Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of the Patriot Act [video] | Hacker News Reader

Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of the Patriot Act [video]

floor.senate.gov

321 pointssinak136 comments

First words:

Mr. President, there comes to a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer.

That time is now. And i will not let the Patriot Act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

At the very least we should debate, we should debate whether or not we are going to relinquish our rights or whether or not we are going to have full and able debate over whronts we can live within -- whether or not we can live within the constitution or whether or not we have to go around the constitution.

The bulk collection of all americans' phone records all of the time is a direct violation of the fourth amendment. The second appeals court has ruled till legal.

The president began this program by executive order. He should immediately end it through executive order. For over a year now, he has said the program is illegal and yet he does nothing.

He says, well, congress can get rid of the Patriot Act. Congress can get rid of the bulk collection. And yet he has the power to do it at his fingertips. He began this illegal program. The court has informed him that the program is illegal. He has every power to stop it and yet the president does nothing.

Justice Brandeis wrote that the right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights, most prized among civilized men. The fourth amendment incorporates this right to privacy. The fourth amendment incorporates this right to be left alone.

I clicked the link and it's another senator talking... anyone know where I can view the opening part of this?

Here:

http://www.c-span.org/video/?326084-1/senator-rand-paul-rky-...

At the top of the video, click on "Watch this program from the beginning"

Skip to something like 3 hours and 50 minutes into the video. That's roughly where Paul begins.

Here's a clip of just that bit: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4538428/rand-pauls-patriot-act...

Technical note for those not familiar with U.S. Senate style: the first "Mr. President" refers to the President Pro Tempore of the senate (currently Sen. Orin Hatch), not the President of the United States.

To those who argue this submission isn't relevant for a tech audience: the Senators in this hearing are discussing backdoors and encryption right now, which is pretty relevant actually, and not something we often see on the Senate floor.

One of his proposed amendments is to disallow governments mandating products change their source code to allow entities access into the data (e.g., a backdoor for the NSA). So basically, allowing encryption, which would be huge.

That shouldn't even need to be an amendment. With a government based on an enumerated and limited set of powers (which the US government is in theory though blatantly not in practice), it should suffice to not explicitly permit them to do so.

This is an astounding speech. He's hitting everything that needs to be hit.

Civil asset forfeiture

Patriot Act

Broad surveillance

Mass incarceration

War on drugs

etc

These are tactical decisions he is making in an effort to win the presidency.

If he could gain just one more vote by saying the exact opposite of everything above, he would do it. And so would "your guy". Or gal.

Even if this assertion of mine is note technically true, you should behave as if it is.

I believe that accusation is plainly wrong.

Paul has long represented these, and similar liberty oriented positions. He has a strong libertarian ideology bent and is mostly consistent about it.

These are not positions you take in order to win the Presidency, and he does not have a realistic shot at winning. That will go to eg Bush or Clinton, both of which are pro war, and pro surveillance.

>He has a strong libertarian ideology bent and is mostly consistent about it and is mostly consistent about it.

Except when it comes to: A woman's right to choose Gay Marriage Legalizing Recreational Drugs US Foreign Policy

He is a politician and as he is being groomed for making a run for presidency he is backpeddling. Which is consistent with every president in modern US history.

Those statements are clearly wrong.

1) He's against the present interventionist foreign policy. he has been extremely clear about that for years.

2) He's in favor of states being left to decide for themselves about drug legalization. If Texas wants to support the legalization of pot, his position is that that is up to Texas voters.

2a) Paul constantly makes the point that the war on drugs has been a disaster, and constantly hits against the mass incarceration system we have today. He makes the point non-stop. He points out the unfairness of our current system, such that it's putting black people in prison for the same things white people are getting away with (drug use).

3) He's in favor of states being left to choose about both abortion and gay marriage.

4) He is not in favor of any federal legislation to outlaw either abortion or gay marriage. Paul has said he would not attempt to change present laws on abortion.

> Those statements are clearly wrong.

If that's the case, feel free to edit his wikipedia page (the source for my statements) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Rand_Pau...

Fortunately his wikipedia page confirms what I said.

