Defund the NSA - This Isn't Over | Hacker News Reader

Defund the NSA - This Isn't Over

defundthensa.com

283 pointssethbannon84 comments

This is great! A followup contact, either praise or criticism, is like Pavlovian conditioning for our representatives. I'm happy to say I was able to give positive reinforcement to my congressman. Forgive me if I'm mixing up my theories, I haven't taken a psychology class in several years.

Also, great job to Sina and the taskforce!

Thanks! And as always, anyone who wants to help create things like this can sign up at http://sina.is/task-force/

We particularly need some extra designers to help out, but the more the merrier.

What you're talking about is operant conditioning ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning )

Here's what I want: A link that I can click on that will add a google calendar event to notify me with the list of representatives to vote AGAINST when voting season comes. I'm pissed now, but like all americans, I'll probably forget about this come election.

That is a good idea. Yesterday in irc, we could only think of trying to get people to confront their local reps in their offices. I'll pass this along.

Edit: If anyone knows any place to programmatically get (r)election dates for districts, please tell us here: https://github.com/tfrce/DefundTheNSA/issues/14

Also, remind me to donate heavily to their competitor if they voted against.

>irc

Which channel/network?

##rritf/freenode, but I don't know if anyone is there now.

I don't think you're allowed to vote for those outside your district/state.

I know. If you go to the link, the first thing it asks is for your zip code to give you a list of your representatives. The reminder would contain that list.

That is where I was thinking of putting the link to download the dynamically generated .ICS file, but I'm stuck on where to get the data for their reelection dates :S (Sunglight labs supposedly has "term_start"and "term_end" fields, but a test call to their api shows nothing and even if those returned, I don't know how well that correlates to when the election is).

I hope I'm not embarrassing myself here, but, does this help? https://www.usvotefoundation.org/state-elections/state-elect...

That could help. But right now i found out that elections are held in the first week of November for house of representatives every two years, and any elections outside of that are due to edge cases like resignation or death. It could be done for 2014 though. Would that be valuable?

Yes. Why are you thinking it might not be valuable?

I guess I meant valuable enough for me to work on it right now :P But I am so I guess that is moot.

Thanks for this idea, it is really awesome, and I hope I can get something up functioning soon.

Edit: Ok, it seems like we cannot create .ics file to download. We're using github pages so we're limited to front end things. But I'm looking to see if there are any work arounds.

I'm pretty ignorant here. These only differ per state right? I mean a brute force solution would be to generate 50 of them and then you're done, right? You could link to the appropriate one directly.

Depends, do people want all the elected officials of that state where one might only be able to vote for 1 or 2 in their district, and all the other information that is being pulled from the api calls now?

I think we're going to get to this at some point, but probably not today. I think with more time, we can get a dedicated server (which would make this task a lot easier), make a more robust tool to include more functionality than this hack, for any organizations that would like use a tool like this.

Personally, if it tells me, "Don't vote for these 4 people" and I can only vote for 1-2 of them, I wouldn't mind. If it tells me, "Don't vote for these 15+ people", that's just noise and I wouldn't find it useful.

That is a great idea! Or the user could select to be reminded via email?

Idea: pre-prepared websites that call to attention representatives that are against privacy (voted for SOPA, the NSA, TSA, etc.) make them available to deploy on heroku, github, s3, whatever. Then developers in support of privacy can litter the internet with them come election time.

If all these guys care about is getting re-elected, lets make it clear not supporting their constituents will seriously damage their chances.

Also love the followup idea.

What makes you think they're not supporting their constituents?

Because they support spying on them. That's kind of the opposite of supporting them.

You should pay more attention to polls - it's not quite the landslide you're implying it is. Many people are okay with being spied on.

This is why we have morals. So we don't have to conduct opinion polls to see what's right and wrong.

Plenty of atrocious things were wildly popular. They get absolutely zero extra legitimacy for being so.

Do you believe your moral compass to be perfect, or is it flawed?

In the event that you think it's flawed, how do you recommend making sure your flawed moral compass isn't going to cause something immoral to happen?

>how do you recommend making sure your flawed moral compass isn't going to cause something immoral to happen?

Careful reflection. Self examination. Dialog and debate with others I consider intelligent and ethical. Certainly not a popularity contest.

Each one of the ways you check your moral compass are easily corruptible by your moral compass.

A vote, or a so-called "popularity contest", is, out of all the things you just listed, the least corruptible by your own biases.

