House Vote 412 - Rejects Limits on N.S.A. Data Collection | Hacker News Reader

House Vote 412 - Rejects Limits on N.S.A. Data Collection

politics.nytimes.com

19 pointsjosephscott24 comments

I'm curious what else was going on in this bill? Was it solely a bill limiting NSA data collection, or was it another one of those where NSA data collection is the headline item, then inside it is alot of other junk.

The vote was over whether to add the following ammendment to the DoD appropriations bill:

> None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to execute a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order pursuant to section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861) that does not include the following sentence: ‘‘This Order limits the collection of any tangible things (including telephone numbers dialed, telephone numbers of incoming calls, and the duration of calls) that may be authorized to be collected pursuant to this Order to those tangible things that pertain to a person who is the subject of an investigation described in section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861).

http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/AMASH_018_xml27...

The ammendment's author (Justin Amash) discusses what this means here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIqJcQR0im8

No: Nancy Pelosi: D CA-12 - San Francisco :facepalm:

Edit: At least M. Honda who is the Congressman for Silicon Valley voted Yes.

I can't recall any other issue, splitting the House orthogonal to party lines.

In all honesty, for all the freedom-related speech in the US and the so-called constitutionally protected rights against government corruption and abuse, I'm shocked that Americans are not in the streets rioting right now.

Americans are a very order-loving people. It's hard to get them to riot or protest about anything, much less something like NSA surveillance that has no visible negative impact to the ordinary person.

These "order-loving people" are the same ones that buy-out all ammunition when a vague proposal is put forward to improve gun registration... I'm not sure how to reconcile these positions at all.

America can be pretty-well described by a Protestant sense of order with a frontiers-y gun culture. The guns are there for hunting, shooting criminals, and in case the order breaks down, not to fight the order the exists now.

Watch the show Jericho for a pretty good idea of much of America thinks. I.e. people who had no beef with the government as it existed, but kinda fantasize about what would happen if the government collapsed and they were on their own.

I'm not sure how to reconcile these positions at all.

It may help if you understand that these people don't trust the government to keep order. It's not wild-eyed anarchists who are buying that ammo.

It's more that the groundswell of support for the 2nd amendment, even going to far to stockpile in lieu of any possible changes, should apply equally to other amendments. Particularly ones that are as important as the fourth.

Sure, there were some protests on Independence Day and I applaud the efforts of those involved, but it seems like regular Americans are largely either unaware or just don't care about it at all.

America has a deep gun culture, and they have a deep "your home is your castle" culture. That's what the 2nd and the 4th mean to your typical American, and that's what they care about. The extension of that to "your Google Drive is your castle" is too abstract and theoretical. People largely don't care about non-visible impingements on their liberties (and arguably are justified in doing so). It's kind of a "what's the sound of one hand clapping" thing.

The 4th amendment is alive and well in America, at least as far as your typical white American voter is concerned. The most egregious violations happen to inner city minorities, who are so segregated from the rest of the population that the mainstream voter has probably never even met a black youth who has been stopped and frisked for no reason. And while you hear about no-knock warrant disasters in white neighborhoods, but it's extremely sporadic, to the point where your typical person probably can't say they know someone personally that it has happened to. And if you don't read the outrage blogs, you probably have never even heard of it. My parents have no idea what a "no-knock" warrant is. It just doesn't happen in their upscale Republican suburb.

But gun registration and licensing chaffes everyone. Even your most upstanding, law-abiding white American has to submit to a background check like some sort of criminal, and that makes people mad.

I don't see any conflict. Legal gun buyers in the US are the most law-abiding people in the country.

There was a run on guns. Generally when an item goes 'on a run' there is panic behind the purchase.

I didn't see any signs of panic. It's just common sense to buy something you want if there's a chance it may become unavailable..

How does that contradict the statement that legal gun buyers are law-abiding?

These law-abiding citizens should demand the same from their government, shouldn't they?

The issue has been making it's way toward the mainstream despite the security establishment doing their best to keep it on the fringe. The leadership has the most to lose---their reputation for establishing an un-American system. The tide is turning though, and it's important to get representatives voting on the record. With continued public outcry, if this thing is really put to a vote, the numbers will swell in opposition because politicians, if anything, are ego driven, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of history.

Riots don't really work, for the most part. And anyway, no one is actually being harmed by this -- at least not in a way that they could see or guess.

Americans don't take to the streets because people on the streets are vulnerable to riot police with tear gas and mass arrest enclosures.

You wish. The fact is most Americans wouldn't even conceive of protesting. It's unseemly and the kind of thing you'd expect the French to do, or worse people in uncivilized places like the Egypt. Your typical American thinks of tear gas and mass arrests as being for dirty hippies like those OWS protesters (young, unemployed, urbanites--triple whammy), not regular folks like themselves. And that's probably true--what kind of tear gas and mass arrests were used on Tea Party protestors?

Americans are in the streets rioting right now, but about the Zimmerman trial...

Mostly opportunists, looters, and lifestyle activists. They're not motivated by the fear of losing something important.

As an Oakland resident, this doesn't match my observations.

Explain how and by what the Oakland protesters are motivated to protest.

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