The House GOP leadership pulled both FISA bills!

Instead, a four-month extension is attached to the NDAA – unless it gets removed. Dozens of civil rights and racial justice groups oppose extending FISA in the NDAA.

If you agree, call your Senators TODAY and with a simple ask: “DO NOT put 702 in the NDAA.”.

(The Congressional switchboard is at (202) 224-3121, or you can use the Senate directory to find their direct number and web contact form.)

yeah it’s really disappointing.

Totally agree that we need a good privacy bill – and if the proposed ADPPA consumer privacy moves forward again this year, we’ll need to get involved on that to push to strengthen it (because last year’s version had huge loopholes, including some that left LGBTQ+ people’s personal data at risk).

Yeah really. Think of the children!!!

It’s all true. WTF indeed. Here’s a letter from over 90 LGBTQ and human rights organizations with more detail. EFF’s article from in May, which is the one they linked to in the original article, has good info to.

Yeah that is really horrible too!

Not exactly. These bills cut across party lines and there’s a lot of desire to be able to pass something – “think of the children!” So if anything the overall gridlock makes it more likely that these bills will pass. So the dynamics that led to stopping the bills last year was a combination of activists making enough noise, and privacy and digital rights groups pressing the case in meetings with legislators (as well as some grassroots groups with good relationships with their legislators). As a result, that Dem leadership decided not to move the bills to the floor, so the vote never happened.

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there’s no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we’ll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here’s the Lemmy community I created, I’m using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there’s a single place to go for everything. [email protected]

Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this – https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/1197545 goes into more detail.

Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this. The ADPPA consumer privacy bill is likely to get reintroduced later this session; last year’s version had some good features but also a lot of weaknesses, and big tech companies and data brokes are pushing to further weaken it. So it’ll be a battle to strengthen and pass it.

But ADPPA doesn’t apply to government agencies (and that’s not likely to change) so bills like Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale are important complements!

No, bipartisan legislative support. It’s got bipartisan co-sponsorship both in the House (Warren Davidson is an R, Sara Jacobs is a D) and Senate (Rand Paul is an R, Ron Wyden is a D). And House Judiciary Committee just voted 30-0 to advance it.

Of course as you say we don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors, and there are also legislators in both parties who aren’ supportive, but there really is bipartisan support for this.

It’s a plausible theory but at the House Judiciary Committee everybody in both parties voted “yes”! We’ll see what happens as things move forward. In the Senate, Rand Paul is a co-sponsor and Mike Lee’s a likely yes vote, so it’s not likely to be straight party-line.

Thanks! Those are links to the version of the bill from last session; this year, the bill number in the House is HR 4639 and the text is at https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/hr-4639-bill-text.pdf

That EFF action alert is also from last session, and has the old bill number; they don’t have a new one up yet as far as I know. So I linked to Free Press’ action page, which is more up-to-date.

We’ll see. Cynicism is certainly justified – it’s very hard to pass a good privacy bill, and last year even though everybody supported it, it died in committee. On the other hand, it really does have bipartisan support, and there Congress is deadlocked in so many areas that they have an incentive to pass something.

Also, people I’ve talked to at EFF, ACLU, and Free Press all think that grassroots activism can help make a difference, and that right now is a key time … so it’s worth a try.

Thank you very much, that’s a great point – I’ll update the post to include it!

Not sure about the hashtags, good question. There will also be separate posts on Mastodon – here’s an early example, guaging awareness – and it’ll be interesting to see what gets traction where

Very good point, thanks much!

It used to be a slang term people trying to sound hip would use, but that was many decades ago – 1930s or 1950s I think.

Thanks!

Yeah, the current thinking is just to have the one magazine for now unless people have good reasons why that won’t work. Of course a lot depends on whether there are any active bugs federating between the two systems but I think right now things are copacetic.