He's against our interventionist foreign policy:

- "He says he would have voted against the invasion of Iraq"

- "Paul also spoke against U.S. overseas military bases"

- "During his 2010 Senate campaign Paul questioned the idea that U.S. Middle East policy is 'killing more terrorists than it creates'"

- "Paul believes that when the United States goes to war, Congress must declare war as mandated by the United States Constitution"

More examples confirming what I said:

"Paul believes the issue of medical marijuana is a states' rights issue and that the federal government should not interfere"

"Paul was one of three U.S. senators in 2015 to introduce a bipartisan bill, CARERS, that would legalize medical marijuana under federal law"

- "Paul has expressed doubt about the fairness of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines"

- "He believes that these laws are applied disproportionately to African Americans, arguing that non-violent drug offenses have contributed to a third of African American males being unable to vote"

"Paul supported a Kentucky bill that would restore voting rights to felons after a five-year waiting period"

"In a 2014 op-ed in Time magazine, Paul criticized the increased militarization of law enforcement"

"Paul's staffers say he believes [on gay marriage] the issue should be left to the states to decide"

"He has said he thought that the Supreme Court's ruling in Windsor v. United States, which struck down the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage at a federal level (as between a man and a woman), was appropriate"

Legalizing Recreational Drugs Use is not the same as Legalizing Medical Marijuana Use.

Second, we're both cherry picking sections from that article to make our point. Except I'm not trying to defending his political ideologies, just pointing out he is like every other major politician who has attempted a run for the presidency: says one thing, but in order to shore up their base, will say something else.

One isn't a libertarian if they simply say "let the states figure it out." That's the ideology of small-government focused conservatives.

A libertarian's point of view would be "Government (federal, state, city) should stay out of lives of people w.r.t (drugs, guns, bedroom).

None of what you've written suggests he has that mentality.

Leaving up to the states to decide isn't freedom-oriented. It just kicks the can down the road. It absolves him of the responsibility of taking a stand on any of those issues.

False. Your influence as a voter is much greater at the state and local level than the federal level. On an individual basis, you have much more freedom to make your own choices and have them honored if the vote is left to your state or local government.

Not false.

"Gay people should have the same freedom to marry the people they love as straight people." That's a freedom-oriented stance.

"Whether gay people have the freedom to marry is up to ... someone else!" That's a cowardly dodge.

By your logic anyone who does not support the United Nations having binding legal powers to force the entire world to allow gay marriage, and the means to enforce compliance, is anti freedom and anti gay.

freedom is partly self determination. not having laws stuffed down our throats by Washington is freedom (it could be marriage today, but more anti drug laws tomorrow)

Oh, sure. I'm all about self-determination.

Know how much gay people marrying each other affects your life, if you're not gay and have no plans to marry someone of the same sex?

Zero. It doesn't affect you. Whether gay people marry one another doesn't affect a lot of the people who oppose gay marriage, because it's an entirely private matter.

Apply the same for a lot of other issues.

If you're a business owner, and enjoy the benefits the law gives to business owners, then you play by a slightly different set of rules; you don't get maximal freedom to choose your customers, you have limits in some general ways once you open a business to the public. That set of rules changes from time to time.

If Rand Paul was to have his way entirely, his stance would be for the government to stay out of marriage altogether, straight or gay. That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all. You should be free to call yourself being married to anyone, and you don't need any recognition to do that.

Now, of course he won't get his way with that, so the next best things is to localize the effect of the law: if you dislike the law of where you're staying, it would be a lot easier if you can just move to the next city with a different set of laws that you agree with. That's basically the overarching ideal of libertarian: liberty and freedom of choice trumps all. There aren't much to choose if the law is federal (or if it's Earth-wide, to take to the extreme). In the US, that would for practical purposes mean advocate for State law over federal law.

There are many things to dislike about libertarian and Rand Paul (his version of libertarian is kind of Objectivism, which is quite ugly). But to characterize Rand Paul's stance as "opposing to gay marriage" is misleading. Calling him "opposing to X", with X being some perceived good thing is (most of the time) attacking a strawman. He's pretty much just opposing to making more law, in general.

Edit: you said that "It absolves him of the responsibility of taking a stand on any of those issues" in one of the comment above. Yes that's the whole point of his ideal: it doesn't matter what his stance is, you're free to do whatever you want.

> That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all.

No, he believes that marriage contracts (LEGAL TERM) should be available for same sex couples.

He also believes that legal issues (like tax codes) should not mention marriage.

To make an opinion, as someone who firmly supports equal rights for all Americans, regardless of gender or sexuality (or any other dimension), Rand Paul is not someone I support.

So not false.

If it were up to the states, we'd still have Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws enforced, instead of just being on the books.

