There's a lot to digest in this, but it all strikes me as a bit dystopian that these bills and laws are framed using "positive" language and terms. Seems like a healthy dose of wishful thinking to title this bill with the word "freedom," when its entire purpose wouldn't exist were the values of free expression upheld in the first place.
It's a hard problem. When coding, I have to come up with sufficiently descriptive names for all methods, all internal variables, all classes, all modules to fit those classes in. Sometimes I feel the urge to cheat, to give less than fully descriptive names for things.
Inevitably, this comes back to bite me when I go back to revise the code and find I can't immediately understand what the code is doing, and the first thing I find myself doing is renaming poorly-named constructs.
Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same, adding the burden of a hard-to-do-right, yet high-visibility responsibility to already-overworked staffers. I'm not surprised at all that the names for most bills are sappy and nondescript.
> Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same, adding the burden of a hard-to-do-right, yet high-visibility responsibility to already-overworked staffers. I'm not surprised at all that the names for most bills are sappy and nondescript.
The purpose of bill names, particularly ones on controversial issues, is not to be descriptive, it is to be sales tools. Its better to think of them as brand names than anything else.
>Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same...
You speak as if they're making an honest attempt to give the bills meaningful and accurate names. They want the former, not the latter. The PATRIOT Act, like the USA FREEDOM Act and many other bills, is purposefully misnomed in an attempt to hide what the bills does and to dissuade voting against it. "You wouldn't vote against patriots or freedom, would you?"
> You speak as if they're making an honest attempt to give the bills meaningful and accurate names.
Even if they did make an honest attempt, it wouldn't solve the problem. It would just increase their workload and open themselves up to political attacks for no real gain.
You don't get the bill you want, you get the bill you can gain support for. Getting any bill onto the floor takes Herculean effort. Honest naming would just hurt these bill's chances.
Not at all, a remotely descriptive name would be far easier to fabricate than a hideously contrived backronym. Naming something is nontrivial, as a developer I understand and appreciate that, but that's no excuse for creating misnomers with the express intent of manipulating other people.
> ... and open themselves up to political attacks for no real gain.
That logic would seem to work for any other unethical and/or unpleasant activity, "Everybody else is doing it and I would be disadvantaged if I didn't as well!"
> Honest naming would just hurt these bill's chances.
I highly doubt it, I'm fairly certain bill names are only to mislead the public as there's a pretty clean dichotomy between the two parties in the U.S. and their votes are usually a pretty standard party split.
> The PATRIOT Act [...] is purposefully misnomed in an attempt to hide what the bills does and to dissuade voting against it
When discussing the manipulative nature of the naming of the act in question, its perhaps useful to get the name right: it's not just the PATRIOT Act, its the USA PATRIOT Act, and USA PATRIOT isn't the full name, its an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
When coding, I have to come up with sufficiently descriptive names for all methods, all internal variables, all classes, all modules to fit those classes in. Sometimes I feel the urge to cheat, to give less than fully descriptive names for things.
But do you name your method that erases the whole system super_fun_happy_data_protection_enforcement_method()?
By this analogy it would be a protect_data_transport method written by an amateur that has a bunch of nasty race conditions and buffer overflows. You're assuming malice on the part of the politicians when there's really no reason to. Just because we know the implications of the law they passed doesn't mean they would.
Wasn't the original PATRIOT act written before Sept. 11, 2001? The frequency with which laws are named grossly inappropriately suggests something a bit more sinister than incompetence, even if it's not 100% malice.
Important CVEs get names like "Heartbleed" and "Shellshock" which are straightforward in their negativity, and reflect the severity of their underlying nature. I understand that we need a human readable/writable title for this bill, but putting "freedom" on this bill is polishing a turd of a policy (bulk collection). It obscures the actual values at stake with the consideration of this bill.
I like to play a game where I take the antonyms of each word in a bill's "marketing name", and see if that is a better fit for what the bill would do. It often is :)
Fine, let's do away with such tricks. But I am pretty sure when I ask my friends about their opinions on H.R.3162 and H.R.2048, I am going to get a lot of blank stares...
My friends? That's it's an Orwellian nightmare designed to legitimize encroachment in everyone's basic freedoms in the name of protecting the U.S. from a nebulous exaggerated threat.
The average American? Who knows?
But in any case, even the most political informed of my friends wouldn't know what H.R.3162 is without a Google search, nor would they remember the number even if news articles referred to it constantly that way. Section 215 is mentioned all the time and I still need to think every time whether it is the "keep a record of everyone you call" section, the "spy on your web browsing" section or the "force companies to secretly spy for the government" section. Short of being a lawyer I don't see how I would remember H.R.3162 better than "PATRIOT Act".
My problem with the PATRIOT Act and with this (USA Freedom Act) is that the name is completely uninformative and seems designed only to get acceptance from people who have no idea what it is. Why not call it the USA Less Spying Act?
I am guessing you are a glass is half empty kind of person. If every small progress was met with whining about naming nothing would ever get done and many would be fine with that because they are terminally committed to their "everything is getting worse narrative". It is practically the siren song of the Millenials. Do you want progress? Then encourage it.
This isn't a squabble about "naming" so much as an observation at intentional deception for the purposes of dodging debate... there isn't any real progress outlined in the bill being discussed anyway, it's just another cover for fewer freedoms and more totalitarianism.
Holy shit. EFF supports this bill. You would know that if you read the article. Do you think EFF is down with more totalitarianism? Maybe time to grow up.
It's possible he has a mature opinion on the matter which relates to the actual bill. Unlike your opinion, which seems to focus on ad hominem attacks on him, and ad verecundiam appeals to the EFF.
For instance, I am upset with the provision that gives immunity to any corporation that aids in government spying. I am also upset that this bill does not provide any new oversight apparatuses to the NSA, and does not remove any of the linguistic vagueness that created the loopholes they exploit in order to spy presently.
Yet, at the same time, I do not think 'the EFF is down with totalitarianism.' Perhaps it is your dichotomous perspective on support for this bill which is puerile.
While it might be a step in the right direction, bills designed to justify and extend surveillance programs (especially of its own citizens) under the pretense of terrorism and the new favorite cyber-security, nothing ever really changes.
You know the problem runs deep when they keep writing bills that basically say, "Remember that whole Constitution thing; yeah, they actually meant it."
