done. The all out assault on our liberties by statists is non stop. The FBI failed to stop Omar Mateen after meeting with him twice, but somehow that is justification for asking for MORE spy powers? Orwellian move by the Oligarchs.
Please submit your phone, laptop and office computer browsing histories for public inspection before the vote. After all, you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For those not familiar with parliamentary rules, this is the archetypal dick move:
>Mitch McConnell (R-KY) switched his vote at the last minute. He submitted a motion to reconsider the vote following the defeat.
In generic rules of order, when a motion is voted down, only someone who voted against it is allowed to submit a motion to reconsider. So if it looks like you don't have enough votes to pass you motion, you vote against it and then file a motion to reconsider. The motion to reconsider has a lower vote threshold, so the failed motion is resurrected like a zombie.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So other than the 16 cosponsors and 1 sponsor, which 58 sacks of shit voted for this.
Time to offend someone
I find it funny how when the FBI and the other letters always think that our losing our rights will stop future crimes. It won't. Because when something happens under their watch, they will just say once again, well, if we can access X without a warrant, we can keep this stuff from happening. Yet bad shit still happens anyways.
You want to stop terrorists? How about we stop making them and stop supplying them with weapons, stop giving them money for oil. Stop killing their family and friends with drones. How about we, the USA be the bigger fucking person and apologize for how we have treated the Middle East for that last 70 years. How about we stop fucking giving Saudi Arabia weapons and money.
And seriously, I'm not against guns at all, but we need smarter laws on purchasing them.
Be seeing you...
(posted this on hacker news, pasting here, too)
If anybody wants to do something about this with me and others, start sending Foia requests for similar information to your local and state governments. You'll find that there is a huge amount of aversion towards releasing things like call logs and email. Push on and on and you'll eventually get what you're looking for. Highlighting the absurdities of these laws through civil reciprocation may just go a long way.
If all goes as best as it can go, I should have Chicago's mayor's office's dns resolution logs tomorrow. Just so I can limit an email search since they consider it too difficult to search for three companies in their email records for a single week. It's taken a year and a half to get this far, but it takes minutes for them to do the same. This is absurd.
This isn't a place for journalists anymore. None I've talked to are evee willing to do anything similar because of the time it takes to get a request fulfilled. Don't be like them, and just persist, dammit.
Assuming the accuracy of the summary, shame on those who voted for this.
Consider a simple hypothetical. Suppose a piece on Al-Jazeera critical of America gets flagged so that when the reader interacts with a customs official or a police officer or a TSA agent, "reads anti-American Al-Jazeera articles" comes up as extra information on that public servant's screen.
Guess who is going to be retaliated against for having once followed a link to a web page? Guess who is going to risk losing the ability to fly?
This proposal discourages freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, criticism of any actions of the US or the Administration here and abroad, research on the enemy, and simple academic free thought. It is the equivalent of monitoring you for checking "subversive" material out of a library.
As someone who very occasionally reads foreign news sources so that my view of the world is a little less dependent on the domestic American narratives and worldview that dominate the American Press, I find the potential for abuse here staggering. As a practical matter, this kind of surveillance penalizes thinking and reading.
The only way around that would be VERY strict controls on when it could be used, combined with good oversight and accountability, which right now we simply do not have. There are lots of very nice and good people involved in the three letter agencies, but they are not the only ones there and the system as a whole has incredible potential for abuse and keeps getting caught abusing its power. Expanding NSL Authority is not the answer.
Real lawyers write in C++
"Mitch McConnell (R-KY) switched his vote at the last minute."
This is a parliamentary move. It allows McConnell to bring the motion back for reconsideration.
Thank you, Senators, for giving me a list of people whose reelection I will oppose.
Sam Harris had a podcast which contains an audio clip of an imam teaching that it's OK to kill gays, that it was the compassionate thing to do. I got the impression from the 'cast that the clip was from an imam in the Orlando area, and that it was taken a week or so before the shooting.
(I can't link the specific podcast at the moment because the site that I read it at is temporarily offline.)
We have often thought that the right to practice religion is absolute, but I'm wondering now if it should be.
Does being a religion give you a license to say anything you like? We have laws against hate speech even though we have free speech in general, and we have laws against speech that encourage a specific crime.
