alt Hacker NewsThey only need to succeed one time. People are generally preoccupied with a lot of other things right now, so maybe this is their lucky shot…
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They actually did succeed once, with the data retention directive. That got annulled by the CoJEU.
cough Patriot Act cough
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.
What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.