All due respect, the Bill of Rights is there specifically to prevent us from the evils that "most people" would be okay with.

All due respect? Heh, I am due no respect.

As for the Bill of Rights, it is entirely arguable whether or not any of the amendments to the Constitution have been violated.

A near-even split on the first try over a high-stakes issue is a pretty darned good showing. Lay into those supportive of the state violating every semblance of privacy, and then try again.

I said this before, but the closeness of the vote has nothing to do with how close the vote actually was. Once the whips figure out if a bill is going to pass or not, they then let people vote however will get them more money.

I'm curious how whips work. Do you have anything I could read up on it to learn more? It makes sense from a certain perspective, but does that mean that they decided to look into how many people were going to vote no for sure (which was 217). Then the remaining legislators would get more money if they voted yes (205) or maybe they voted yes because it was what their constituents wanted. That's all speculation but it's seriously interesting and very disturbing.

Once you know a vote isn't going to happen, the voting gets rearranged to look good. Since the outcome is the same, it doesn't really matter how the outcome happens, so long as the 'yes' or the 'no' is still a 'yes' or 'no'.

And it's probably one of the least improper things that happens in US government.

I'd also like to take a moment to explain why this vote doesn't have a chance, ever, and it's the exact same reason all spending cuts to defense don't generally go through - all it takes is one bad thing to happen, and suddenly every single person who voted to reduce defense spending/the NSA budget is at risk in their district.

It's the easiest attack ad in the world to construct: "My opponent was one of the people who took away the NSA's power to defend this country, and as a result we were attacked again!" That's a guaranteed and immediate hit that's very easy to understand. What's much more complicated is the 'yes' argument. It's nuanced, confusing, many constituents don't even want it, and in general a big risk.

The biggest win for members of congress is if no change actually happens, and yet they still get to have a voting record that shows they're against what the NSA is doing (exactly how it turned out). Those "yes" votes were probably pretty damn expensive for the congresspeople who got them, but they'd be HUGE liabilities if the vote actually passed.

In other words, 'yes' votes were worth more if the 'yes' lost.

While that is all true, it is still worth noting that worst case they still cared enough to be disingenuous about their voting records.

If they believed that they could just get away with sweeping it under the rug, they would not even have tried to manipulate the optics of the vote. That's still a victory in the face of all the propaganda downplaying the importance of the issue.

They are getting away with sweeping it under the rug. You're being pandered to by worthless voting records, if anything I'd be more upset were I in your position.

Like the sibling commenter asked, do you have any sources that break this down further? Your response there had too much on the attack/defense angle for campaigns. What exactly is the relationship between a whip, the passage of legislation, and the dollar valuation of voting yes/no? How are votes quantified into dollars in such a way that a whip figures out if a bill will pass, then lets reps vote 'however will get them more money'?

It's all very googleable, check out the citations section of the related wiki pages for specific books. Most of what I know about the process comes from primary research made possible by living in DC and spending too much time in hill bars listening to windbags bloviate on their own importance.

Also fictional TV. Because that's a great place to learn things about your government, right?

The NSA spying program is horrible, yes. And I think it should be halted immediately. But we need the NSA—they do important things for this country despite the bad clout they've received because of this one domestic program. That program is minuscule in size compared to the sum of the important operations that are conducted in the agency.

I want to make myself clear. I think the domestic intercepts are 100% wrong and unconstitutional. That needs to stop. But that agency is home to smart people who do other necessary work to protect us.

domestic spying NO Foreign spying and intel gathering YES

Despite the catchy slogan, this isn't actually about defunding the entire NSA.

For reference, here's the text of the amendment: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/AMASH_018_xml27...

It short, it defunds the NSA's ability to conduct surveillance on people who are not being investigated.

Could you list some things they do to protect us so that we all have a better understanding?

I feel that their aim would be to collect non-domestic information that could be used to push US interests. Is that really a positive thing?

I think this could get legs.

Are there any other like this issues where the government is blatantly thumbing its nose at its own people? I'm running a survey right now and one of the elements is support for the NSA surveillance, and almost nobody supports it. Like, 85% just say it's flat-out wrong.

Surveys are heavily influenced by the way you are asking questions.

