House Votes to Renew Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Limits

In reality, we don't know if Trump - or anyone else - was "wire tapped" - and we won't ever know thanks to the passage of this bill. One of the crucial elements of the Amash amendment was that those who were unconstitutionally spied upon via 702 authorization would have to be eventually notified that they were spied on - now they don't. That's one of the many things that's so awful and frightening about these police-state powers. There is no oversight and no notification.

Curiosity is getting the best of me, and I figured HN is a good place to scratch the itch.

Has anyone done a study or solicited information from the government that shows the impact of legislation such as FISA or better yet the Patriot ACT's post provision sunset (what's left of the act) parts? Namely - hard numbers that shows in a numerical fashion the fact based evidence to keep overt invasions of privacy in check in the name of security.

Being from New York, I always try to question politicians here - more specifically Gov. Cuomo on the quantifiable evidence that supports the SAFE ACT's passage in our state - on such things, to have a better impact on things that affect me regionally vs. worrying about broad stroke Federal things that rarely do.

This is a common fallacy, that freedom and safety are in opposition, that increasing one decreases the other, that freedom puts you in danger and a lack of freedom saves you. In this debate people often say there is perfect safety in prison, but if I imagine myself a prisoner, versus my daily life right now, I'd feel a lot less safe in prison. I've read that some prisoners go to the bathroom with one pant-leg undone, just so their legs won't be tangled at the ankles if they get violently attacked. I can't imagine my daily life being this dangerous.

Freedom leads to the most security. If you scatter plot graph "free countries" and "safe countries" you'll find an unmistakable positive correlation. Whether the dangers are religious police kidnapping people for "virginity tests," people being disappeared for criticizing the government, or routine industrial accidents in places where expendable people aren't free to demand workers rights, a lack of freedom increases danger.

You're pretty safe in Switzerland, not so much in Iraq.

It wasn't kicked down the can for many years, because it wasn't known!

It was a quietly authorized program Bush signed off on & that the DoJ authorized & no one knew anything more about. Congress didn't know any more than we did about it until Wired began writing up the program in 2012, a full decade after it began, talking about the massive massive data warehouse in Utah that the NSA was building with details provided by William Binney.

And it wasn't until Snowden's 2013 leaks that the government really had to admit to what it was doing, had to fess up to the STELLAR WIND program, & that forced the creation of a more "regulated" system, supposedly protected by the as-we've-seen rubber-stamping FISA court.

The government has been unable to regulate or consider this program, because it's been concealed & shadowy for a long long time, and could well have remained that way.

Now Congress actually has some responsibility to the American people, and sadly, in spite of unbelievable stonewalling & unwillingness to disclose how many Americans, how many emails it sweeps up[1], in spite of terrifying provisions like "abouts" collection, Congress is somehow deciding that drastically expanding the program's scope & using it for non-terrorism purposes is OK. Congress is insane, completely derelict from duty.

I don't really disagree. Bush, Obama, and Trump are all kicking this can down the road. But for Congress too to be soo willing to kick this down the road is really a shock. And you're exactly right. When FBI Director Christopher Wray gets up and says- encryption is a problem- he's far far less credible & we have far less chance to meet him part way, when the government seems so happy giving itself such unlimited unaccountable spy powers. Math is the only defense we have against this catastrophic, out of control authoritarianism, and we're not very liable to abandon or dismantle that shelter, when the US government seems unwilling to develop even an iota of restraint.

I'd also point out the other tension: the US government is placing itself just as much at ends with Europe and the rest of the world as they are the technology world. The EU's Privacy Shield ongoingly takes issue with the US's seemingly ever growing 702 authorization to spy on everyone[2], and the question of revisiting the data-sharing arrangements that make much of it possible keeps coming up.

The US was running on borrowed time as it was. This radical expansion of powers in this new 702 bill are only heightening the silently growing crisis. Congress and the military seem entirely unwilling to strike any kind of balance, seem unwilling to get even basic facts on what the size, scale and impact of the program really are, while increasing it's scope and scale. This is an untennable position, and I thank you for doing a really good job highlighting a lot of the irresolvable tensions the US Government has created for itself with this unaccountable unquestionable seemingly unlimited program.

[1] https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-pass-surv...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/eu-uses-privacy-shield-rev...

Those numbers confirm the stats, and actually prove GP's point better (that the gov't is mostly medicare/aid, social security, and defense; half being the former, and ~22% being spent on defense), and are similar to numbers from the CBO [0]

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...