US House To Vote On FISA Mass Surveillance Bill Today

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Sly... code it differently, make it harder for someone else to spot because they'll more than likely only be looking for HR bills, not S bill within the House of Representatives (the group that is supposed to be supporting and representing WE THE PEOPLE instead of treating us like plebs.)
 
No surprise. Republicans have always supported and loved warrantless government spying on its citizens when they're the ones doing it.
 
I wonder if they intentionally timed it to coincide with CES, when it would be crowded out of the tech headlines by all the latest announcements plus crap like AI IoT-enabled wine bottle spouts.
 


Hmmm.... it is possible.
 


If you want to believe that, Democrats had their chance to disembowel warrantless spying and didn't bother. Reality is Democrats are not any better, especially since they (Dems and Reps) are both two sides of the same coin.
 
"Land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy."
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I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but even will all these surveillance, USA is still the free-er country in the world.
 

I don't think it's necessarily a partisan issue, nor do I think it helps to get bogged down in partisan politics. What I think tends to happen is that intimidating people from the CIA and Pentagon take some lawmakers in a room and tell them some scary stories. Politicians don't like the idea of something Bad happening after they voted down some legislation that "could make us safer", so they easily take the vote that trades a small but real amount of liberty in order to avoid looking bad in front of their constituents. They tell themselves that it's making us safer, and probably think if it's really violating the constitution, then it'll eventually get struck down.

One problem is that they don't consider the cost of more surveillance, and there's nobody in the room to make the case against it. Another problem is that public perception of risk is famously skewed. People dramatically over-weight exotic and scary-sounding risks, while underestimating common risks. So, the public is largely to blame for both electing the clowns who write these bills & take these votes, and for continually getting so worked up about anything construed as terrorism.

Of course, the media doesn't help matters by following their natural incentive to report on unusual and scary things, which further skews public perception of the risks. In fairness, if reporting actually correlated with risk, most of the time would be taken up by reporting on traffic accidents and unhealthy lifestyle choices, with only a couple seconds devoted to terrorism.
 

I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but free is not a linear scale. For instance, Germany has much greater protections against surveillance on citizens, but more restrictions on speech.

Also, the thought that the US merely isn't winning the "race to the bottom" is hardly comforting. I think mrmez' point was probably that complacency is the enemy. It's of no help to a frog in a pot on the stove that his pot isn't yet as hot as some of the others'.
 
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