Taking the position that it's none of the federal government's business is perfectly sensible.

For many issues, it would be even more preferable to have such rights positively enforced at the federal level, but we have a process for doing exactly that: propose a constitutional amendment that gives the federal government the power to enforce that. It's perfectly consistent to hold the position that the federal government simply doesn't have any power that would give it a say one way or another.

S.583 - A bill to implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/583

Sponsor: Rand Paul

I think if he was shooting for popular appeal, he would champion a much different platform.

I don't believe this is true. These are highly unpopular positions among the republican base.

> These are highly unpopular positions among the republican base.

There's a number of states with open primaries now, so its not implausible that Paul's Presidential tactics involve trying to bring non-Republicans (particularly libertarian non-Republicans) in to vote for him in the Republican primaries.

Or to secure support outside the Republican base and then be able to make an electability argument to the primary electorate.

True, but they're popular outside the republican base, and Paul has rightly calculated that the base consists of too many older white social conservatives for the party's long-term health.

I don't think he expects to get the nomination for President on his first attempt, and I'm not sure he wants a cabinet post either. Rather, he wants to position himself as a national figure for a more serious run in a future election cycle by laying out a more libertarian-themed party platform now. For example, he's also taking efforts to distance himself from attempts to set abortion policy at a federal level, which he rightly perceives as a liability for the national party.

Although it's an unlikely prospect, I wonder if the internal conflicts in the GOP might manifest as an actual split. Ironically enough the passionate, fire-breathing Tea Party types, who you would expect to be primarily concenred with shrinking government, are actually most likely to support more aggressive foreign policy, expansion and intensification of domestic law enforcement, and hold a hardline attitude on social conservative issues like gay marriage or abortion (these are my anecdotal observations FWIW).

There really is no more Tea Party. It was co-opted by the establishment. The original Tea Party was far more libertarian and stood against all those things you list.

The original "Tea Party" was a reference to the Boston Tea Party made during a Ron Paul fundraiser, right?

I wouldn't look at it so cynically. The man might be in the Republican Party, but like his father, he is a man of personal ideals, not one to tow the party line.

I just wish his ideals weren't so retrograde. This is the same guy who said he wouldn't have voted for the civil rights act.

I'm not a fan of all of Rand Paul's positions; but the reason why he said that was that it prohibited businesses from serving people they don't want to serve. The instance he gave was the Jewish Store owner that would be forced to serve a neo-nazi.

The Civil Rights act keeps business owners from truly owning whom they can serve; which unfortunately keeps an essential part of social pressure from happening. Imagine if businesses could refuse services to anyone who didn't vaccinate their children? Or refuse service to people who are bigots?

Part of the issue with the CRA is the issue with all sorts of legislation: In its zeal to right wrongs, it has plenty of unintended consequences that have side-effects that can't be forseen.

Well, right, because business owners perpetuated structural racism. If they'd all decided that black folks' money was as good as whites', we wouldn't have needed the government to take action.

The hypothetical of the Jewish store owner being forced to serve a neo-nazi is pretty weak, when the law addressed a real problem (private business owners' personal racism) that affected millions of actual people over the course of their lives.

Reading through your comment history; I recognize that there's no way for us to achieve mutual understanding or have a substantive debate on this issue. Thank you for responding.

Thanks for at least responding.

I just noticed a flurry of downvotes on all of my comments in this thread. It'd be nice if the randbots could at least try to talk, instead of knee-jerking on the little down arrow.

Don't automatically assume that people who disagree with you are 'randbots'. That would make me downvote (if I had that privilege).

Reasonable people can disagree with you without being a 'bot'. I disagree with Rand Paul on a great number of issues, but I can also disagree with your position without being a Rand Paul supporter.

This is another reason why we can't have a substantive discussion on this issue; when someone jumps to name-calling, it's clear they don't want to discuss the principles of the argument.

I'm surprised that you're responding.

In your own words, "... there's no way for us to achieve mutual understanding ...". So, what gives?

Do you want to try to have a discussion after all?

Because, of course, I'm game. I've made no blanket declarations that you'll never be able to understand my point of view.

Not responding to the points you made regarding the CRA; responding to your specific actions.

Why are you still responding? What kind of rhetorical trick is this?

"I'm not going to talk to you, because there's no way you and I could ever see eye to eye. ..... except now I'm going to call out some part of your behavior I don't agree with."

