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New Jersey Senate Candidate leads fight to repeal Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act
N.J. Rep. Rush Holt Wants to Kill the PATRIOT Act
The Jersey Congressman beat a supercomputer at Jeopardy! Can he outsmart the NSA?
A little over two years ago, New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt bested IBM supercomputer Watson in a round of Jeopardy!, $8,600 to the machine’s $6,200. Four other Congress members, along with 75-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings earlier that year, failed to even come close to matching Holt’s accomplishment in out-answering a supercomputer with more than four terabytes of information-packed storage at its disposal. This, perhaps, is partially why bumper stickers reading “My Congressman is a rocket scientist!” dot Central Jersey’s 12th Ward.
Since then, Holt has gone on to become a favorite among his Jersey constituents, most recently beating Newark Mayor Cory Booker in an unscientific straw poll in Sussex County regarding Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s as-yet-vacant Senate seat. Watson, meanwhile, has been probed extensively by the CIA and NSA in hopes of putting its advanced supercomputing power to recognize patterns to use on the troves of digital information the federal government has been collecting on pretty much everyone these past few years. Given the recent surveillance state revelations courtesy of Edward Snowden, Holt merely won a small battle — Watson and its compatriots are busy quietly winning the war.
With his July 11 announcement in the Asbury Park Press of intent to introduce legislation rescinding both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, it would seem that Holt is up for a more public rematch, so to speak. Invoking Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, Holt condemns the advancement of the NSA’s massive information-collecting scheme as one of those “institutions which have a tendency to destroy [our] civil and political rights.” The result, he concludes, has been an“industrial-scale surveillance and perpetual war mentality that has been foisted on the American people in the name of ‘national security.’” Unfortunately, though, in Holt’s own words he “got lucky” against Watson last time, and the odds appear to be even worse here against a much larger machine.
In the most pessimistic view, Holt’s attempts at repealing what amounts to the backbone of the prevailing surveillance state, not even yet filed, have no chance at passing. After all, the PATRIOT Act has been in effect for 12 years. President Obama, campaigning on a promise to not expand the surveillance powers of the federal government, re-approved both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment during his term in office. The NSA, having dumped more than $2 billion into its Utah Data Center, has opened the facility ahead of schedule, beating an initial estimate of September of this year. And, of course, there is an American citizen, his passport revoked, sitting in a Moscow airport waiting for temporary Russian asylum.
...
http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2013/07/19/new-jersey-reprush-holt-nsa-patriot-act-jeopardy/
Since then, Holt has gone on to become a favorite among his Jersey constituents, most recently beating Newark Mayor Cory Booker in an unscientific straw poll in Sussex County regarding Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s as-yet-vacant Senate seat. Watson, meanwhile, has been probed extensively by the CIA and NSA in hopes of putting its advanced supercomputing power to recognize patterns to use on the troves of digital information the federal government has been collecting on pretty much everyone these past few years. Given the recent surveillance state revelations courtesy of Edward Snowden, Holt merely won a small battle — Watson and its compatriots are busy quietly winning the war.
With his July 11 announcement in the Asbury Park Press of intent to introduce legislation rescinding both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, it would seem that Holt is up for a more public rematch, so to speak. Invoking Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, Holt condemns the advancement of the NSA’s massive information-collecting scheme as one of those “institutions which have a tendency to destroy [our] civil and political rights.” The result, he concludes, has been an“industrial-scale surveillance and perpetual war mentality that has been foisted on the American people in the name of ‘national security.’” Unfortunately, though, in Holt’s own words he “got lucky” against Watson last time, and the odds appear to be even worse here against a much larger machine.
In the most pessimistic view, Holt’s attempts at repealing what amounts to the backbone of the prevailing surveillance state, not even yet filed, have no chance at passing. After all, the PATRIOT Act has been in effect for 12 years. President Obama, campaigning on a promise to not expand the surveillance powers of the federal government, re-approved both the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment during his term in office. The NSA, having dumped more than $2 billion into its Utah Data Center, has opened the facility ahead of schedule, beating an initial estimate of September of this year. And, of course, there is an American citizen, his passport revoked, sitting in a Moscow airport waiting for temporary Russian asylum.
...
http://www.rushholt.com/issues/