Wow a bill that isn't the exact opposite of what its name would imply. Admittedly I was not encouraged when I saw the phrase "USA Freedom".

Names of bills nowadays have little to do with their content. Maybe we should just get rid of names altogether and refer to them by SHA hashes of their content...

"Some moron amended bill f7eed03, now it's bill f5ba821. Do you know how much I had to tweak the language in order to generate a hash that looks like 'freedom'?"

Why not refer to the bill as H.R.3361.

For anyone interested, here is the bill in question: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3361

Hashes would make it a lot easier to detect sneaky last-minute changes.

At the same time, though, you lose the thread if you miss any "X is the next version of Y" update. Probably HR-number-hash would be ideal.

or maybe just 'version numbers'.

HR3361.4 HR3361.5 HR3361.6

etc

Easier for everyone to understand, not just geeks...

People get tempted to play shenanigans like reusing numbers.

datetime?

HR3361.20141106142502

almost as bad as hash, but immediately parseable and understood if a version was before or after something else.

Take a look at what New York City Council Member Ben Kallos is doing. He posts his legislation to GitHub so tracking changes is easy.

https://github.com/BenKallos/legislation

It's a unique approach to governing that I wish more would follow.

"Under the bill, Internet and telecommunications companies are allowed to report publicly an estimate of: (1) the number of FISA orders and NSLs received; (2) the number of such orders and NSLs complied with; and (3) the number of users or accounts on whom information was demanded under the orders and letters."

Is it just me, or the last one is a pretty big deal? Since before, "number of NSLs" could include a single letter asking for all the data on all users or really large sets of accounts. Of course, there is still always the typical loophole of "oh, it wasn't an NSL, it was data collected under a different program...", but otherwise this bill does seem to address a lot of the issues with NSA collection happening at completely secret rates, based on secret law interpreted by secret courts. Am I being too optimistic about it?