Section 702 surveillance reauthorization may get slipped into ‘must-pass’ NDAA
wired.com
wired.com
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/28/u-s-used-contentiou... ("US used its Section 702 spy tool to disrupt Iran’s weapons program")
- "In recent months, U.S. officials have increasingly been disclosing examples of how Section 702 has been used to protect national security, including thwarting the flow of fentanyl through the southern border and identifying the hacker behind a 2021 ransomware attack that crippled one of the country’s largest fuel pipelines."
... It's so insidious. So wrong, so useless.
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
Presumably, if it was effective, that would mean their crackdown either moved pill packaging jobs from Mexico to the US or it off-shored production to China.
Efficiency in legislative process is a terrible metric for effectiveness in governance. In fact, some of the worst legislation in recent history was passed during times of greatest legislative efficiency. E.g., the PATRIOT act.
The understanding that governments are the absolute worst at everything has been written about and understood since the time of Plato.
All that's happening is information is more readily accessible and the population is becoming less ignorant of their own government.
People love to draw comparisons between their government and some other government to make a point in favor of their favorite pet policy. Rarely do the same people have even the most rudimentary understanding of all of the ridiculous things that take place in other governments.
It is a shit-show of monumental proportions.
More typically, thousands-of-pages-bills are only printed hours before they go to vote. In past eras, legislators were unable to read them and shirked that off to staffers who would read and summarize for them, but it became too much of a burden even for staffers at some point. They'd just read key sections.
But at the same time, as technology progressed, bills became easier to print en masse. It was possible to print them at the "last second" (figuratively, say less than 24 hours), and so less time was allotted to print them before taking things to a vote.
This is considered normal, among those who are involved, those who are knowledgeable about how Congressional procedure works.
When legislators vote a bill up or vote a bill down, they are inevitably voting on little more than the name of the bill.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/988865415/stuck-at-435-repres...
About that. I discovered a really neat hack a few years ago, but I don't have the juice to pull it off.
Constitutional amendments never expire and they can't be canceled, as long as that's not written into the wording itself. The ERA for instance, needed to be ratified within 7 years, or it became invalid. But old amendments didn't do that... so they wait around for centuries.
And there's a particular amendment that was part of the original bill of rights (there were 12, of those 10 were ratified more or less immediately, and the 11th in the 1990s). This amendment demands that there must be one representative for ever 50,000 constituents. And it's already been ratified my much of New England (plus Kentucky!).
If you happened to live in say, I dunno, Nebraska... you could conceivably get the ball rolling just by going in to talk to your state legislator. Call up his local office, ask if there's a time where you could come in and see him for 5 minutes, and then pour your heart out about how important it is to you.
If he even brings it to a vote, that might be the sort of viral kick-in-the-pants it would need. But if it were ratified by your state, that would pique the interest of other states.
You can check out what I've said, Wikipedia is sufficient to confirm all of it.
Thirty-thousand.org also has information about allowing the House to expand.
We should ratify the amendment. Little more is needed.
If you wanted this, rather than donating to some sort of weird counter-operation, you'd go look up your state legislator (two of them, really, upper or lower house). Choose the one that seems most sympathetic, or maybe just choose both, and go talk to them. Dress nicely. Get a haircut before. Spend 5 minutes, and appeal to whatever their political sensibilities are. While still being friendly, make it clear that your continued support rests on their ability to get the state legislature to move towards ratifying it.
And if you know anyone else interested in things like this, convince them to do the same.
This is probably one of those cases where as few as 4 or 5 people could totally change the face of American politics, and relatively quickly (within the next 10 years or so).
If they're voting on 5000 page monstrosities drafted by lobbyists, or blanks pieces of paper... the solution can never be to make it easier to vote on those things. Because we want them to stop doing that, not do it even more.
Let alone any of their constituents, who are just as soon to believe the Saving Puppies and Kittens Act really is about saving puppies and kittens.
It'd make a nice series of bipartisan stories, especially for readers who have been polarized into tight camps.
You can't sue unless you can prove damages and you can't prove damages if everything is classified.
That's why parallel construction is such an important tool for law enforcement.
Ironically, on a per-token-consumed basis, one of the most societally impactful uses of LLMs may very well be giving lawmakers and their staffers the capability to actually be able to understand - and communicate with constituents on - controversial passages buried in laws they are voting on with little notice.
It's immensely sad to me that this is the case. But I suppose the next best thing to Alexander Hamilton writing the Federalist Papers to explain a legal document... is Alexander LLM being able to do the same.
> Section 702 is a key provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.
Why wouldn't we want this? I'll agree to abolish it when there are no more bad guys in the world.
So, now there's a mapping from 2OEH8eoCRo0 to your real name somewhere in a "secret" law enforcement database, and that can be used to bootstrap a FISA warrant against you with effectively no oversight.