"Should the NSA be able to snoop all of our email/phone/etc records, and store them for later?" --> NO

"Should the government be able to expand its limited search capabilities so that it can better prevent terrorist attacks?" --> WELL SURE

That was a terrible example of a second way of phrasing it, but I am certain there is a way to frame what they are doing in a way which leaves out the "collect all your things" nuance (;)) and therefore will sound reasonable to many people.

In the general case you will find that answers tend to trend in this way:

NO: "Should the gov't ${trample_our_freedoms}?" YES: "Should the gov't ${catch_more_terrorists}|${protect_more_children}?"

I agree, that's why we tried to phrase it neutrally: "Does the NSA surveillance of US citizens concern you? " Yes/No/I don't know/No, I don't have anything to hide/No, it's necessary to keep us safe?"

It's not intended to produce a specific outcome, we want some genuinely good data :)

If you want to check it out and look at the results it's here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QBvTRxDQXmALhYqZMn7S3T_DBq8...

Which of those responses are you interpreting as "it's flat out wrong" as you put it?

I think there's a lot of space between having concerns about something and being vehemently opposed to it.

Survey of who? Do you have a tech-biased or liberal-biased or youth-biased audience?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-suppor... ("Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders 'acceptable,' while 41 percent call the practice 'unacceptable.'")

I'm just trying to get random people to respond. I would refer to gknoy's comment about how easy surveys are to manipulate, and question whether the survey you mention was created with a purpose.

I've been working with some research companies lately and one thing which surprised me was the fact that surveys are often constructed with the sequence of questions carefully set up to test various messages. Unless you can see the survey itself, I would question the results.

For example, the question prior to 'How do you feel about the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders' might have been 'Is it important that the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans has stopped terrorist attacks?' This type of question can mightily swing the outcome, so if you don't have access to the survey you need to ask yourself if the organization putting out the survey has an agenda...

What do you mean "random people?" What sorts of sites are you posting the survey to? If people like my mom aren't part of your survey demographic, your methodology is flawed.

The Washington Post-Pew survey is detailed (through a link) in the article, specifically this question:

"Q: As you may know, it has been reported that the National Security Agency has been getting secret court orders to track telephone call records of MILLIONS of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism. Would you consider this access to telephone call records an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?"

58% responded 'acceptable' and 41% responded 'unacceptable'.

FWIW, I think the WAPO-PEW phrasing is slightly biased in favor of the NSA. I think the following would be more accurate and thus more closer to neutral (italics indicate changes):

"Q: As you may know, it has been reported that the National Security Agency has been getting secret court orders to collect telephone call records of nearly all American cell phones in an effort to investigate terrorism. Would you consider this collection of telephone call records an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?"

What isn't clear to me is if the phrasing has changed from the survey a month ago to the most recent survey. If the phrasing (of the entire survey because cross-question context is important) is not identical then the results just aren't comparable no matter what biases may or may not be built into the questions.

As of now your survey has less than 50 responses, and is heavily skewed towards young males. Right now it looks like barely 20 people have said it is "flat-out wrong." How are you concluding that "almost nobody supports it" based on a sample this small?

Might as well add this one to the criticism sent to your representative:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/senate-bill-...

Great site. I was able to research and find that Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema, serving Arizona's 9th District was cosponsor of the Amash bill but voted against the amendment, stating that it "has an unintended consequence".

Her press release is full of wonderful contradictions and weasel words:

http://sinema.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=b23deeab...

From:

“I have very real concerns about the federal government’s action and lack of transparency regarding the collection and retention of law-abiding Americans’ private information. "

Straight to:

"I believe that we must work toward less intrusive methods to ensure our security. The broad language we considered today could have limited the ability of our national security and law enforcement community to prevent the bombing plot against the New York subway system or to quickly respond to events like the Boston bombing."

Wrapping it all up with:

"There are other ways than the invasive collection of metadata to ensure the security of Americans while protecting our precious 4th Amendment rights.”

Ok... so there are other ways, gotcha.... but you don't vote for an amendment which would have forced the NSA into using / finding other ways. Cool.

Edit: I give her props for responding to my tweet though: https://twitter.com/fuzzywah/status/360441317609840642

Does anyone find it ironic that the same folks who are anti-libertarian (not necessarily the HN crowd) and anti-tea party are strident supporters of a tea-party favorite congressman's amendment. The idea that such a group would rally around someone who they would not have voted for, seems strange.

I am not sure if I should be proud that a citizenry can see past politics and rally based on substance, or if they are totally out of touch with how politics works.

