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Re:The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone by mgkimsal on Tuesday December 31, 2013 @08:29AM (#6990323)
"Going by how fast they passed the bill, and how few details were offered, you can't really blame most people for "not knowing"."

True, but perhaps someday we can learn to not advocate the passage of bills in such a short amount of time that representatives themselves do not have a chance to read or digest them, much less have debate about the specific contents. I say perhaps because I suspect we'll continue to see much more of this until there's some sort of mechanical change requiring a X day waiting period on any legislation introduced, and/or something requiring reps to sign a document with real penalties for perjury that they've read the damn things before voting on them.

Re:The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone by leephillips on Tuesday December 31, 2013 @09:11AM (#6990484)
This sounds great in principle, but it would turn the way congress does business upside down (maybe not a bad thing). I've heard stories about hundreds or thousands of pages being added to bills by staff just minutes before a vote. I suspect the way it works is that the legislators tell their staffs what they want the bills to do, rely on them, and have no interest in actually reading the result (and who can blame them - ever read legislation?).
Re:The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone by beagle3 on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @08:32AM (#6994953)
> I suspect the way it works is that the legislators tell their staffs what they want the bills to do

Many bills today (perhaps most) are not written by legislators and their staff, but rather by lobbyists. That might have been the case since forever (if the movie "The Aviator" is not too dramatized, this has been true in the 1930's as well)