Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning.
"People deserve the right to a better process." Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, when, after 8:00 PM EST on Wednesday, he and his colleagues were handed a 2,232-page bill to review and approve for a floor vote by the next morning.
In the final pages of the bill—meant only to appropriate future government spending—lawmakers snuck in a separate piece of legislation that made no mention of funds, salaries, or budget cuts. Instead, this final, tacked-on piece of legislation will erode privacy protections around the globe.
[...] As we wrote before, the CLOUD Act is a far-reaching, privacy-upending piece of legislation that will:
- Enable foreign police to collect and wiretap people's communications from U.S. companies, without obtaining a U.S. warrant.
- Allow foreign nations to demand personal data stored in the United States, without prior review by a judge.
- Allow the U.S. president to enter "executive agreements" that empower police in foreign nations that have weaker privacy laws than the United States to seize data in the United States while ignoring U.S. privacy laws.
- Allow foreign police to collect someone's data without notifying them about it.
- Empower U.S. police to grab any data, regardless if it's a U.S. person's or not, no matter where it is stored.
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes
See also: As the CLOUD Act sneaks into the omnibus, big tech butts heads with privacy advocates
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:02AM (7 children)
Uh huh. What was I thinking? Of course you're absolutely right. The people are with you. So go ahead and start your insurgency. I'm sure that *millions* will immediately join you against the evil gub'mint.
I'd start with your local town hall. Kill the mayor and the city/town council, then round up and kill their male relatives and then gang rape the females. Let a few of the females go so they can warn others about how powerful and fearsome you are.
Then you can move on to the state capitol and do the same there. By the time that's done, you'll be so popular that the entire nation will rise up and decapitate the beast with many heads! No more government! No mayors or county executives, no town/city councils, state legislatures/governors.
Then you can turn your attention to Washington, DC (you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy), where those cowardly, traitorous scumbags will flee for their lives.
Only then can we have real liberty. Only then can we have the freedom we deserve. Right on! Death to representative government! Death to the Constitution! Death to the politicians! Death to...well, anyone we decide needs to die! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM!
And most of all, Death to the most evil of entities, the Homeowners Association! There is a special place in hell for them, after we torture them for months, then disembowel them alive and force them to eat their own guts.
I await your triumphant victory over the evil oppressors who stamp on our faces with the boots of unbridled government power.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:21AM (6 children)
I stopped reading pretty quickly; I hope you had fun writing that drivel.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:39AM (5 children)
What other conclusion could I draw from your statements?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:50AM (4 children)
You should have concluded that the 2nd Amendment is an important principle and an effective means by which to thwart an enormous, global, deep-pocketed drive to crush individual liberty for the benefit of a small group of elite.
Nobody is calling for an insurgency; the mere threat of the possibility of a violent uprising against the the global Authoritarians is quite effective enough, as evidenced by the endless push to disarm the populace—by the endless push to transfer strength from the weak (the individual) to the strong (the State).
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:08AM (3 children)
It has its uses. I have no issue with it myself.
There is where you're just embarrassing yourself. Your Glock or AR-15 is no match for a squad of regular army infantrymen. Not that anyone is sending such folks, because no one is trying to take your guns away.
All that normal, reasonable folks are saying is that we should be able to limit the ability of violent crazies to obtain firearms.
Have you considered stand up comedy? I nearly busted a gut reading that.
No one is trying to disarm the populace. Rather, reasonable people want to keep guns out of the hands of folks who are *likely* to commit mass murder.
Any steps taken won't stop all the crazies, but if we can keep folks like the Parkland high school shooter from *legally* obtaining semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines (who needs high-capacity magazines? For what purpose?), we can reduce that threat.
Has the local sheriff's office, police, ATF or other gub'mint agency come by your house to take your guns? Have they come by to inspect them? Has any LEO ever (except in an adversarial situation) even asked if you have/own guns?
I'm betting the answer is "no." So who are these "global authoritarians" who are so aggressively trying to take your weapons? They don't exist, except in your mind.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:14AM (1 child)
Just take the guns away from the Government.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:19AM
I have no issue with forbidding "law enforcement officers" from carrying guns all the time. In fact, I think it would be a very good thing.
It would encourage the police to use force only as the last resort rather than the first, as happens far too often.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:20PM
Don't fool yourself. If you don't think anyone wants to disarm the populace, you've likely never come to Massachusetts.
But it is always nice to be reminded that at least there's enough people in the rest of the country to keep these lunatics from having too much power. Now, if only the SCOTUS would remind them that it's unconstitutional to require licensure to simply OWN a SHOTGUN (not talking transporting, hunting, or anything else other than having one in one's home for protection), we'd almost be doing okay.
There are some safeguards we should probably have to address mass shootings, though I'd rather see the root of that problem addressed than merely tackling the symptoms. In the meantime, there's absolutely such a thing as going too far, and it does get done in some places. For another well known example, see Chicago's old hand gun ban that did finally get overturned by the SCOTUS.