Source info

  http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor.aspx?day=20130724

It was Roll call #412, the Amash ammendment for Bill H.r. 2397

  http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml
  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr2397
  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h412

I called both of mine (FL), one voted one way and the other the other. Do I thank the one, and what would I say to the other?

Good job calling! And yes, call both again - with thanks (it shows you really care and are paying attention), and with disappointment, asking why they voted the way they did, letting them know this may influence your vote in the primary and general election, and recommendations about what they should read to get a different perspective when the next vote comes up.

What's the list of stuff they could read? Thanks

Astonishingly page doesn't work in Opera.

And why all the effort in a "defund NSA" site to find out as much as possible about visitors (e-mail, zip code) and link them to Facebook, Twitter and Google, the second-tier sinners in this scandal?

Just provide good information at a pre-defined URL - I'll get around to it if I want to.

We will definitely test in Opera going forward--thank you for reporting that it doesn't work.

We are trying to figure out how to best spread a message while still being privacy-conscious. One possible idea is to put the sharing functionality on a second page, thus allowing people who want to share to do so but not loading scripts for people just visiting for the first time. Another is to load sharing scripts on the same page asynchronously only if people click a 'Tweet my legislator!' button--that's how the current site would work if there were not the three social buttons at the bottom of the page.

We'll also be dropping Google Analytics for Piwik (which is self-hosted) soon.

Can you provide more information about what doesn't work in Opera? I just tested it in the current version on OS X and could not find any issues.

Representatives up for election in 2013 [EDIT: 2014] should be flagged. Ones in competitive states should be at the top, with donation links for those who voted Aye. If they voted Nay and their competitor is anti-NSA, their competitor gets a donation link by the incumbent's name.

> Representatives up for election in 2013 should be flagged.

That's going to be a pretty short list, as regular elections for all seats of the House of Representatives (and one-third of the seats of the Senate) occur in every even-numbered year.

The only House elections in 2013 would be special elections, which would normally be to fill a vacant seat, and thus would not have an incumbent running.

Not sure who would know how to fix this, but the tweet button only puts half[1] of the message in. (URL maybe too long)

[1] - http://imgur.com/z7JDuXV

weird, it worked fine for me. Try to just manually add it. The positive Tweet was "Thank you for supporting #privacy! You're earning my vote, keep up the good work! #defundNSA http://defundthensa.com/" while the negative Tweet was: "It's shameful that you voted for unconstitutional record collection instead of #privacy! #defundNSA http://defundthensa.com/"

another good link, providing full information about everyone that voted on this, with clickable links to more detailed information about each representative.

Makes it easier to get people to pester the appropriate representative.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/113/house/1/vote...

Broken on Chrome/Win 7.

EDIT: Whoops, it's Adblock Plus on Chrome. For some reason it gets rid of most of the site.

What is going on with the photo of Judy Chu and the guy below her? I'm referencing the duct tape.

WWRPD?

I'm a trifle pessimistic over the chances of this ever succeeding.

Did you not see the vote spread yesterday? Twelve vote difference. That's incredible, and this is only the beginning.

Also remember, there are still leaks to come, we've only seen a glimpse of the full scope of the revelations.

My understanding is that even if it had passed with flying colours, Obama would have vetoed it. So all of this process is just for show.

If it had passed with flying colors, pressure on the Obama to not veto it would be tremendous.

He's already been reelected, so he doesn't care what the general public thinks of him.

True that he doesn't care per se, but as I doubt he's going to quietly retire to a Hawaiian villa in 3.5 years, he does have to gauge who thinks what of this presumably unexpected issue & backlash.

Well, I want it to get to that. I want it to be on Obama's desk and see what happens.

I prefer that to just sitting around.

Your understanding is incorrect. This was an amendment to the NDAA. Basically the bill that Congress has to pass every year to authorize the government to maintain a standing army, and fund said army. Without the NDAA, our military would effectively cease to exist.

It would be impossible for President Obama to veto it.

Oh so weird riders for special interest causes are okay now?

They always have been in the past.

I wouldn't call this a weird rider. The NSA is a DoD agency, and the NDAA is one of the tools that Congress uses to regulate the DoD.

FYI, you're missing the congresspeople who abstained.

Very good point--abstentions and absences should also be listed.

Had those who abstained voted yes, it would have been a tie. It would have still failed to pass because the WH would have the final say, but I'm encouraged that it was as close as it was.

Too many secrets.

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