I can't figure out what you're trying to accomplish; this is a new form of internet snark for me.

Downvoting should be reserved for those who are impairing discussion, not engaging in discussion that I (or in many cases, the groupthink) disagree with.

I think that's the most attractive part of his candidacy for me. I can't support someone who doesn't see that private individuals should be able to make the WRONG choice. That's what freedom is about. If you only have the freedom to make the "right" choice, then you have no freedom at all.

This applies to drugs (he's for allowing individuals to make their own choices here), civil rights act, supporting home schooling, owning guns, etc. he consistently favors freedom of choice. Out of all of the candidates, he's the only one who is even close to a libertarian.

Except by saying "people are free to make the WRONG choice," you're at the same time throwing entire populations under the bus, because...freedom!

The civil rights act didn't spring out of a desire for nanny staters to force us all to listen to Sting and eat kale three times a day. It came out of the fact that, decades after we abolished slavery here, entire regions of the country were filled with businesspeople who habitually discriminated against those former slaves, which couldn't have been good for business, but which they did because they were carrying around racist beliefs which guided their actions.

You could say "those business owners all made the WRONG choice" and, well, ok, but that doesn't really get us anywhere. It's also callous beyond belief to ignore the people that suffered as a result of there being no real consequence for that wrong choice.

    Based on analysis of multiple outside rankings,
    Paul is an average Republican member of Congress,
    meaning he will vote with the Republican Party on
    the majority of bills.

http://ballotpedia.org/Rand_Paul

That says absolutely nothing specific about what is actually being voted on or against.

That doesn't tell me if he votes with Congress on war policies, different budget issues, drug policy, incarceration policy, surveillance policy, et al.

Averages on something like that are almost entirely worthless.

You'd have to be specific on what he voted on, and why. Or what he voted against, and why.

As Bernie Sanders pointed out in an AMA the other day, he often has to vote against some thing (a smaller part of a bill) he is in favor of, because a bill contains a far bigger issue that needs voted against.

I'm not sure I agree. Rand has been pretty consistent with his libertarian(ish) based belief system.

He's not seriously running for president; he's running for his next book deal. And this is nothing but a Rand Paul fundraiser. A serious person, instead of being a showboating idiot, would realize fillibusters accomplish virtually nothing and instead do the serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause. Unfortunately, that neither makes good tv nor for good book deals.

viz his "evolution" -- ie complete flip flop -- about drones

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/rand-pauls-drone-evo...

> He's not seriously running for president; he's running for his next book deal. And this is nothing but a Rand Paul fundraiser. A serious person, instead of being a showboating idiot, would realize fillibusters accomplish virtually nothing and instead do the serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause. Unfortunately, that neither makes good tv nor for good book deals.

Of course, running for President has the same similarity of need with "Good TV" as trying to get good book deals does, so I'm not sure how anything he is currently doing is inconsistent with seriously running for President.

Effectively governing might be related to serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause, but effective governing and running for President are, unfortunately, not particularly related to each other.

Thumbsup - another cynic regarding the political theater. Thanks...

Correct link is https://floor.senate.gov/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&event_id=...

But it does give me a bad certificate warning.

Another option is C-SPAN, which is livestreaming it as well … http://www.c-span.org/networks/?channel=c-span-2

It seems like it would be a lot safer to elect Rand Paul as US President then it was President B. Obama

I'm not one of those "everything Obama does is wrong" people, but the man has been frightfully wrong on Police State issues, IMO, as well as persecution of whistle-blowers.

And that's not just it. Also on deportation, health care (written by the insurance companies), drone strikes, JSPO, freedom of expression [0] and the list goes on and on...

0 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2532528/

I am not one of those either, he has done some good, but he hasn't done anything that I was planning on him to do (thinking (un-)PATRIOT Act and Guantanamo for example).

How long has he been talking? How does this work, only if he stops can the process continue? Can he realistically achieve anything here?

only if he stops can the process continue?

That's the idea. So long as he has the floor, they can't vote. But he can only keep the floor so long as he keeps talking.

Can he realistically achieve anything here?

One person can't usually achieve more than a political statement, because one person can't usually talk for long enough to have a meaningful impact. Successful filibusters usually involve the cooperation of a number of people.

It'd be nice if Wyden joined him.

He just did.

If he and his friends can keep talking, they can keep going until cloture is invoked. That takes a couple of days and 60 senators. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture#Procedure for the exact procedure.

