The Top Pieces of Legislation that Have %*@#ed Us Over

The other day I got into a discussion with a colleague of mine. Despite our better attempts, the conversation drifted into the realm of politics. Being of the mind that the more bigger and drastic programs and laws that are passed by our representatives in Washington, the more our freedoms are flaking away like dandruff from my scalp when I haven’t washed my hair for a couple of days. My colleague pressed me for examples of how we are any less free today than a generation ago. I quipped back with the smart ass demeanor of an eight year old that the Patriot Act, although justifiable for a brief window at its passing, was one of the offenders. He said I was crazy, I called him uninformed,  he retorted that I’m just jaded, I made some crude joke involving his mother and the New York Knicks, he idly threatened me with violence, I slapped him, he hit back, I ran off to blog about my feeling, which leads us to;

The Top Pieces of Legislation that Have $#%@ed Us Over.

October 2001 - Patriot Act (Bush)
This is an all-encompassing piece of legislation that Allows the Federal government to secretly search records and conduct roving wiretaps & raids in pursuit of alleged terrorists or their supporters. On top of the fact that 9/11 occurred over 10 years ago, it was only designed to be a temporary measure, it’s been extended up through 2015, and ‘tweaked’ so many times most people don’t even know what the heck is in it anymore. Here are a few highlights.

-The ability for government agencies to listen in on communications prior to a warrant being approved. Fourth Amendment WHAT!?!?
-Little distinction is made between enemy combatants and US citizens as the government is allowed to jail indefinitely without a trial.Fifth Amendment WHAT!?!?!
-The government may monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes. Sixth Amendment WHAT!?!?!

October 2011 - ACTA (multinational version of SOPA) - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

Remember the Black Out of Wikipedia earlier this year? The good news is that it did have an impact on bringing attention to the ridiculous standards of content. That withstanding, Obama signed this in 10/2011, characterizing it as a "executive agreement" and thus bypassing Congressional approval. Secrecy has made it difficult for members of the media and citizens and elected officials in participating countries to understand the implications of the agreement. Imagine an internet where if you say something bad about a company, all the company has to do is call up your ISP and BAM! Your blog or page is gone! And of course, trademark violations are much harder to verify than copyright violations, since they often hinge on complex, fact-intensive components. Meaning that ISPs are that much more likely to simply take complaints at face-value, leading to even more easy censorship of the Internet with nothing more than a claim of trademark violation. Just remember, slander is spoken, in print it’s liable.

January 2012 – NDAA – National Defense Authorization Act

This one make your head spin once you read up on it. This works in conjecture with bullet point 3 of the Patriot Act list above in that it states Citizens can be detained pretty much with the say so of the Executive branch for any reason at any time for any duration. This pretty much passed because without the funding appropriations attached to it the Defense Department would probably have been gutted pretty badly. When asked to defend Section 1031 of this provision, Senator Levin of Michigan stated in so many words that the case is overblown because the government wasn’t being forced to detain citizens, it just had the ability to, as requested by President Obama, forgive me by not taking comfort is him basically saying "Just because we can, doesn't mean we will."

March 2012 - NDRP - National Defense Resources Preparedness

This being put on paper is just downright scary. In 1950, the Korean War was kicking off and fears of another long term war with the USSR and other countries was looming. In order to enable the government to flip the switch from peacetime to wartime easier then had happened in 1940’s; the Defense Production Act was passed. The prominent thought was giving the government the capacity to change American production to fit the need of National Defense. In March, the President used powers granted to the executive branch in this law to expand it to include the confiscation of pretty much any personal property in the name of National Defense. The big question is, why now? In a time when an international war would either be fought overseas or with nukes, does the government need the capacity to allocate “…food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer…” –Section 201(a)(1)?

May 2012 - Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act

Intended for the noble cause of cracking down on Child Pornography by creating a database that includes your viewer history, your credit card information, your name, phone number, just about anything you may have put online at any. A quote from Lifehacker;

Consider the browser history of a single person over the course of a year, and then multiply that by 272,100,000. Then try to find 10,000 people in that data that have, at some point during that year, downloaded at least a single piece of child pornography. Finding a needle in a haystack is hard, but it gets to be pretty close to impossible when that haystack is the size of a country.

It begs the question that even with this power, it’s an impossible task to stay ahead of its intended purpose. Couple this with the investments companies like Facebook and Google have made toward self-monitoring while still having some disturbing stories break about Child Pornography and questions are raised to what the intended to be accomplished. Proactive investigations into these practices and a consideration for intent are generally considered a much more effective method of tracking these criminals down.

And last, but by NO means least.

CISPA - Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

Anyone in the tech industry should be aware of this piece of legislation. The 2 second explanation is this law allows Government & private entities share info, no warrants or subpoenas needed, the military will have access to private info, and companies immune from liability if they give info to government. This includes e-mails, texts, private site posts like Facebook. This is under the guise of, that’s right, fighting cyber terrorism. But, there are virtually no protections that this info can’t be used by the government for pretty much whatever they want. The silver lining here is that it is still on the floor of the Senate, but it already passed the House, using arguments like “Think about how many people could die if a cyber-terrorist attacked our air traffic control system and planes slammed into one another…” Sen. Rockefeller-WV
Well, with an airtight argument like that, why wouldn’t you want the government looking at your e-mails? <rolls eyes>

Put this all together, and you get a universe where almost all communication is monitored and the power of the state is limitless. By no means is this the entire list, but I'd propose that these bills alone pretty much make our government a pretty scary entity.