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Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections

135 points by CoryOndrejka 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- jrockway 17y ago
  Despite what you might think, Democrats and Republicans both want a powerful federal government. The Democrats want a powerful government where citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for social programs, and the Republicans want a powerful government where the citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for wars. Pretty much the same.
  - jfornear 17y ago
    Perhaps I'm just reading you wrong, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. :) Neither party pushes for the right to give — their ideas are funded by borrowing and taxation. A right is a choice, and taxes are involuntary. There is a clear philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans regarding the role and size of government, but of course, whether or not these differences play out in practice in a consistent manner is another story. The politics of war is simply a game of public opinion. For example, here's a video of Sen. Clinton (D) arguing for the invasion of Iraq (without citing Bush intel): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYATbsu2cP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYATbsu2cP8
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Yes, I mean this very sarcastically. Liberals (like myself, I'm as far left as you can get, basically) think that Republicans are Pure Evil and that the Democrats are sent by God to fight those evil forces. In reality, they're all politicians, and they and their friends come before their constituents. I think a lot more Democrats are doing the right thing in general, so I'm willing to support them, but I also realize that they are causing plenty of problems. A government-by-jrockway would look very different than our current system.
  - dnsworks 17y ago
    This might be the truest description of American politics I've ever read. The only change is s/have the right to/are forced to/
  - barnaby 17y ago
    Wars and corporate entitlements cost more than creating opportunities for the poor.
  - foldr 17y ago
    >Pretty much the same. Except for the difference between wars and social programs, which can be pretty significant if you are on the receiving end.
dougp 17y ago
Maybe next year
jackfoxy 17y ago
I'm shocked, shocked!
- raganwald 17y ago
  Your winnings, sir.
  - mhartl 17y ago
    N.B. The parent comment is a seemingly obscure movie reference,* but is surprisingly Google-able. *The movie itself is not obscure at all.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      Monsieur Raganwald, what kind of a hacker is Captain Foxy? Raganwald: Oh, he's just like any other hacker, only more so.
croby 17y ago
yet to be signed, just passed by the house
jswinghammer 17y ago
After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life is anyone surprised? The Congress care about increasing the power of the government and doing whatever it is they want to do when they're in power. They like the new powers when they are in power and criticize them when they are out of power. Though the Neocons just criticize how much they are used rather than their existence so I guess they're more consistent. I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party? I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part. We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.
- lucifer 17y ago
  > "I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this." It is not in the interest of the ruling elite for this fact to become apparent. They control education and media, and have mastered the art of dividing society along various (ultimately facile and irrelevant) fault lines. (Do you remember when Blue and Red state meme suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a cheap ready-made knockoff hanging in every one of our various media outlets? Is it a surprise that every time the country finally starts focusing on a substantial issue some completely random troll topic is pushed on queue; is the biggest problem facing USA the decision to allow gay marriage or to rescue this sinking ship of a state?) "We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition." You take that sentence and run it by a random sampling of 18 year olds in America. A certain proportion may be able to parse it; a subset of that may actually understand what is said; an even smaller subset would be able to reason about the proposition. Am I being completely pessimistic for thinking that the percentage that can even understand that as English is in single digit percentile?
  - lallysingh 17y ago
    Remember this? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it. That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter. And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).
evgen 17y ago
It's not really surprising if you consider the options that were available: 1) Renew the current law. No real upside for any legislator, but no significant downside. 2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument. 3) Amend the current law. An effort which would have needed to start a while ago. With enough bi-partisan support this could have limited the downside risk and enabled supporters to make the sort of "we are being smart about protecting ourselves form terrorists while protecting liberties" arguments that would have electoral upside, but given the current legislative climate it would have been a hard task to get the early defectors form the status quo which would have provided a bit of momentum.
- gnosis 17y ago
  "2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument." If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do. If they want not to be attacked at all, they should just stay completely out of politics. Of course, they should pick their battles, and fight the ones that are really important. It's obvious from their inaction on and even outright support of the PATRIOT Act, that civil liberties just aren't that important to them, no matter what their rhetoric might be. The same has been true regarding their "opposition" to torture, to the Iraq war, to Bush's Supreme Court nominees, their support of the "public option" for health care, etc. The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama. Their spinelessness and willingness to be the Bush-lite party could cost them dearly in the mid-terms and 2012. They're just lucky the Republican party is tearing itself apart with their "tea party" splintering and fighting over who are the "real conservatives".