Since it isn't actually a filibuster, he has to yield the floor by 1PM Eastern tomorrow according to Senate procedure.

> How does this work, only if he stops can the process continue?

The senate isn't actually discussing or voting on the USA Freedom Act today (floor schedule is for discussions of an unrelated trade bill) and this discussion can be cut off tomorrow anyway, so this isn't technically a filibuster (yet).

There's a provision in the TPP (which is this 'unrelated trade bill' you speak of) that allows for extension of 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. It's not a filibuster; but it's definitely related to the TPP.

Wait, what, really? This is my number 1 thing about Congress that grinds my gears. Attach little bits of (significant) legislation, many times at the last minute, that have absolutely no relation to the bill's topic. At least this time Wyden and Rand Paul are doing something about it.

Sadly, this happens all the time. And it does it in really sneaky ways, things like "Strike paragraph 1a from USC 1234 that says 'June 30, 2015' and replace with 'June 30, 2019'". That way if you're searching through the bill, you not only need to know what those other bills are, but those specific paragraphs are; and there's no way from just reading a bill what the intent is.

It's like a really slow, broken, expensive, rigged version of Github.

Just as newspapers, radio and television, etc. have brought increased transparency and clarity to the inner-workings of government, likewise we should definitely be using even more recently developed tools like branching, revision histories, hyperlinks and various diffing algorithms to elucidate exactly what has been or is being proposed or adopted and by whom.

It should be a point of procedure that all bills be voted in page by page.

It should be a point of procedure that all bills do exactly one thing. Small and easily reviewable commits, please; software engineers learned this long ago.

Page-by-page of a single bill doesn't work, though; see also attempts at a "line-item veto". For the most obvious failure mode, consider a bill that replaces one tax with another and a veto on the removal of the old tax. Or consider a bill that adds a tax and a service funded by that tax, and a veto on the service but not the tax.

Or, maybe each congressperson casts a tri-state vote on each line item (bill must contain this, bill must not contain this, or no opinion). Congress then runs a SAT solver to determine if there is any combination of line items that pass the criteria given by a majority of congresspeople. If none exist, the bill fails. If multiple candidate bills succeed, each congressperson is allowed to nominate one candidate bill for consideration, and the legislative body then votes on the best candidate via approval voting.

Well, "one thing" isn't a coherent concept. That's the same problem that the line-item veto has.

It's a fuzzy ideal that you can try to stay close to, but it can't be a point of procedure because it has no actual definition.

For those who don't have Silverlight, you can play this link in mpv or VLC:

mms://207.7.154.95/G1075_002?wmcache=0

When did he start? How long is he expected to go for?

He started at 1:18pm EST I believe.

GO RAND

I found it here:

http://www.c-span.org/video/?326084-1/senator-rand-paul-rky-...

You GO, sir!

It would be nice if flagging had a generic selection as in stackexchange reasons for flagging, and users could vote to remove flags.

While there are certainly highly up-voted topics that deserve to go to the bottom for other reasons - I don't think this is one of them.

The title is misleading.

He isn't filibustering unless he goes past 1pm tomorrow. The fact that he has started now, rather than tomorrow at 1pm demonstrates that he isn't serious - it's just an insubstantial, disingenuous grab for attention.

I suppose you think the same thing about the other senators who are participating in the filibuster?

I didn't know there were any, but yes, whoever they are. The vote is tomorrow, this is stupid.

EDIT: Either this is stupid, or, if there are enough people to keep this up for an extended period, it's brilliant. But, I fear that that is a lot to hope for.

Your comment is misleading. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2015/may/20/rand-pau...

who's talking now?

It's Rand Paul & Ron Wyden who are talking right now.

Flagging legitimate threads by some members is the worst thing on HN. A thread can have a hundred upvotes but just a few flags will move it out from the front-page, effectively killing the discussion. Something has to be done about this, i.e. ignore flaggings once a thread gets 15 points and maybe alert the mods so they can make human decision on whether leave it or flag out.

I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.

At this point 65 users of HN are thinking otherwise.

edit: I didn't downvote you

That doesn't necessarily matter. It's well established by now that communities tend to upvote things they "like", not specifically things that belong. We know there's a large overlap between users of HN and Libertarians, which in itself is fine, but it doesn't mean this type of discussion should be occurring here.

If you don't give any merit to a majority vote, why should relevance be given to your singular opinion? Seems like a double standard honestly.

