An attempt to reauthorize Section 702, the so-called crown jewel of US spy powers, failed for a third time in the House of Representatives after former president Donald Trump criticized the law.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/15183880

Well it wasn’t just Trump loyalists; it was 19 Republicans in the Freedom Caucus (who are indeed Trump loyalists) and almost all the Democrats voting agains bringing the current bill to the floor. Now what?

“Congressional sources tell WIRED they have no idea what the next steps will be.”

Oh.

  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    11·
    8 months ago

    I don’t think anyone needs more evidence that Trump is a crook; I think the concern is that Trump is enough in cahoots with for-real foreign adversaries who are at odds with FISA-authorized surveillance (as it makes real operational problems for them), and they might be telling him how badly he needs to kill this to weaken it. He usually doesn’t get anywhere deep into policy on this kind of stuff. Unless someone smarter than him is telling him what’s important, he just talks about windmills and toilets and Crooked Hillary and how the election was stolen.

    I honestly don’t know whether it’s that, or whether he’s having an unexpected interest in policy details just because it came to his attention somehow and he knows the US national security apparatus is bad because it was mean to him. It could be either one.

    • neatchee@lemmy.world
      81·
      8 months ago

      “Cool story. Still murder.” I have really serious problems with how FISA has been used in the past. I usually could go either way on authorizing state surveillance but it has been abused too much for me to be comfortable keeping it around in its current form

      As far as trump is concerned, even a broken clock is right twice a day

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
        4·
        8 months ago

        Yeah. And it could be both – it could be both a useful tool for law enforcement to wiretap foreign adversaries that are trying to elect Trump or do something similarly awful, and also a convenient loophole if they want to track protest organizations where one of the members sometimes calls his brother who lives in France or whatever. Russia/Trump would only care about the first, and someone who’s chiefly concerned about civil liberties in the US would only really care (or even be aware of, by definition) about the second.