Is this as wild as it seems? It sounds like a free for all in terms of getting communications data from all US residents. I hope it's clear what "between Americans and foreigners overseas" means and that it doesn't include simply messages going through a foreign server at some point or something like that.

That is exactly what this is about. And no, the distinction isn't clear/made.

It means any outbound request that is destined for a non-US IP address.

How did we get here? I don't know any sane citizen that would want this.

This version is substantially better than the previous versions that didn't pass.

I consider dropping the warrant requirement from the last attempt as not much of a loss, since the previous FISA applications were being rubber-stamped anyway.

Forcing another vote in two years is better than the original 8, and better than the failed compromise of 5 in my book. Not as good as it should have been (not reauthorizing at all), better than it could have been.

1) A bad system of elections that tends to result in only two viable parties that substantially differ in policy positions from their own voters. Our system of elections drives that outcome.

2) Cowardice. Being personally punished (say, by losing an election) for problems caused by too much spying or too much military spending or too much surveillance is vanishingly unlikely. Being punished because something bad happens and maybe that thing you voted against would have prevented it? That’s possible.

3) Probably blackmail campaigns by various law enforcement and spy agencies, aimed at politicians. I very much doubt that sort of thing stopped after Hoover was gone, or that the FBI was the only agency to engage in it. I guess the “how we got here” for this part is failing to aggressively dismantle the whole tainted edifice and start from scratch back when that was feasible, and failure to keep those agencies on an extremely tight leash.

> Being punished because something bad happens and maybe that thing you voted against would have prevented it? That’s possible.

Do you have any examples of this? Nobody was politically punished for allowing 9/11 to happen. There are countless examples of bad things happening for which nobody was politically punished. As far as I see, there's an almost complete lack of consequences in politics.

4) The amount of money and corruption in politics means that the people who are better at sucking up to donors end up winning. These people are also not really interested in governing, but are interested in accumulating wealth and power.

Are you sure about that? There's a large amount of people who don't give a shit about privacy because they've "got nothing to hide" and are convinced that surveillance should, and does, only happen to those people who deserve it.

Our institutions of government are so far removed from democratic control at this point that the content of this bill hardly even matters in the first place: they'll just break the "law" with impunity anyway, if Congress can't deliver what they want.