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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

This philosophy is precisely why I was so dumbfounded to hear a congressman talk on the topic of the Patriot act on NPR. He recently flip-flopped from having been instrumental in writing it to being categorically for reform of it.

What blew me away was that he genuinely did not think that the NSA would interpret the term "relevant" as broadly as humanly possible. Anyone who's taken 10 minutes of a law class knows that you write laws defensively, presuming the most evil motherfucker imaginable will have the reins some day. And this retard is one of the few running the country.

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F. James Sensenbrenner - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2139021...

I heard the same thing. His position is that there is a common sense definition of "relevant" that they did not define in the law, and that the NSA would be cool and only look at what they needed.

EDIT: A quote.

>What Congress intended and what I intended is that the target had to be a foreign national and not a U.S. person. He would be targeted, and then they would find out who that person was calling, both in the United States and elsewhere, rather than grabbing all of the phone information and working backwards to the target. The relevant standard was intended to limit what NSA could do. They took the position that it expanded it. And that tips the commonsense definition of relevance on its head.

Thanks for posting the link. I got all worked up and forgot to go back and edit it in.

> What blew me away was that he genuinely did not think that the NSA would interpret the term "relevant" as broadly as humanly possible.

What makes you think he genuinely thought that? My (admittedly limited) experience with state and national politicians is that most say in public exactly what benefits them the most at the moment.

Because I don't care to consider the more insidious alternative, that he wanted this outcome.

> 10 minutes of a law class

Out of curiosity, what was the name of this class that you took and expect that most others have taken?

Introduction to Law

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