What a ridiculous clickbait headline from the EFF. The truth is buried 7 paragraphs down:
The amendments announced on Thursday will be formally included into the bill on Monday, in a committee meeting that was not planned to include a vote. The Lords will then have two more minor opportunities to debate the content of the bill before it is passed onto the elected House of Commons in its entirety for what is expected to be a simple up/down vote. Britain's members of parliament are currently distracted as they prepare for nationwide elections in May, which means it is highly likely that a major anti-terrorism bill like this will collect enough votes to pass.
If it's anything like the US system, the time to stop an amendment is before it becomes part of a Christmas-tree bill, rather than after. So I don't think this is burying the truth at all.
Why's that more alarming? "72 hours to stop the bill" is pretty alarming, but with the bill still in committee, there's still a a little longer for it to go yet. The third reading is scheduled in a fortnight.
Hi, Danny O'Brien from EFF, and the person who wrote the headline and the paragraph.
I'd say the headline is actually in this case more accurate, but I didn't really want to add another six paragraphs of insider politics to the blog post to explain why. Long-form HN comment readers are a different matter, of course, so here goes:
It's true there are three more readings in the Lords, but my understanding (and recollection from when I worked more on HoP issues) is that the majority of these are pretty perfunctory, especially with a bill like this which has a high government priority to get through before the end of the current Parliament. Essentially, once these amendments hitch a ride on the process, it will get steadily more difficult to unmoor them. They will cease to become amendments, and more a small part of a very important bill.
Rejecting amendments like this at any step is an unusual act, especially when they are promoted by peers with apparent strong domain knowledge. It's absolutely impossible if you don't actually have time to debate the details.
So what you have to do is to alert politicians to a procedural violation instead. Few politicians are experts on Internet surveillance, so wil not feel confident to go up against domain experts; all of them are experts, however, on the exact moments they might be being bypassed or steamrollered over. That's because they're politicians and human beings, and being sensitive to possible cheating among your peers (pun not intended) is built into their psychology.
That moment of steamrollering is on Monday. If the amendments go through on the nod on Monday without a fuss, then the moment will be lost where we can argue about a violation of procedure. After that, we will have to argue about the substance of the bill. And there is no parliamentary time allotted for arguments of substance, because the whole point of inserting these 18 pages of amendments so quickly is to bypass that debate.
TLDR; yes, there are other opportunities. No, we're really not confident at all that we could stop the bill at those points. The best and possibly only probable chance to stop the Snooper's Charter is on Monday.
(For those wondering how you even begin to make these calculations: EFF works with the Open Rights Group, Britain's own awesome digital rights group. ORG's advisory bench includes MPs and peers, so they walk us both through the probabilities. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/advisory )
Just to add, fellow HNers in the UK might want to support the Open Rights Group; Jim Killock gave a useful overview of their activities on a recent Linux Outlaws podcast [1] - motivated me to support the Open Rights Group [2].
I don't agree with the narrow definition of clickbait. I think any sensationalism in headline, for sake of gaining clicks and attention, can be considered clickbait. I saw Wikipedia also proclaims the same relation to ad revenue; I just disagree that it's the only interpretation as people have been using the term more broadly for a while now even if it's origins are of the online advertising world.
In this case, I wouldn't categorize the headline as sensationalist though, considering that it's accurate and the next 72 hours are actually important.
The amendments announced on Thursday will be formally included into the bill on Monday, in a committee meeting that was not planned to include a vote. The Lords will then have two more minor opportunities to debate the content of the bill before it is passed onto the elected House of Commons in its entirety for what is expected to be a simple up/down vote. Britain's members of parliament are currently distracted as they prepare for nationwide elections in May, which means it is highly likely that a major anti-terrorism bill like this will collect enough votes to pass.