Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadowl | Hacker News Reader

About fucking time (pardon my language)

Could still die in the senate, unfortunately.

More than a quarter of senators have endorsed similar legislation in the upper chamber to the House bill, including No. 2 Republican John Cornyn.

Are we supposed to see that as a positive? Because I read it as "Only a quarter of senators have endorsed similar legislation."

Endorsing a piece of legislature is very different than actually voting on it. There's a lot of political back and forth for every bill that passes and endorsement is just an early phase when the whips start gathering numbers for who supports a given bill vocally and officially. This will put pressure on the comittee to put the bill on the floor as soon as possible and with little modification.

Once it's slated for the floor vote, the whips and bill sponsors (even more involved than endorsement) will round up the rest of the votes including those who would have voted yes anyway, but couldn't endorse or sponsor for political reasons, and those who need to be convinced through favors and whatnot. Remember, senators are elected by all districts in a state so they have to be more careful politically.

I don't think the other 75% have expressed an opinion -- the Senate bill has only been in committee so far, not voted on by the Senate.

> Could still die in the senate, unfortunately.

And Obama still has to sign it. I imagine there would be huge lobbying by intelligence and law enforcement if this ever made it to his desk.

I'm surprised this passed, to be honest.

I'm mostly surprised that it passed 419-0.

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2016/roll167.xml

Given the relative difficulty that privacy bills face in Congress, one wonders what kind of vested interests are at play here. Skeletons in the closet?

Unanimously. How often does that happen?

In the 113th Congress, it looks like the House of Representatives had 95 unanimous votes, where unanimous is defined as having zero no votes and at least one yes vote. This is out of 1204 votes, based on a quick little script I whipped up.

You can look at the raw data pretty easily thanks to https://www.govtrack.us/developers/data

    rsync -avz --delete --delete-excluded --exclude **/text-versions/ govtrack.us::govtrackdata/congress/113/votes .
    for file in votes/*/h*/data.json; do
        noes=$(jq '(.votes.Nay | length) + (.votes.No | length)'  $file;)
        yeses=$(jq  '(.votes.Yea | length) + (.votes.Aye | length)' $file;)
        if [[ "$yeses" -gt 0 && "$noes" -eq 0 ]]
            then
            echo $file :  "No: $noes" "Yes: $yeses"
        fi
    done | wc -l

In the senate, the number is 87. (The code for the senate is basically the same, except you do

    votes/*/s*/data.json
    instead of
    votes/*/h*/data.json
)

Cool. Thanks. It's the definition of unanimous that's a little fishy. I thought it meant everyone voted Yes for it whereas even a 1 to 0 vote could pass as unanimous, right?

That's why we have a quorum. Half of all seated Senators (51) are required to be present for the Senate to do business. For a House with no vacancies, half means 218 Representatives.

So you're right; fishy "unanimous" votes can and do happen. A controversial measure might pass unanimously in a legislative body because all the opposition walked out in protest. This happened about a month ago in the 50-seat North Carolina Senate, which is dominated by Republicans. [1]

[1] https://www.carolinajournal.com/news-article/senate-democrat...

It looks like the smallest unanimous vote in the 113/114th congresses was 353.

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll631.xml

For the Senate, 83.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote11...

Makes sense. Appreciate the tip.

"Yes, we need to read all emails to keep America safe."

whisper whisper from a staff aid

"WHAT? You mean Jenkins down at NSA, Sally at FTC, Bob at FBI, any of them can read MY emails any time and I'd never even know it!? We must do something!"

Fortunately congresspeople are citizens too. ;-]

The defense I kept telling Schneier et al to post, but haven't seen, is how susceptible our dirty Congress is to blackmail. Probably have to be a closed session to get the honesty there. We can present it less like they're scumbags and more like "we know how the world works so let's be real about risk to you and therefore rest of us." I heavily pushed on different blogs extrapolating the Hoover precedent to NSA-level capabilities.

I think it's the best route as it's in their self interests. I think getting the business and international elites on board might be helpful as well. Unfortunately, they often push for surveillance or police states since they're good for business at various levels. However, even a minority push might hold back the worst legislation while letting whatever passes contain a loophole big enough for them and maybe some of us. Plus, they have the money to fund key solutions in the stack.

So, those are two ideas I've pushed in the various debates.

Everybody in the house must have their own home Email servers.

Home email servers require a warrant. It's third-party email servers, or even third-party hosts, that this is addressing. That is assuming my past understanding is correct. It should be unconstitutional as it stands now, as anything password-protected whatsoever should ideally fall under reasonable expectation of privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com