I think you're missing the point entirely. I'm not saying my opinion matters, I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website. I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.

The only fact here is that this is on the front page. However your opinion is that it shouldn't be. By the majority vote, you are wrong.

No, the rules state that this post should not be here.

You're conflating opinion and fact. Please stop. Majority vote does not dictate fact. HN is not a "anything and everything can be on the front page of the community votes it as such" site like Reddit is.

What rule is this violating? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is on-topic, which clearly enough "good hackers" do given the upvotes. The "most stories about politics" clearly doesn't say "all stories about politics", and this one has a lot of relevance to the tech world.

Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.

> Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.

I'm actually replying to a discussion started about flagging.

Weasel your way around the point all you like. Again, "What rule is this violating?" Specifically, please.

> Weasel your way around the point all you like

Please don't be personally rude on HN.

You're right that the rules do not exclude all politics, only most. GlickWick is right that upvotes alone do not determine HN's front page and about the weakness of the voting mechanism in general.

By complaining that the submission is inappropriate:

GlickWick: I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.

Which was in reply to a question about why the thread was being flagged. This was not an unprompted complaint about an inappropriate submission, this was a reply to a question.

You were still breaking the rules.

That is not true. If a user asks a question about the rules or the validity of a post/flagging, it's fine to discuss.

You don't like the fact that I'm criticizing this thread, which is fine, but stop trying to cherry-pick silly reasons to discredit what I'm saying. It's having the opposite effect of what you intended anyways.

Yes it is.

That is just your opinion. Rules are clear on this:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

As you can see, no additional caveats are listed. Therefore you, by responding to a comment which was about incorrect flagging, complained about inappropriate submissions, directly violated the rules.

Your last paragraph is basically just ad-hominem.

I'm ending this "discussion" here and will not be reading your inevitable further comments.

> I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website.

The applicable "rules" (actually, they are labeled "guidelines" [0] for good reason) can be viewed as either supporting or opposing it.

Specifically, one could view it as on-topic as falling within "anything that good hackers would find interesting." (Section 215 surveillance clearly has a special interest within the "hacker" culture, which is more plugged into it than the general population), or as probably off-topic because "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

> I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.

You are positing your interpretation of the application of rules which are fuzzy and inherently subjective as "fact", and where the only things in the rules that would support your conclusion are hedged with "most" or "probably". Your suggestion that the HN guidelines can reasonably be read in a way in which the topic here would be unequivocally, factually off-topic is an untenable argument.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- under "What to Submit".

IMHO this has a very direct impact on many internet start up (and not start up) businesses, as well as touches on the very important subject of legality and ethics of data collection and privacy by government as well as businesses.

Not only that, but HN will also usually post the very best possible links to big news stories that affect the HN audience as they break, which is a great feature of this website.

Whlie this may not be a huge story, it will likely be the talk of the day tomorrow.

The Patriot Act (and policy in general) can have a serious impact on software companies for sure.

However, this is a politically charged thread clearly aimed at drawing interest/support for an individual candidate. This is not supposed to be permitted on HN.

A thread discussing the potential issues caused by the Patriot Act is much more suitable for the front page than this.

Is that not what Paul is discussing on the floor? I mean, he's discussing the consequences of building backdoors right now.

It would be wise, I believe, if a discussion here on HN about this were to be informed by what the actual policy makers are saying/thinking.

Well it _is_ Rand Paul on the floor, how else would you like to phrase it?

I've got no political interest in this either way, since I'm not American. So consider it an outsiders view when I say that I think it's not unreasonable to mention the person who's taking the action.

HN has long been a bastion of Ron Paul fandom, going back as far as the founding of the board. So there's backstory here.

I don't support either political party, and the odds are great that I will not vote for Rand Paul.

However, as a technical person living in a democratic society I _am_ interested in the factors that change public policy, whether it's a RP filibuster, a Snowden leak, or a public move on policy by Wyden.

Perhaps if the tech community pulled together, somebody like Wyden could cross the aisle and make it a bipartisan filibuster. Whether you like either guy or either party or not is immaterial. The important thing is to try to get a little momentum here. The system is totally hosed, and we've got a long way to go to get it functioning again.

I agree that public policy that impacts software is very relevant to HN in general. However, this post is clearly meant to draw focus to supporting a political candidate specifically.

