Congress should be following Bruce Schneier's advice, and appoint a special independent prosecutor with full powers to see everything that's happening within NSA, and to be able to take confessions from NSA employees, without them fearing repercussions. The NSA needs to be reined it, and it needs a full audit.
If the guy who wrote the law says, "that is not what I meant" it is pretty clear that what congress voted for and what they got are two different things.
He's just one congressman and, author of the PATRIOT Act or not, he doesn't necessarily speak for all of Congress. And in any case he's just talking about one particular program (which, perhaps tellingly, is the only one there seems to be any serious debate in congress about).
> If the guy who wrote the law says, "that is not what I meant" it is pretty clear that what congress voted for and what they got are two different things.
And so when people warned him that the law he actually wrong might be used to create programs that actually happened, why didn't he reword the law to conform to what he says he meant?
Either way, doesn't matter one fig what Jim personally meant when he drafted the law; what does Congress think they passed is the different question.
Just like you shouldn't proofread your own writing, you shouldn't assume 535 legislators and a President came to the same meaning of your draft legislation as you had in mind when you drafted it.
Your proof-reading example doesn't fit this case. When you write something, the people who read it rarely also talk to you about it.
In congress, most bills are "lobbied" for by the authors - they go around talking to other members of congress to try to sell them on voting for it. In such a situation it absolutely matters what the author thinks the bill says because, if nothing else, it will have a large effect on how the bill is perceived when it is later read. In the specific case of the patriot act most members of congress did not even read it before voting on it. The only thing they had to go on is how it was presented by the author.
To be honest, Schneier's repeated insistence that the NSA has gone rogue from the rest of the government seems more than a little silly. Special prosecutors are for investigating illegal activity within the government, not just things Bruce Schneier doesn't like. The right way to change things would seem to be legislative. It's a lot less exciting, but more practical.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-only...