
EFF Wins National Security Letter Transparency Lawsuit - Elof
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/victory-eff-wins-national-security-letter-transparency-lawsuit
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mLuby
If a thing requires an eternal gag order, maybe we shouldn't be doing that
thing.

Kudos to EFF for casting light on the shadows.

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mjevans
Every law, and every sealed procedure, should have a (relatively) short sunset
clause built in. Before that clause triggers it should be reviewed and
extended if necessary.

In the case of NSLs, the proper legal way to do this would be to have a new
judge review the need for continued secrecy every couple years.

~~~
hirundo
> Every law, and every sealed procedure, should have a (relatively) short
> sunset clause built in.

Including the law that implements that policy? Including the Bill of Rights? A
law prohibiting murder?

~~~
Sir_Substance
>A law prohibiting murder?

Seems like the kind of thing that should have no trouble getting rubber-
stamped every few years.

Lets invert that though.

In 1615 Iceland passed a law stating that any Basque that set foot in the
Westfjords /must/ be killed. They got around to abolishing it in 2015.

Seems like the sort of thing that probably should have been revoked earlier,
no?

More generally, most countries legal codes are a god damn shitshow of strata
so dense it takes years to decades of study to understand them even a little.

As a result, rulings are arbitrary and hard to predict, citizens are
uninformed on the law and can be blindsided by vindictive police, new laws are
disproportionately hard to create due to conflict resolution with old laws
being required and parliaments enshrine old laws in tradition and are lothe to
amend them.

In general, it's the legal equivalent of that codebase that no one is willing
to change because no one remembers why things were implemented in the first
place.

Lets not pretend that adding expiry clauses to existing or new laws would lead
to a world where murder is legal. That'll get tracked pretty closely and
refreshed on the regular. I would expect two outcomes:

1\. A government department is created specifically for the purpose of
tracking and ranking upcoming law expiries by importance. We should probably
have something like this already.

2\. For the things society holds really dear, murder/rape/assault, taxes,
driving laws etc, I would expect to see a regular "refresh the core issues"
session at the start of every year. Essentially a formality where the
government can go "yep, torture is still bad, moving on".

However, I'd expect most of the random statutes against oral sex that are
still all across the US to expire pretty quickly with lawmakers by and large
not giving enough of a shit to refresh them, and that's /good/. Those laws
serve no meaningful purpose, their only use is as a weapon for corrupt police
to threaten average citizens with.

~~~
kardos
A yearly review of all of the laws would be labour intensive (read expensive).
Governments will simply say "reviewing all the laws means we have to raise
taxes to pay for the review, so instead we're going to do a blanket refresh on
all laws"

~~~
Sir_Substance
I'm envisioning the average sunset clause being more like 20 years. The annual
refresh would be "lets make sure this doesn't expire" done voluntarily for the
things that are really important that are currently going to expire in 19
years but everyone wants to reset their timer every year just in case.

I also don't really think it's that big a deal to ask the government to once a
year go "we all still think rape's pretty uncool? yep? great, all in favor of
amending the Consolidated Sexual Offenses Act 2019's expiry to be 2038, up
from 2037? Done! Moving on."

I imagine any politician that objected would get eviscerated in the public
eye. Should be a one-hour-a-year process to knock out all the key stuff,
particularly if everyone knows first sitting session of the year is the
refresh-the-core-values session.

~~~
kardos
That doesn't sound like a review, it sounds like busy work

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throw2016
Rule of law, democracy, free speech and dissent are at odds with secret
courts, secret processes and secret orders. A democracy is about transparency
and accountability which cannot happen in secret.

A democracy loses meaning with these kinds of laws, and the freedom act is a
classic example of Orwellian doublespeak.

There are obviously many people who care deeply about democracy but given how
long these activities have gone on and get passed without strong public push
back betrays a serious lack of organization in the public sphere. Unless a
million people are on the roads this won't stop.

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mleonhard
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