We guarantee freedom of religion, but we also guarantee freedom of life.
Which one has priority?
Maybe it's time to prioritize freedom of life over the freedom of religion. Maybe we should say categorically that you *can't* preach that it's OK to kill people of a certain class, whatever the class might be.
This would apply to any religion, even Christian ones ("thou shall not suffer a witch to live"), and it would apply to all cases: people who leave the religion are free to go unmolested (Islam, Scientology), people that the religion dislikes would be free to go unmolested (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism), and so on.
So for example, I would cite The Westboro Baptist church claiming that gays should be put to death, or evangelists calling on their flock to assasinate abortion providers.
As a country, I think we might legitimately say "not in this country" to these extreme views, and in these specific cases maybe intervene and say "no, you can't preach that even if your religion believes it".
Personal safety should be absolute, and the right to religion isn't more important.
In the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, imams haven't stopped teaching that gays should be killed.
Perhaps they should.
Time and again they've shown nothing but contempt for the law, attempting to circumvent and overthrow fundamental rights and bills, long institutionalized, for very shortsighted and short term gains. They are just too big for their britches and need to come back down to reality or simply taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up. They are not doing their jobs anymore but wasting hard earned taxes, we cannot continue to enable their paranoia. It is way past out of hand now.
My understanding on the matter is confused, but apparently the CDC is banned from studying gun violence. https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
I hate rider bills totally unrelated to the primary bill just to get some nasty thing passed that can't get passed on its own.
And seriously, I'm not against guns at all, but we need smarter laws on purchasing them.
Translation: As long as I get what I want the rest of you can fuck off.
Are you running for Senate? You sound like one of them. If we can only take away the rights I think you shouldn't have we would all be safer.
$7M+ from the NRA--the most given to any congress person--is a good incentive to introduce legislation to distract from efforts at gun control. It's a great irony to undermine one civic right (privacy) in defense of another (purported) one.
https://usuncut.com/politics/see-how-much-nra-paid-your-senator/
Diversity is weakness, not strength. Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, and look at where it has gotten them.
Diversity sucks, incest is so hot.
Maybe they should stop approving military actions that cause unnecessary wars that lead to blow back... err... oh, you mean they *want* all that to lead to an erosion of our freedom?
:T:R:A:N:S:
They communicate with anybody? If they do their not Lone...
If you say so. Because GP did not.
Just to be safe, make it "killed 49 entities in a place." Sometimes, people feel less-than-human, so they might self-identify as "working-class zombie" or "drone."
It would only take a majority vote to pass the bill. However, you must first close debate and bring the question. In the US Senate since 1975, you need 3/5 of the duly sworn and chosen Senators to allow the bill to be voted on.
Seriously, has the Republican party gone mad?
Do they really believe that only a police state can be a free state?
Since when is the "war on crime" ALWAYS a war on the 4th Amendment, and now 5th (forced passwords)?
Time for a new Constitutional convention, to spell out prison for every police who violates any right, ever, for ANY reason, including claims of "ignorance".
What this actually means is that slightly under 3/5 of the senate is totally fine with this invasion of privacy clearly guaranteed by the fourth amendment, to say nothing of these "national security letters" which are a perversion of our justice system.
He had many meetings with congressional people, he is probably a CIA asset.
This makes his son's behavior more possible to be some false flag event, meant to further the anti gun campaign.
Speaking of incest... Muslim countries are all about first cousin marriages. Feel free to look it up.
Even those who don't accept average IQ differences between populations still tend to believe that inbreeding lowers IQ. Muslims are extremely inbred by Western standards.
"These [X] (approves/rejects) bid for warrantless access to [Y]" headlines are getting silly.
The FBI should just come forward with a bid to eliminate judicial oversight, as they *actually* want.
The majority of gun owners aren't against smarter laws on purchasing them. They are against ones that could be used for future confiscation, they are against ones that will cost inordinate amounts of money for ownership, and they are against giving the gun control lobby something for nothing. There is plenty of room for negotiation. First step, voters who support gun control need to know what is going on. They keep getting sold laws that already exist in our own country. Secondly they've got to understand and use their bargaining chips: Gun control has the NFA that is pretty stupid especially if we have proper background checks. They also somehow have managed to fend off concealed carry reciprocity, so gun owners have to figure out if they are still legally entitled to protect themselves when they cross state lines. Either of those should be a pretty easy trade for better background checks.
