Parts of this thread got me all up on my hind legs afraid of fascist Big Brother of 1984 with sound recorders hidden in the walls of my bedroom, keystroke grabb

Parts of this thread got me all up on my hind legs afraid of fascist Big Brother of 1984 with sound recorders hidden in the walls of my bedroom, keystroke grabbing on my computer, brainwave recorders in stealth drones flying overhead at 100,000 feet capturing my thoughts, etc. Yes, while my usual excuse has long been, and apparently been confirmed, that the US Federal Government is too incompetent to do much to me, or really even know about me (if they only knew what I really think of them!), this thread got me worried again. So, I just followed the link to the bill. There I got the text version, in some small, light font tough to read in Firefox on my screen and with the warning that actually it was not accurate. So I took the HTML version. Soon, much of the text was off the right side my screen with no horizontal scroll bars. Gee, is there some CSS keyword to suppress the scroll bars? My Web pages have both horizontal and vertical scroll bars, and I entered nothing about scroll bars and just took defaults. So, I told Firefox to reduce screen magnification until all the text characters fit my screen, and then all I had were characters about the size of two pixels each with each line of text just some broken horizontal line totally impossible to read. Great work Congress: You found yet another way to implement the now famous Pelosi "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it"! So, third try, I took the PDF version. Okay, magnifying to 185%, I got something readable. Looking at the table of contents for the really deep, down, fascist dirty stuff, right away (Adobe Acrobat has a search feature!), I found: "H. R. 4681—5 SEC. 302. RESTRICTION ON CONDUCT OF INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES. The authorization of appropriations by this Act shall not be deemed to constitute authority for the conduct of any intelligence activity which is not otherwise authorized by the Constitution or the laws of the United States." Okay, sounds not so bad. Maybe they just put that in there so that it could be removed in a conference committee with all that really deep, dirty, fascist stuff elsewhere now enabled? They are really smart enough to be that tricky? Naaaaw ...! Congress? The US Congress I have long watched? Naaaaw. So, from that paragraph, apparently this bill doesn't authorize even more microphones in the walls of my bedroom, more keystroke captures, more grabbing of my PGP private key (once I start using PGP), my software to find some 50,000 or so (don't want to be too exact here!) decimal digit prime numbers, assuming I don't encounter a prime gap, etc.! Ah, I should not have said that and, instead, should have let the NSA know that, really, I've long been doing my super hush-hush communications via the subspace radio flip phone I got from Captain Kirk! Once he was parked on my front lawn for three weeks, but no one but me noticed because he was using a Romulan cloaking device. Maybe I'm too easily fooled, but, lazy me, I'm back down off my hind legs now no longer afraid of being subject to "rectal feeding", etc. I mean, were my thoughts that former NSA head Michael Hayden looked too much like Elmer Fudd a reason for me to have 1 trillion exabytes of data kept on me in some flat building covering 25% of, what is it, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Utah, somewhere out there? So, was that the reason HP worked out how to store one bit per oxygen ion, just so that the NSA could store what I really thought of them? Naaaaw! Joking aside, the section I quoted does seem to say that the bill doesn't make things worse.