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"Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, has said there’s no urgent need to pass the bill. The law author
by DanielBMarkham 12y ago
"Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, has said there’s no urgent need to pass the bill. The law authorizing the NSA to collect bulk phone records expires on June 1, meaning the new Congress can wait until then to pass legislation, Chambliss told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October."
So this is a public discussion and debate that the country is going to have any way between now and next Fall.
The question then becomes "Why this news article right now?"
Looks a bit like political posturing. If your party is on the way out, you can pretty much propose anything you'd like. Nobody is going to vote it trough, so you get credit for taking a position that you'll never have to live through or defend. It's a win.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for limiting NSA. I'd just like it to really happen, instead of reading 100 articles like this over the next ten years while nothing ever changes, which is the way this seems to be playing out.
For whatever reason, the establishment, that is, both parties, seem to have secretly decided that it's perfectly okay to have the government sifting through all of our personal lives. I like seeing this lobby group make an economic argument to the Republicans: this is killing our tech sector. I like seeing folks in both parties make a freedom argument: this is the not values our country was constructed on. I even like my personal argument from pragmatism: our country cannot keep operating in such a manner. But all of these arguments seem to just bounce off a stone wall. I hear all kinds of people talking, I see speeches made and bills sponsored that will never see the light of day. I see bills that have a chance of passage that look like they hamstring the government but in fact just allow it to keep doing what it's doing. The only thing I'm not seeing is any real movement here. I'm hoping that will change.