Source Control For Bills In Congress?

grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"

Should, yes...

[Junior J. Junior III]

This problem should really take care of itself. Just get a staffer to SQL-inject* the necessary clause as a rider for some boring budget stuff that no one will read all the way through, wait for Dubya to sign it, and then pop out and shout p0wned! Then they'll have to build that foolproof system, and we'll be all set.

*SQL = Staffer Quill Language

Sure, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm more concerned about their system of bug tracking.

Alternative 2

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Use source control for the whole of congress, not just the bills.

Oops, seem to have made some bad mistakes voting in some idiots in the last election? No problems just type "cvs update -D 2000-01-01 congress" and get back the congress you had back then.

Would PARALYZE government

[Creosote]

If all Congressional documents were stored in a Subversion [tigris.org] repository, Homeland Security would positively short-circuit trying to follow up on all of the suspicious emails from young DC residents saying things like "Hey, are you sure the latest pages are committed to Subversion yet?" and "Something just bombed in my sandbox, I'm going to have to nuke everything in sight and do an update!"

Re:Alternative 2

[ari_j]

Sounds good to me. Bill Clinton gave us something that few Republican presidents ever have: a Republican Congress [wikipedia.org]. I'm just in favor of as little party solidarity between the House, the Senate, and the Executive as possible. :P

alternatively...RTF(_)

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony of slashdot telling people to RTFB is black hole massive.

Re:I think I saw this.

[trimbo]

Wasn't this in the last episode of "24"?

No, no no, you're thinking of the one where Jack yelled into his cellphone "Chloe, There's NO TIME!", got shot and died, was brought back to life, saved the President, yelled "DAMMIT!", confonted the bad guy (a different high ranking government official bad guy than last week), pulled out his gun, pistol-whipped the high ranking government official and threatened to kill him with "TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW NOW!"

Re:I think I saw this.

[hazem]

DAMMIT! You just gave away the entire next season!

Brilliant Idea!

[thedji]

I can't wait to use this:

$ svn blame PATRIOT

Re: Very Simple To Do

[DumbSwede]

Has I understand it, it should be simple enough to just have somebody just slip this new Mandatory Read law in.

Anyone here at Slashdot know someone on the inside?

Re:Alternative 2

[Trailer Trash]

cvs? It sounds like someone's already using subversion...

I think I can see it now...

[Kadin2048]

The legal system on an index card, volume 1:

1) Don't be a twit.

Sincerely,
        Congress

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.

Re:Yes, and a debuggable malloc too.

[Myopic]

Yes, thankfully laws are more like a high-level scripting language, interpreted inside a sandbox which can heuristically decide how to handle situations where the program logic produces exceptions; we call that sandbox the Court system. In fact the heuristics employ a learning algorithm called stare decisis [wikipedia.org]. Because of stare decisis, the heuristics should become better and better over time, but some rogue hacker keeps hotpatching the system code, causing new exceptions; we call that hacker Congress.

Shall I go on? See our system code also interfaces with a legacy system called common law...

Re:alternatively...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh this hypocrisy. We are on slashdot after all, or did you RTFA?

Re:Read The Bills Act

[Asic Eng]

Shouldn't be too difficult to have a staffer slip that into a bill.

Re:I think I can see it now...

[PopeRatzo]

Instead, we get 2500 pages of byzantine gunk and a cover page that says:

BROUGHT TO YOU BY EXXON-MOBIL

Re:Alternative 2

[WWWWolf]

cvs? It sounds like someone's already using subversion...

To avoid all gits from using subversion and leading us to the darcs alleys of police state tactics, we should make the arch of laws as monotone as possible!

Re:alternatively...

[spike2131]

If this came to pass, I would foresee a huge market for Congressional Cliffs Notes.

Re:alternatively...

[Fordiman]

That's brilliant!

Add release dates. We're not running US Gov't 'Cunning Congress' until Jan 12, 2008. For the moment, we're running 'Artful Assembly'.

Re:alternatively...

[Copid]

Eating puppies is already perfectly legal in the United States, and always has been.

Legal, maybe. Mandatory? Not yet. I'll slip it past the House some day, though. Probably tacked on to an appropriations bill.

A solution

[dcam]

This is an interesting problem and after thinking about it for some time I've come up with a solution I think will work.

Kill all of the Bush family, put stakes in their hearts and bury them at crossroads. Burn down all their businesses and spread salt on their farms. Ditto for the Cheney family. You'd probably want to do the same for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz too just to be safe.

Wait, what was the question again?

(note for the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Police, Secret Service and President Bush: this is a joke)