Comment by electric_muse

The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...

But then they say "The first act reauthorized all but two Title II provisions. Two sections were changed to sunset on December 31, 2009"

But the first act was passed in 2005, and so it's unclear whether it reauthorized provisions only until 2006 or a longer term.

I looked into this a little more, and these were the final two provisions of the Patriot Act, so the did law expire.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.

The wording is confusing.

Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.

For nearly quarter of a century.

Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.

It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.

The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.

I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.

> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.

It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.

When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.

Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.

My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?

I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?

  > a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.

Case in point:

Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.

Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.

Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.

Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.

We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?

No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.

This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.

The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.

> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.

This is such a sham though.

You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.

Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.

Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.

> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc

Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.

But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.

It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.

> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.

Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:

Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.

People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.

It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.

Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.

The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu

"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden

Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?

You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"

So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?

Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.

Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation.

If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.

If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.

That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.

Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.

  > that's cash

Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.

Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.

Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.

Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.

To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.

The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.

It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.

I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.

I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.

The wording was that the Patriot Act would not be temporary, and it will not be receded, and in fact would be strengthened.

He can pick up his million dollars at the end of eternity

> Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.

I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.

> The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault

Well you know, they are the ones constantly comparing Republicans to Hitler, the Nazis, calling them fascists, making direct claims that electing Trump would lead to the end of democracy, having "punch Nazis" be a rallying cry, and so on. Not really crazy to see how that might influence people to think that killing Trump or even a conservative podcaster is necessary to save the world.

There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.

An interesting what-if scenario; but, let's assume Sanders won and all else remained largely the same as it has:

Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised. Knowing our limitation that everything else has stayed largely the same as history since, this wouldn't be the case. The hypothetical administration's attempts at sweeping reforms, such as healthcare and climate regulation, would very likely be significantly curtailed or overturned by courts or constrained by constitutional limits on separation. The GOP, even though they actively outspend Democrats when in power, obstruct via financial limits each and every Democratic-led effort while crowing about expansion of debt incursion; as such, spending on Bernie's proposed initiatives would raise concerns about deficits, inflation, and taxation. Even with tax increases, there would be pushback from wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists.

Basically, nothing would change in any significant way except, perhaps, the SCOTUS would not be outright overturning DECADES of 'settled law' in favor of an absurd view of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.

Many people will imagine things. However history constantly suggests that most of those are very different from the reality that results.

The good news is when your candidate loses you don't find out the evil they really do and you can say it is not your fault. The bad news is you don't find out what is bad about the things you think are good.

Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.

He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.

Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.

Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.

I'm guessing similar to the Obama administration. E.g. he couldn't get proper healthcare reform passed.

He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place.

But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.

[dead]

There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.

popular means whatever Hollywood decided to like

this is the end of celebrity culture at the hands of social media.

monarchies are the central core of celebrity cultism, look at France today; surrounded by the Monarchies and up in flames.

There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.

you don't make improvements to a house, adorn it with gold all over, make 200m improvements if you have the intention of leaving.

behaviour says more than words

Why not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...

One less thing to worry about

any democratic candidate?

At the same time the legislature snuck in turning the US into a police state into the 2012 Defense spending bill. So while SOPA and PIPA was defeated, people did not pay “enough” attention in the end.

If we had that kind of reaction to making your internet worse as we did to making our rights worse we would be better off.

This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.

Ideologically we're probably quite aligned. However I disagree with you. Having traveled a lot of the USA, I've found Americans to be surprisingly much less racist than I expected.

Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.

Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.

Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.

> Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.

That sounds like a very radical statement. How are we to decide on these "fundamental freedoms" without putting them through the same democratic process we usually employ? Are we to ask the king for his opinions on how our democracy must be restricted? Are we to ask you? If the democratically elected officials "feat the public" what are they fearful of? Not getting elected? Are you implying the democratically elected officials shouldn't do what the public want?

Additionally, do these "fundamental freedoms" include the right to transact with any counterpart at any point? I have not found that right in any established human rights framework.