SamAtt 17y ago
There's an unfortunate reality here which is that the Government can't really prevent terrorist attacks. Israel is much smaller and they've tried much harder and they can't prevent them so the U.S. stands very little chance. So another attack will happen some day. It's a given (and both the Bush and Obama administrations have said as much) That's where the Patriot Act comes in. Every politician believes it would be the death of their career if they change or reject the existing law only to have that inevitable terrorist attack take place right after. And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right. So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack. I won't be holding my breath.
- cynicalkane 17y ago
  More accurately, the government can prevent terrorist attacks, but that will take sophisticated and unpopular foreign policy measures. The Patriot Act, security theater, war, and other such nonsense is easier to sell to voters and lobbies.
  - JshWright 17y ago
    I think the implication above is that you can't prevent _every_ terrorist attack. I think that's a pretty defensible argument to make. Geography alone makes it pretty obvious that you can't stop a determined group from carrying out an attack. So that leaves making nice with those groups so that they don't want to attack us. Given the fact that there are radical groups at either end of just about any political or religious spectrum you can think of, the idea of appeasing all of them is nuts. The very actions necessary to appease one group could incite another to attack. This is, of course, putting aside the idea that the motivation behind some violence isn't motivated by our actions at all, but rather by internal politics within extremist groups. There are a lot of folks out there who are awfully fond of power, and one of the easiest ways to garner power is to rally people against a common enemy (who cares if that "enemy" actually instigated anything... that's easy enough to spin) So, all that to say... We're never going to prevent every terrorist attack, we can only work to minimize the collateral damage. In my opinion, the Patriot Act is just about the biggest example of collateral damage we've seen resulting from terrorist attacks, and I'm saddened to see that Congress chose to do nothing to limit that.
JoeAltmaier 17y ago
It might be a failure of courage by our representatives; or maybe there are too many irons in the fire to get this done right. Not necessary to conjure up conspiracies, plenty of ordinary human reasons for this to take too long.
gnosis 17y ago
You know, the Democrats didn't have to renew the PATRIOT Act at all. If they were serious about protecting civil liberties that's just what they'd do. And the Republicans couldn't have stopped them.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  I don't know why anyone pretends that these people actually care anymore. They're there to get money and power, and to make sure they can get it again when they go up for re-election. They want to be everything to everyone, which leads to big problems because you can't do one thing without pissing off someone, so then they do the other thing too, but in amounts just enough that neither side will freak out too much, and just so that the Reps can claim to support whatever suits their campaign. Take the health care bill, for instance. It doesn't do anything helpful, just forces everyone to pay for a private insurance policy. Republicans can say they protected business, Democrats can say they reformed health care and everyone now has access, businesspeople stay happy and their money keeps pouring in, normal people are hoodwinked into believing their side did whatever it was they wanted, and this cycle perpetuates.
jsz0 17y ago
Maybe I'm a defeatist but Patriot Act or no Patriot Act I believe they're just going to do this stuff anyway. These intelligence organizations aren't really held accountable often to the public for their actions. Just look at all the shady stuff they've done over the decades -- and that's just the stuff we know about. Who knows what really goes on inside the NSA or CIA? If they're out to get you I really doubt laws are going to save you. We know for an absolute fact this stuff was happening before the Patriot Act was law. Who went to jail? Was the President who permitted it held accountable? Nope. Were a significant number of the Representatives and Senators who voted for the Patriot Act expelled from office by voters? Nope. Maybe America is getting what it deserves. It looks like civil liberty violations are going to have to get much worse before Americans turn off their TVs and put down their Big Macs and actually care about the issue. The solution won't be so simple as repealing the Patriot Act either.
lallysingh 17y ago
The Patriot problem isn't going anytime soon. The levels of surveillance enabled by modern technology were going to get used, somehow, by governments. Counterterrorism is just the manifesting justification of this inevitability. The debate on privacy -- or more accurately, the debate on the inflection point between real safety vs real privacy -- will be long and hard. It's a complex question that hasn't had an answer settled by any means. My guess is that it's going to take a lot of work by folks like Wikileaks and the courts to make understood how the power is really being used. Only after a few cycles of (massive-problem -> privacy regulation) are we going to see some rational work in this area. Sadly this is probably the only way it can happen; there just isn't any real data on what levels of privacy are appropriate with a civilization built on current levels of cyber-interconnection.
theschwa 17y ago
Where can I find a list of the people who voted against the renewal? It's turning out to be harder to find than I had thought.
- theschwa 17y ago
  It took me a while, but for anyone else who is interested this explains a bit why it's hard to find the voting record http://bit.ly/92Qfz4 http://bit.ly/92Qfz4 and this is the roll call for the vote which also shows the break down for each party http://bit.ly/cVkRiC http://bit.ly/cVkRiC

