Parts of this thread got me all up on my
hind legs afraid of fascist Big Brother of 1984
with sound recorders hidden in
the walls of my bedroom, keystroke
grabbing on my computer, brainwave
recorders in stealth drones flying overhead at 100,000 feet capturing my thoughts, etc.

Yes, while my usual excuse has long been,
and apparently been confirmed, that the
US Federal Government is too incompetent to
do much to me, or really even know about me
(if they only knew what I really think of
them!), this thread got me worried again.

So, I just followed the link to the bill. There I got
the text version, in some small, light font
tough to read in Firefox on my screen and with the
warning that actually it was not accurate.

So I took the HTML version. Soon, much of the
text was off the right side my screen with
no horizontal scroll bars. Gee, is there
some CSS keyword to suppress the scroll bars?
My Web pages have both horizontal and vertical
scroll bars, and I entered nothing about
scroll bars and just took defaults.

So, I told Firefox to reduce screen magnification
until all the text characters fit my screen,
and then all I had
were characters about the size of two pixels each
with each line of text just some broken
horizontal line totally impossible to read.
Great work Congress: You found yet another
way to implement the now famous
Pelosi "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it"!

So, third try, I took the PDF version. Okay,
magnifying to 185%, I got something readable.

Looking at the table of contents for the really
deep, down, fascist dirty stuff, right away
(Adobe Acrobat has a search feature!), I found:

"H. R. 4681—5

SEC. 302. RESTRICTION ON CONDUCT OF INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES.

The authorization of appropriations by this Act shall not be
deemed to constitute authority for the conduct of any intelligence
activity which is not otherwise authorized by the Constitution or
the laws of the United States."

Okay, sounds not so bad. Maybe they just put that
in there so that it could be removed in
a conference committee with all that
really deep, dirty, fascist stuff elsewhere
now enabled? They are really smart enough
to be that tricky? Naaaaw ...! Congress?
The US Congress I have long watched? Naaaaw.

So, from that paragraph, apparently
this bill doesn't authorize even more
microphones in the walls of my
bedroom, more keystroke captures,
more grabbing of my PGP private
key (once I start using PGP),
my software to find some 50,000 or so
(don't want to be too exact here!)
decimal digit prime numbers, assuming
I don't encounter a prime gap, etc.!

Ah, I should not have said that and, instead,
should have let the NSA know that, really,
I've long been doing my super hush-hush
communications via the subspace radio flip phone
I got from Captain Kirk! Once he was parked
on my front lawn for three weeks, but
no one but me noticed because
he was using a Romulan cloaking device.

Maybe I'm too easily fooled, but, lazy
me, I'm back down off my hind legs now
no longer afraid of being subject to
"rectal feeding", etc.

I mean, were my thoughts that former
NSA head Michael Hayden looked too much
like Elmer Fudd a reason for me to
have 1 trillion exabytes of data kept
on me in some flat building covering 25% of, what is it,
Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Utah, somewhere
out there? So, was that the reason
HP worked out how to store one bit per
oxygen ion, just so that the NSA could
store what I really thought of them? Naaaaw!

Joking aside, the section I quoted does seem
to say that the bill doesn't make things
worse.