I am not one of those people who cares about this issue specifically; they can have my metadata and hang themselves on it. I just hope McConnell's wrong about the level this will impact national security -- and I think he is. Time will tell.
They're using this same reform argument in the UK - or "modernization", is the keyword being used. British people naturally tend to be more trusting of our goverment, or so it seems at least. Strange since quite a significant number of us have to study 1984 in school.
As someone who does care about this a bit, I thought McConnell's quote in the AP article was interesting (mostly because I agree with him about not enhancing privacy protections, but for presumably opposite reasons): I'm worried that what interest there is in privacy protections now will flag because anything got passed. I figure that if this actually significantly impacted collection, there would have been a lot more push back against it. But this bill is a change that resulted from a more informed public. So that's good. "This is a step in the wrong direction," a frustrated McConnell said on the Senate floor ahead of the Senate's final vote to approve the House version, dubbed the USA Freedom Act. He said the legislation "does not enhance the privacy protections of American citizens. And it surely undermines American security by taking one more tool form our warfighters at exactly the wrong time."
I think the EFF has a pretty good analysis of the Freedom Act -- its strengths and limitations. For the most part, it's a step in the right direction. |they can have my metadata and hang themselves on it. Gotta say, I really don't like this attitude. It's a big pet-peeve of mine because to me it shows some negligent apathy. The whole idea of "go ahead through my info, I'm boring, I have nothing to hide" etc to me is narrow thinking. COINTELPRO is pretty much a documented fact at this point. The government was scrutinizing protest groups raging from student organizations to MLK himself. Surely, we can agree that spying on people like MLK was not a good thing. Why be apathetic about handing the government the legal ability to act similarly toward modern activists?
