Representatives that rejected limits on NSA data collection and funding sources | Hacker News Reader

Representatives that rejected limits on NSA data collection and funding sources

docs.google.com

60 pointskumarski38 comments

Feel free to add sources/links/columns to the list. There's 217 rows.

The most interesting takeaway from the data in this spreadsheet: every single member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted to reject these limits, regardless of party affiliation. This committee is responsible for intelligence oversight and is briefed on all intelligence activities by the executive branch--mostly classified information. In other words, these are the House members which are most familiar with how the NSA operates, its oversight (or lack thereof), the intelligence it obtains, and the action taken on that intelligence. By virtue of sitting on this committee, they are also likely to receive political contributions from the defense industry.

And the people in congress who get the most access to all that data. Perhaps they should have recused themselves?

Are you suggesting that they use this data for personal gain? Who better to judge the tradeoffs than those who have seen the data? Someone who hasn't seen it, perhaps?

Data is irrelevant. It's unconstitutional.

Data is indeed irrelevant; it's how it's collected that is the issue. So letting the former influence the latter is most definitely not proper.

Not every single one. Schiff and Pastor voted yes.

For the Democrats on the committee, it was 2 yes, 8 no. It was 0 yes, 13 no for Republicans. Overall, 2 yes, 21 no.

Of the Bay-Area congress people I know (Eshoo, Lofgren, Honda, Speier, Pelosi), only one rejected limits on NSA. Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi, representative of San Francisco, voted in favor of unlimited NSA wiretaps for all of your phone and email traffic.

Pelosi also happened to serve as the ranking member the House Intelligence Committee. The Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 explicitly requires that the president keep congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities, which means that Pelosi likely has seen more classified/NSA information than any other House member. She is also from perhaps the most liberal district in America.

Yeah it's like asking the kid with his hand in the cookie jar to sign onto a bill calling for the lid to be put back on.

Well I certainly won't be voting for her in 2014. I feel like she really let me down. Same thing happened with Obama when he voted to re-new the Patriot Act.

It would be interesting to do some data mining on the open secrets data set for things like this. Has anybody seen any work on identifying statistically significant funding sources for clusters of representatives based on the way they vote?

Very true. Wish I had the time to toy around with D3JS.

My goal with starting the google doc was to make it easier for people to target the companies that fund the politicians.

If everyone who sees this doc, fills in 2 rows, this will be done in a few minutes.

A lot of these donors probably donated to the other side, too. "I won't do business with anyone who funds politicians I don't like, even if they also fund politicians I do like" is not necessarily a bad policy, but just be aware that that's what you're adopting if you choose to move your business away from these donors without also checking out the other side of the coin.

That's a really good point.

Thanks for putting together this spreadsheet! It would be cool to combine this with a campaign on Buycott (buycott.com) in order to target all these companies.

i added some really rough charts on the other spreadsheets to get started.

thanks.

And what would that show, exactly? That donors are more likely to donate to politicians who agree with them?

In order to be interesting, you'd have to demonstrate that a donation caused the politician's stance and was not just because of the politician's stance - and I'm not sure that's extractable from the data set you've got to work with.

It's fun picturing yesterday's emergency top-secret hearing[1].

"We'd just like all of you in the House to know that we've recorded every single one of your phone calls and have all your emails on file. If this amendment passes and our funding gets cut..."

http://rt.com/usa/nsa-surveillance-amendment-amash-485/

Snowden has alleged that Congress is not affected by NSA surveillance.

Source: top answer at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...

Here are the final vote results on ROLL CALL 412 (Amash of Michigan Amendment No. 100) from the House website.

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml

The most interesting part is that the difference in votes is exactly equal to the number of individuals marked as "not voting".

As the guy said at the end of the film Contact, "that is interesting, isn't it?"

Keith Ellison: "For the government to just collect people's data without any sense of that individual warrants or merits and investigation of some kind is a problem. I am pretty disappointed we didn't pass it, but I am pretty impressed with how well we did. This issue is not over. There will be more voters and there will be more bills. I feel confident we can perhaps prevail."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/25/narrow-defeat-ns...

I honestly didn't expect my representative Chris van Hollen (his Congressional District is the MD suburbs of Washington, DC, not too far from the NSA), to vote to de-fund it. It would result in hundreds of lost jobs in his district. But nevertheless, I regret not making the phone call yesterday.

I hope this bill is offered up again, so I get a chance to tell my representative my opinion on it.

Edit: probably hundreds of jobs, not thousands.

Remember this wasn't to defund the NSA, just to defund the programs that spy on us citizens.

I wish I could go back and edit the title. I upvoted you to compensate.

Sorry.

Correct - but this would still mean tons of lost jobs in this area, right? Surely, some human's eventually got to analyze the stuff.

The claims are that no one looks at it unless they are specifically chasing down a lead - c.f. their redefinition of "collecT" from "acquire" to "look it up in the database of acquired data." Presumably they would have just as many analysts working cases without this database.

My logic, is that if it becomes apparent which companies/organizations are funding the pro-NSA politicians, then something can be done about it.

Whether it's nudging the SEO of donor companies in a negative direction or calling up companies and asking them why they support the NSA.

You might find this useful: https://optin.stopwatching.us/

Edit: Also might find this useful: http://defundthensa.com/

> It would result in hundreds of lost jobs in his district.

I'm just imagining a bill like this being debated in hypothetical 1980s East Germany, and legislators being concerned about the loss of all the good-paying Stasi jobs.

Sort by state/district and party: http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/113/house/1/412

This is great. We need more public shitlists. Transparency in action!

Shitlist is a great addition to my vocabulary. Thanks!

Thank you for this. First we need transparency, then we need action.

No problem. Can't wait to turn this into a network graph and shine light on the fattest nodes.

I'm curious of the motivation behind Issa's nay. I remember him being at the forefront of the SOPA rejection along with Chaffetz, Lofgren and Polis, all of whom voted for the limits.

McCarthy rejected defunding programs that spy on US citizens. Go figure.

20 representatives from California, I'm disappointed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com