Not to mention that this isn't really a big deal. We have people being terrorized, 49 dead, lots of friends and family having a horrible night trying to find if their loved one is still alive. It's a tragedy.
However, that day, there were almost certainly more people killed in the US in accidents involving drunk driving. That was true for the day before and the day after, when there were no mass shootings. Each one of the deaths was also a tragedy, ending a life and causing great distress to friends and families.
If we're going to go for mass surveillance, wouldn't it make more sense to look for potential drunk drivers? The FBI interviewed the night club shooter twice, and couldn't do anything to stop him anyway. If the police find a drunk driver, they can do things to make drunk driving accidents less likely.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Chocolate rations are up.
By any useful law enforcement definition, everyone is at least a potential Lone Wolf.
I reach that conclusion based on the following:
- The Three Letter Agencies have clearly and repeatedly stated that they want to stop terrorism;
- A Lone Wolf has no organizational affiliation (and no, some lame statement of support for ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Taliban/whatever, at the last second does not count. It's not actionable by law enforcement and its probably only aspirational on the part of the criminal);
- Every Lone Wolf has to start somewhere, and the objective is to catch them before they start their crime spree.
Thus, in practical terms, the TLAs will consider everyone a potential Lone Wolf. And presto, the TLAs need to spy on everyone. I'm not defending the Panopticon, I'm saying the logic of the TLAs is internally consistent and compelling at least to them.
Mr McCain is hiding behind the same tired argument; spying on everyone will tell us who the criminals are. General warrant policies have never ended well. The FBI examined the most recent mass murderer before his killing spree. They couldn't predict what he was going to do. Why didn't they get a search warrant then? Does the FBI need a lower standard of probable cause to investigate 'lone wolf' suspects? Is spying on everyone the best answer to these questions? Evidence suggest the police already detect terrorist sympathizers with their current data. Adding bulk data will be useless because all those extra people are unsympathetic and it will not stop the real sympathizers turning into 'lone wolf' terrorists. The police need to run ongoing, deep-inspection investigations into the sympathizers they do find, not machines that 'detect' terrorists with the push of a button.
We've already got the 'internet never forgets' and government wants a similar permanent log of their citizens, but with more detail. The true purpose of perpetual surveillance is creating guilt retroactively.
While we're at it we should ask Iraq, Belgium and France to also lay off the poor terrorists since they also seem to be triggering similar ire.
Always fighting the good fight! Always protecting individual liberties against an all-too intrusive nanny state! 11!1
Oh, wait...
If you give a toddler a gun plenty of people could be shot, the one to blame is still the person who gave the toddler the gun.
Iraq, Belgium and France didn't help with creating Al-Qaeda and they sure as hell didn't give Osama bin Laden his terrorist training.
You can blame it on CIA and say that they did it without the support of the people, but they still get their funding from you and I don't see much outrage about their bullshit.
Since the people and the government are one and the same, you're the one attacking yourself.
We are dealing with the aftermath of giving a bunch of chaotic evil people guns. We've completely forgotten we did that because Lawful Evil people with a bunch of guns or worse are much more terrifying. Most of the country doesn't know what it feels like to live under the fear of a Lawful Evil threat.
Maybe they should play more D&D then.
Back in the real world the concepts of good and evil are mostly bullshit.
It's not about good vs evil but about conflicts of interests.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
It failed a 60 person vote by 2.
So 58% of the senate is in favor of taking away your rights and privacy. On top of the court that just said you have no right of privacy.
What's worse? *I can't vote them out*. I can only vote against one person, and not for another 2 years (not up for re-election this year).
At one point, judges were supposed to be the last defense of rights against abusive congress, and the judges even gave themselves lifetime tenure to prevent political abuse. Now, the judges are not even bothering to protect the constitution, and none of the political parties is making "Protect the constitution" their rallying cry.
The FBI is multi-ethnic and full of moles.
If you want to know what the FBI has just ask Tim Cook to ask China.