135 points by CoryOndrejka 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jrockway 17y ago
Despite what you might think, Democrats and Republicans both want a powerful federal government. The Democrats want a powerful government where citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for social programs, and the Republicans want a powerful government where the citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for wars. Pretty much the same.
- jfornear 17y ago
  Perhaps I'm just reading you wrong, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. :) Neither party pushes for the right to give — their ideas are funded by borrowing and taxation. A right is a choice, and taxes are involuntary. There is a clear philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans regarding the role and size of government, but of course, whether or not these differences play out in practice in a consistent manner is another story. The politics of war is simply a game of public opinion. For example, here's a video of Sen. Clinton (D) arguing for the invasion of Iraq (without citing Bush intel): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYATbsu2cP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYATbsu2cP8
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Yes, I mean this very sarcastically. Liberals (like myself, I'm as far left as you can get, basically) think that Republicans are Pure Evil and that the Democrats are sent by God to fight those evil forces. In reality, they're all politicians, and they and their friends come before their constituents. I think a lot more Democrats are doing the right thing in general, so I'm willing to support them, but I also realize that they are causing plenty of problems. A government-by-jrockway would look very different than our current system.
- dnsworks 17y ago
  This might be the truest description of American politics I've ever read. The only change is s/have the right to/are forced to/
- barnaby 17y ago
  Wars and corporate entitlements cost more than creating opportunities for the poor.
- foldr 17y ago
  >Pretty much the same. Except for the difference between wars and social programs, which can be pretty significant if you are on the receiving end.

dougp 17y ago

Maybe next year

jackfoxy 17y ago

I'm shocked, shocked!

raganwald 17y ago
Your winnings, sir.
- mhartl 17y ago
  N.B. The parent comment is a seemingly obscure movie reference,* but is surprisingly Google-able. *The movie itself is not obscure at all.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Monsieur Raganwald, what kind of a hacker is Captain Foxy? Raganwald: Oh, he's just like any other hacker, only more so.

croby 17y ago

yet to be signed, just passed by the house

jswinghammer 17y ago

After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life is anyone surprised? The Congress care about increasing the power of the government and doing whatever it is they want to do when they're in power. They like the new powers when they are in power and criticize them when they are out of power. Though the Neocons just criticize how much they are used rather than their existence so I guess they're more consistent. I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party? I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part. We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.

lucifer 17y ago
> "I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this." It is not in the interest of the ruling elite for this fact to become apparent. They control education and media, and have mastered the art of dividing society along various (ultimately facile and irrelevant) fault lines. (Do you remember when Blue and Red state meme suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a cheap ready-made knockoff hanging in every one of our various media outlets? Is it a surprise that every time the country finally starts focusing on a substantial issue some completely random troll topic is pushed on queue; is the biggest problem facing USA the decision to allow gay marriage or to rescue this sinking ship of a state?) "We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition." You take that sentence and run it by a random sampling of 18 year olds in America. A certain proportion may be able to parse it; a subset of that may actually understand what is said; an even smaller subset would be able to reason about the proposition. Am I being completely pessimistic for thinking that the percentage that can even understand that as English is in single digit percentile?
- lallysingh 17y ago
  Remember this? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it. That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter. And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).

evgen 17y ago

It's not really surprising if you consider the options that were available: 1) Renew the current law. No real upside for any legislator, but no significant downside. 2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument. 3) Amend the current law. An effort which would have needed to start a while ago. With enough bi-partisan support this could have limited the downside risk and enabled supporters to make the sort of "we are being smart about protecting ourselves form terrorists while protecting liberties" arguments that would have electoral upside, but given the current legislative climate it would have been a hard task to get the early defectors form the status quo which would have provided a bit of momentum.

gnosis 17y ago
"2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument." If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do. If they want not to be attacked at all, they should just stay completely out of politics. Of course, they should pick their battles, and fight the ones that are really important. It's obvious from their inaction on and even outright support of the PATRIOT Act, that civil liberties just aren't that important to them, no matter what their rhetoric might be. The same has been true regarding their "opposition" to torture, to the Iraq war, to Bush's Supreme Court nominees, their support of the "public option" for health care, etc. The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama. Their spinelessness and willingness to be the Bush-lite party could cost them dearly in the mid-terms and 2012. They're just lucky the Republican party is tearing itself apart with their "tea party" splintering and fighting over who are the "real conservatives".

