Interesting no one reported this. Either everyone missed this or it is still in place.

In their defense, there has been an awful lot going on.

The EFF reported on the expiration in the brief window when there were no authorizations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/yes-section-215-expire...

It's being reintroduced as the equally doublespeak "USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act":

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6172

I'd be interested to know if any behavior was changed during the few weeks that the permissions were not covered by either law.

To be fair, they do have to reauthorize the Freedom Unmitigated Bill for Appropriations Reconciliation Defense act every year or we're not allowed to leave our homes. Those F35-Liberty planes aren't going to pay for themselves.

this is the second backronym pun I've seen today, whats going on?

rate-limit edit:

I don't think Baader Meinhoff applies when I already know what a backcronym is and also have to extrapolate the first letter of all the words to get the joke.

Was there a show or pop culture thing that has people leaning towards this joke?

If anything, this could be a perceptive bias where I am forcing meaning into something, but a FUBAR Defense Act is exactly what that poster was going for. Who knows about the other one I saw earlier.

Likely just Baader–Meinhof phenomenon[1]. Interestingly, I think that phenomenon ignores the superset of when you actually had seen something multiple times before but for whatever reason started noticing the frequency more frequently (eg you’ve seen backronym’s before, but you’re happening but your brain has decided to notice them more because maybe you saw them in quicker succession than you’re used to).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

EFF reported on it.

https://eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-215-expired-year-r...

> "On March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law with a rich history of government overreach and abuse—expired due to its sunset clause. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)."

Short answer, its spirit lives on. Not to search very far, FinCEN did not stop contacting financial institutions for 314(a) compliance.

https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/314afactsh...

I'm on a huge greenfield application project at a major bank to collect and send patriot act mandated information to FinCEN. The Patriot act expiring did not even come up and I had no idea it expired. I thought it was a shoe-in for rubber stamping.

definitely interesting but certainly unsurprising

this suggests many of the processes that have become constituative due to patriot act, maybe are still occurring outside of a legal framework, it seems patriot act is still in the system even if not renewed