You can tell how your congresscritter voted on the unsuccessful attempt to send back to to committee -- a good idea -- which failed 73-345: http://clerkweb.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.exe?year=2001&rollnumber=385 The 339-79 final roll call vote to approve the USA Act v2.0: http://clerkweb.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.exe?year=2001&rollnumber=386 Text of USA Act v2.0: http://www.house.gov/rules/sensen_028.pdf Background on debate: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02652.html --- http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47549,00.html House Endorses Snoop Bill By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Oct. 13, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Friday afternoon to hand unprecedented surveillance powers to police. Just hours after the Senate approved its version of the anti-terrorism bill, House legislators followed suit by voting 339-79 to ease limits on wiretapping and Internet monitoring. The big difference: The House attached an expiration date to the "USA Act" (PDF). The wiretap sections expire in December 2004 -- unless the president decides it is in the "national interest" to extend them until December 2006. During the five-hour debate, legislators complained that House leaders had forced a vote before anyone had a chance to review the 175-page bill. Early in the morning, top House Republicans met privately and abruptly agreed to use the Senate's anti-terrorism bill instead of a more moderate one that their colleagues had expected. Democrats were the most strident critics of that decision. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) said: "What we have today is an outrageous procedure: A bill, drafted by a handful of people in secret, comes to us without a committee review and immune to amendment." Frank was talking about a rule handed down from GOP leaders on Friday morning that banned any changes to the USA Act before the vote. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----