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Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or did anyone else have to double-check to see that this was an ANTI-spying bill and not a PRO-spying bill? I wish bills were required to have descriptive names.

TL;DR: It's a good one, but EFF and others feel it doesn't go nearly far enough to curb spying.

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> "TL;DR: It's a good one, but EFF and others feel it doesn't go nearly far enough to curb spying."

Actually, it's NOT a good one. To quote Rep. Justin Amash on USA Freedom: “H.R. 2048 actually expands the statutory basis for the large-scale collection of most data“

* http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/118897240668/justin...

Amash is emerging to play a Ron Paul esque role of which both Paul's supporters and detractors made incredible use:

He's the only one who is strangely saying something different than the rest.

At his young age, it's possible to imagine Amash breaking Paul's record for casting the largest number of sole nays.

He also goes through the hassle of explaining his votes. Which is nice to see and understand his thought process.

What does that say about the EFF marking this a neutral?

Yeah. Based on the name and past history of the government, I assumed it was something nefarious. (And probably like the Congressmen, I haven't read it, so maybe they did slip something nasty in.)

Honestly, they ought to just pass a law that bills can't have names and can only be numbered, to avoid propagandized or just plain dishonest titles.

My god this might be brilliant! It will get nicknames from each partisan side but it WON'T have a title.

But it's got "freedom" in the name. It couldn't possibly be bad... You know, like the "Patriot" Act. </s>

Anything with a patriotic word in the title is suspect. Anything with a victim's name in the title is presumed awful.

I dunno, the AMBER alert system was a pretty damn good idea.

I turned amber alerts off on my phone after multiple alerts at 2am for someone over 100 miles away.

Good idea, less than great implementation. But still, it's just a presumption--presumptions can be overcome.

Are you sure about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Retrieval_rate

Isn't that the thing that wakes me up at 4 AM when I forget to disable it on a new phone? No, I don't think it's a good idea.

Were we really expecting the government to just one day give us exactly what we wanted?

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