This is exactly what I’m talking about when I complain about closed-source legislation. The idea that something could get inserted into a bill, and nobody knows where it came from is completely absurd, particularly given the fact that there are *dozens* of software solutions available to prevent precisely that problem.

I firmly believe that legislation should be developed in public CVS/SVN repositories. Diffs could be clearly seen, and clearly attributed. Sure, almost nobody (statistically speaking) would follow the mailing list. But it would be there, and it would be archived, and there would be at least *some* accountability.

It would also increase the chances that changes like this could be caught before they were voted into law. And it would mean that long before a law was voted on, people would actually know what was in it. Instead, we have 1,000-page bills being voted into law which *NOBODY* has actually read. Think about that. We have laws on the books that nobody has read. If that doesn’t seem like a bit of a deviation from “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, then I’m misunderstanding the intent of that phrase.