Stop HR4681, aka. Stop 1984

The internet certainly is on fire, isn't it?  Here's another head turner for Americlaps: the NSA & friends tried to sneak in a financial bill to congress that hid a clause that allows unrestricted access for them to snoop anything they deem degenerate, known as "HR4681". For example:

>shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications

Covered communication being defined as...

>communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage.

>Meaning all your phone calls, emails, chat logs and even documents in cloud storage are free rain with no warrants, over-site or accountability. And all this info can be shared freely between all federal and local government agencies including local police. This is the worst law that has ever been passed by congress in our entire history. There is almost no chance Obama will veto it, our only hope is the courts save us and deem this unconstitutional but they have been happy to fuck us over recently. The whole cavity in this law is it does not authorize the collection, NSA already does that it only authorizes the sharing of the data, the fourth amendment doesn't mention sharing of documents once obtained. We are fucked.

Full text can be found here, under section #309: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4681

Voting of the initial bill: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll271.xml

For those that want to change this, see who your representative is, and call them up to get it through their thick skulls: http://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup

For those out of the US (this unleashes the NSA worldwide, btw), you can still show awareness in this petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/protect-our-privacy-and-please...

This has been sitting for a while this week, and was only caught by Justin Amash - if the representatives' votes are unchanged, this goes straight to Obama, where fate will be out of the people's hands.

Good god this is frightening. The good news is my local Representative (Republican at that) was one of the few 'nay' votes. The bad news is there's not enough of them.

 

Section 309 in whole, my emphasis added

 SEC. 309. PROCEDURES FOR THE RETENTION OF INCIDENTALLY ACQUIRED 
      COMMUNICATIONS.
    (a) Definitions.--In this section:
        (1) Covered communication.--The term ``covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage.
        (2) Head of an element of the intelligence community.--The term 
    ``head of an element of the intelligence community'' means, as 
    appropriate--
            (A) the head of an element of the intelligence community; 
        or
            (B) the head of the department or agency containing such 
        element.
        (3) United states person.--The term ``United States person'' 
    has the meaning given that term in section 101 of the Foreign 
    Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801).
    (b) Procedures for Covered Communications.--
        (1) Requirement to adopt.--Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act each head of an element of the intelligence community shall adopt procedures approved by the Attorney General for such element that ensure compliance with the requirements of paragraph (3).
        (2) Coordination and approval.--The procedures required by 
    paragraph (1) shall be--
            (A) prepared in coordination with the Director of National 
        Intelligence; and
            (B) approved by the Attorney General prior to issuance.
        (3) Procedures.-- (A) Application.--The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall apply to any intelligence collection activity not otherwise authorized by court order (including an order or 
        certification issued by a court established under subsection 
        (a) or (b) of section 103 of the Foreign Intelligence 
        Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803)), subpoena, or 
        similar legal process that is reasonably anticipated to result 
        in the acquisition of a covered communication to or from a 
        United States person and shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B).
            (B) Limitation on retention.--A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless--
                (i) the communication has been affirmatively 
            determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign 
            intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to 
            understand or assess foreign intelligence or 
            counterintelligence;
                (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to 
            constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law 
            enforcement agency;
                (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; [LOL WUT??????]
                (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; 
                (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; [so they need to retain intelligence for 5 years that is an 'imminent threat' to human life?]
                (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or 
            compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery 
            obligation, in which case access to information retained 
            for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be 
            reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an 
            annual basis; or
                (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is 
            approved by the head of the element of the intelligence 
            community responsible for such retention, based on a 
            determination that retention is necessary to protect the 
            national security of the United States, in which case the 
            head of such element shall provide to the congressional 
            intelligence committees a written certification 
            describing--

                    (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to 
                protect the national security of the United States;
                    (II) the duration for which the head of the element 
                is authorizing retention;
                    (III) the particular information to be retained; 
                and
                    (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence 
                community is taking to protect the privacy interests of 
                United States persons or persons located inside the 
                United States.

 The thing is that's just for retaining this information for greater than 5 years. Basically it says they can collect EVERYTHING for up to 5 years. WTF.

Thanks for sharing. I can't believe I have not seen or heard a peep about this. This is why I love this forum.

Thank 8chan, they were the ones sitting on this goose egg for 4 days. They urged a twitter campaign and made several infographs to spread around, but if you've seen the petition, we still have less than 10k signatures. Not a good sign for proof-of-concept.

https://8chan.co/gamergate/res/68283.html

https://8chan.co/b/res/1043895.html

https://8chan.co/news+/res/620.html

https://8chan.co/cyber/res/6611.html

Every 8chan user heard about this, even /v/ and /pol/ had it stickied for a while, only reason you haven't heard it on 4chan is because /pol/'s booty was plundered so hard by moot shortly before the shitstorm, and reddit is, well, reddit. Maybe a couple threads on r/KotakuInAction, but that's it.

One thing is they're already doing this but they're going to make it-erm "legal" to do now