A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation that would delay the end of the bulk collection of phone metadata by the National Security Agency to Jan. 31, 2017, in the wake of security concerns after the terror attacks last Friday in Paris.
Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, believes that the termination of the program, scheduled for month-end under the USA Freedom Act, "takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical one that will be less effective."
The transition will happen in less than two weeks, at a time when the threat level for the U.S. is "incredibly high," he said Tuesday.
The obvious answer to doing something that doesn't work is to do more of that something.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:08PM
> Because export restrictions on strong encryption totally worked back in the day?
There's rumbles about trying to bring that back too - or to backdoor all encryption because that will really work - despite current (though admittedly still a bit sketchy) evidence pointing to the Paris attackers doing most of their communications in the clear, without so much as ROT13 to protect them.
Bad ideas don't die, they just wait for the next tragedy.