SamAtt 17y ago

There's an unfortunate reality here which is that the Government can't really prevent terrorist attacks. Israel is much smaller and they've tried much harder and they can't prevent them so the U.S. stands very little chance. So another attack will happen some day. It's a given (and both the Bush and Obama administrations have said as much) That's where the Patriot Act comes in. Every politician believes it would be the death of their career if they change or reject the existing law only to have that inevitable terrorist attack take place right after. And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right. So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack. I won't be holding my breath.

cynicalkane 17y ago
More accurately, the government can prevent terrorist attacks, but that will take sophisticated and unpopular foreign policy measures. The Patriot Act, security theater, war, and other such nonsense is easier to sell to voters and lobbies.
- JshWright 17y ago
  I think the implication above is that you can't prevent _every_ terrorist attack. I think that's a pretty defensible argument to make. Geography alone makes it pretty obvious that you can't stop a determined group from carrying out an attack. So that leaves making nice with those groups so that they don't want to attack us. Given the fact that there are radical groups at either end of just about any political or religious spectrum you can think of, the idea of appeasing all of them is nuts. The very actions necessary to appease one group could incite another to attack. This is, of course, putting aside the idea that the motivation behind some violence isn't motivated by our actions at all, but rather by internal politics within extremist groups. There are a lot of folks out there who are awfully fond of power, and one of the easiest ways to garner power is to rally people against a common enemy (who cares if that "enemy" actually instigated anything... that's easy enough to spin) So, all that to say... We're never going to prevent every terrorist attack, we can only work to minimize the collateral damage. In my opinion, the Patriot Act is just about the biggest example of collateral damage we've seen resulting from terrorist attacks, and I'm saddened to see that Congress chose to do nothing to limit that.

JoeAltmaier 17y ago

It might be a failure of courage by our representatives; or maybe there are too many irons in the fire to get this done right. Not necessary to conjure up conspiracies, plenty of ordinary human reasons for this to take too long.

gnosis 17y ago

You know, the Democrats didn't have to renew the PATRIOT Act at all. If they were serious about protecting civil liberties that's just what they'd do. And the Republicans couldn't have stopped them.

cookiecaper 17y ago
I don't know why anyone pretends that these people actually care anymore. They're there to get money and power, and to make sure they can get it again when they go up for re-election. They want to be everything to everyone, which leads to big problems because you can't do one thing without pissing off someone, so then they do the other thing too, but in amounts just enough that neither side will freak out too much, and just so that the Reps can claim to support whatever suits their campaign. Take the health care bill, for instance. It doesn't do anything helpful, just forces everyone to pay for a private insurance policy. Republicans can say they protected business, Democrats can say they reformed health care and everyone now has access, businesspeople stay happy and their money keeps pouring in, normal people are hoodwinked into believing their side did whatever it was they wanted, and this cycle perpetuates.

jsz0 17y ago

Maybe I'm a defeatist but Patriot Act or no Patriot Act I believe they're just going to do this stuff anyway. These intelligence organizations aren't really held accountable often to the public for their actions. Just look at all the shady stuff they've done over the decades -- and that's just the stuff we know about. Who knows what really goes on inside the NSA or CIA? If they're out to get you I really doubt laws are going to save you. We know for an absolute fact this stuff was happening before the Patriot Act was law. Who went to jail? Was the President who permitted it held accountable? Nope. Were a significant number of the Representatives and Senators who voted for the Patriot Act expelled from office by voters? Nope. Maybe America is getting what it deserves. It looks like civil liberty violations are going to have to get much worse before Americans turn off their TVs and put down their Big Macs and actually care about the issue. The solution won't be so simple as repealing the Patriot Act either.

lallysingh 17y ago

The Patriot problem isn't going anytime soon. The levels of surveillance enabled by modern technology were going to get used, somehow, by governments. Counterterrorism is just the manifesting justification of this inevitability. The debate on privacy -- or more accurately, the debate on the inflection point between real safety vs real privacy -- will be long and hard. It's a complex question that hasn't had an answer settled by any means. My guess is that it's going to take a lot of work by folks like Wikileaks and the courts to make understood how the power is really being used. Only after a few cycles of (massive-problem -> privacy regulation) are we going to see some rational work in this area. Sadly this is probably the only way it can happen; there just isn't any real data on what levels of privacy are appropriate with a civilization built on current levels of cyber-interconnection.

theschwa 17y ago

Where can I find a list of the people who voted against the renewal? It's turning out to be harder to find than I had thought.

theschwa 17y ago
It took me a while, but for anyone else who is interested this explains a bit why it's hard to find the voting record http://bit.ly/92Qfz4 http://bit.ly/92Qfz4 and this is the roll call for the vote which also shows the break down for each party http://bit.ly/cVkRiC http://bit.ly/cVkRiC