A thread about the cons of the renewal of the Patriot Act without the obvious Libertarian political candidate undertones would be much more fitting for the front page of HN.

> HN has long been a bastion of Ron Paul fandom, going back as far as the founding of the board.

I don't think that's accurate. Fewer than ten Ron Paul stories got much traction here in eight years, and most were either tied to more popular topics (SOPA, Snowden) or skeptical: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ron%20paul&sort=byPopularity&p...

Similarly, I doubt that the interest in the current post has much to do with partisan support for a candidate. Given the community's interests, it is more likely because of what he's talking about.

Apologies. It appears I remember this discussion with pg and paul -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76469 -- but not the fact that it was about reddit, not HN.

It certainly felt to me like during the 2008 election that there were RP stories all over HN. Wasn't the case though. Odd.

Yeah, this is a live stream of a political speech by a presidential candidate. I bet we wouldn't see any complaints about flagging if this was a flagged live stream of Hillary Clinton talking about immigration reform.

They (Sen. Wyden and Sen. Paul) are going over backdoors in encryption right now.

People and businesses have moved their data away from USA-based companies because of worries about privacy. The outcome of this bill will directly affect the ability of US tech companies to attract overseas customers.

As does discussion of San Francisco real estate prices.

Well this specific submission seems highly relevant, and so far it hasn't been flagged off the front page yet :)

OT: I agree there is a lot of downvoting of submissions and comments with a political slant. Anything that's phrased as being slightly partisan seems to be immediately downvoted by people from the other side of the political spectrum because they don't agree with it.

I have in the past flagged blatantly political articles that align perfectly with my own opinions, simply because they had no place on HN. There are better places for politics; see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ .

In this case, I think this article is relevant for the HN audience, because of the massive technology-related threat involved here.

That isn't far from the way things work now, and worked in the case of this thread.

I'd add: (1) the community doesn't necessarily agree about what's legitimate. I don't see any evidence that the flags on this one are less in good faith than the upvotes; (2) upvotes can't be the only factor determining HN's front page; that would make it consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion, and undermine the reason why readers come here in the first place.

Thanks for the reply, I'm sorry for the off-topic discussion, it's just that I witnessed several times how a thread is doing very well (like 50 points in 10 minutes), is in the first places on the FP, then in a minute it's on the bottom of the FP, in another minute it's on the third page. So I though it must be the flaggings. Is HN's ranking algorithm public?

If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)

There are also other mechanisms, such as vote-ring-detection, that can kill a topic as well.

(That is my current understanding anyway, I am not HN staff, and I am not saying whether I agree/disagree with any of these mechanisms, just stating them to help alleviate your confusion about why some topics may be doing very well and then suddenly die -- it's not always because of flagging)

> If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)

I've heard about this before and it still sounds crazy to me. I comment quite a bit, and almost never upvote topics. Using the standard "other people are like me" heuristic, I deduce that the normal operation of HN involves automatically killing all the topics.

It's more likely that other people are in fact nothing like me, but I'd like to understand this a bit better.

> (2) upvotes can't be the only factor determining HN's front page; that would make it consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion all day long

That seems like an awfully low expectation of the average HN reader IQ.

It's an empirical statement that has nothing to do with IQ.

Yeah, I sure hate when a vocal majority can override a clear majority. That's as bad as a filibuster. Oh wait...

Ugh...I can't stand this. Says Senator Lee, "we ask you, Mr. President." As though he bears full responsibility for all of this. Pathetic political grandstanding. As a reminder, which administration gave birth to the Patriot Act?

Point understood; however, when you do have the full capability to end something, and you don't, then you do have full responsibility for the present day situation.

In formal debate all remarks are supposed to be addressed to the president of the deliberative body. In this case "Mr. President" may well be the President of the Senate, not the President of the United States.

(Disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to listen to the stream yet, so I don't actually know whom Sen. Lee is addressing. In the top remark, Sen. Rand is most likely addressing the President of the Senate.)

Oh, lol. Never mind :)

Paul has been hitting his party for three hours on their support of surveillance and the patriot act.

As others have pointed out, "Mr. President" is not referring to the President of the United States, but of the Senate.

That said, anytime an extension to the Patriot Act crosses their desk, and the President of the United States doesn't veto it, they are bearing responsibility.

He seems like a bad man in many ways, but I'm glad he's working on doing the right thing in this case.

On what grounds is he a bad man? Do you have reasons aside from disagreeing with his politics?

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