"According to supporters of the USA Freedom Act, the USA Freedom Act was meant to end the bulk collection of Americans' metadata by the NSA, end the secret laws created by the FISA court, and introduce a "Special Advocate" to represent public and privacy matters."
"The USA Freedom Act is perceived as containing several concessions to pro-surveillance legislators meant to facilitate its passage, such as extending the Patriot Act powers until 2019."
I'm so confused. Is this bill a good thing or a bad thing?
We should also stop calling these bills like "the patriot act", "USA freedom act" and replace the names with something like a unique identifier. That would remove some of the support from bills like the patriot act.
I'll repost this with minor edits from the last time I saw someone call for the sensible naming of bills in Congress:
==
See Downsize DC's One Subject at a Time Act (OSTA) which does almost exactly what you ask[0] in addition to eliminating riders. I have heard that what the bill wants to accomplish would require a constitutional amendment due to legislative entrenchment (the current congress cannot bind a future congress) but I do not know what the truth of the situation is.
Downsize DC's Agenda page has a list of all of their bills[1]. OSTA is the one I think has the best chance of being implemented. Some others with good ideas include:
* Read The Bills Act: 'Yea' votes require that the congressperson has read/heard the bill (no more "I didn't know that was in there!"), mandatory 7-day public review period of final bill text. I think that the additional requirement of a mandatory reading of a bill's text before a quorum will keep this one from being considered though.
* Enumerated Powers Act: Congress must cite the constitutional authority on which any proposed bill rests. The full text of OSTA[3] includes this citation.
I don't view Downsize DC as a very effective organization (don't sign up for their newsletter unless you like poorly-formatted rants), so I would love to see other orgs throw their weight behind OSTA and RTBA. It seems to me that it's something EFF or ACLU could support, for example, because so many of the things they fight against were enacted using sneaky riders.
> See Downsize DC's One Subject at a Time Act (OSTA) which does almost exactly what you ask[0] in addition to eliminating riders. I have heard that what the bill wants to accomplish would require a constitutional amendment due to legislative entrenchment (the current congress cannot bind a future congress) but I do not know what the truth of the situation is.
This is pretty universally accepted as true among everyone I've heard discuss this kind of issue, including (especially) legal and constitutional scholars. Anything Congress can put it a law purporting to constrain what laws it can pass, it can undo with any new law, simply by passing a law that conflicts with it.
> * Read The Bills Act: 'Yea' votes require that the congressperson has read/heard the bill (no more "I didn't know that was in there!"), mandatory 7-day public review period of final bill text. I think that the additional requirement of a mandatory reading of a bill's text before a quorum will keep this one from being considered though.
Like OSTA, this is an attempt to legislate a fixed element of the rules of the houses of Congress, and would therefore seem to require a Constitutional amendment, for the same reason.
> Enumerated Powers Act: Congress must cite the constitutional authority on which any proposed bill rests. The full text of OSTA[3] includes this citation.
If framed properly (as a dictate to the judiciary on how they are to apply federal law, and particularly that they are to consider only the cited powers when deciding on the Constitutionality of a challenged federal law), this is perhaps one that can be done without a Constitutional Amendment. (OTOH, what will quickly happen if it is passed is that every provision of the Constitution for which there is a colorable claim that it grants any authority to Congress will be cited in every piece of legislation as a source of authority.)
All good points; the last one being a great example of the kind of gamesmanship I hadn't considered. Perhaps these help to explain why there aren't many big-name supporters attached to these efforts. I wonder what the chances of holding a constitutional convention are.
Huh, I just went to Wikipedia to read up on that and discovered that in 2013, a super PAC was registered to push for "an Article V Convention for the limited purpose of proposing an amendment to provide every law enacted by Congress shall embrace only one subject which shall be clearly expressed in the bill's title"[0]. I also did not know that 41 states already have single subject provisions in their constitutions.
So, GP, scratch all that Downsize DC stuff and instead get the word out about the Single Subject Amendment PAC[1]! With a majority of states already using them for state law it seems like we ought to be able to convince people that it's a good idea to subject Congress to the same rule.
Out of curiosity, did anyone here already know about this PAC? I've been making noises about DownsizeDC's proposals since 2013 and this never hit my radar until now. I'm switching tactics to drum up support for this immediately; I only wish I'd known sooner.
> We should also stop calling these bills like "the patriot act", "USA freedom act" and replace the names with something like a unique identifier.
All bills have a unique identifier (a bill number combined with the Congress in which it is introduced.)
However, its very common for them to have, as part of the content of the bill, language providing a title, which -- especially with controversial bills -- is often, for bills with controversial subject matter, itself a brand name designed to make the bill sound warm and fluffy.
The Unique IDs are hardly memorable and hard to keep straight which applies to which substance, so the titles are convenient and useful in most cases (and the convenience encourages the use, which is then exploited in the controversial cases.)
That'll never happen. Congressmen and senators would then not be able to say "...and my opponent voted against the America Awesome Act..." in the next election.
The USA Patriot Act is actually a ridiculous backronym:
"Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001"
I was curious to see if my country (Australia) had a similar bad habit of wrapping up bills in rhetoric buzzwords. I found only eight bills (on the digest archive) that mentioned the word "Patriot" and, hilariously, they're all references to the American bill.
Assuming you have typical HN leanings, this bill is a qualified good thing. It ends the NSA bulk metadata collection, but keeps less controversial things like roving wiretaps.
No. Bulk metadata collection will continue, but is in the custody of the telecom companies. The only obstacle to NSA running amok through the data is having to say "please" to the telecom companies first.
AIUI, there's still no need for a warrant, and there's still no need for a specific individual as target.
Nothing was reined in, it was just shuffled around a bit.
> The only obstacle to NSA running amok through the data is having to say "please" to the telecom companies first.
The obstacle to the NSA running amok is that this bill drastically reduces what's covered by a specific selection term. It means the NSA can request things like "records for people living in this one house" or "any records pertaining to this one person" but can't request things like "all call records from New York", which is what they had a week ago.
On top of that, any FISA decisions that attempt to redefine what a specific selection term is have to be declassified now.
Not that I disbelieve you, but do you have a reference?
It was my understanding that no amendments were allowed to USA FREEDOM, which still leaves the barn doors open. But perhaps I misunderstood something about the version of USA FREEDOM that was current at the time of the vote, so I'd like to read more about it.
Nobody can explain you such matters. It's like asking someone to briefly explain Quantum Mechanics. You will never truly understand a word unless you learn everything you need to know first. This is especially true in law and politics because things can be ambiguous and often times people deliberately want to deceive you.
If you are pro civil activism, take the time and effort and learn how to read documents. Otherwise you are just lying to yourself so you can feel warm and fuzzy.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
"According to supporters of the USA Freedom Act, the USA Freedom Act was meant to end the bulk collection of Americans' metadata by the NSA, end the secret laws created by the FISA court, and introduce a "Special Advocate" to represent public and privacy matters."
"The USA Freedom Act is perceived as containing several concessions to pro-surveillance legislators meant to facilitate its passage, such as extending the Patriot Act powers until 2019."
I'm so confused. Is this bill a good thing or a bad thing?