>>Shouldn't be too hard to do - as I say, I saw it done - and would actually make the government less obscure. A little measure of deobfuscation, IMO, is always welcome.
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>I'm doubt any obfuscation is intentional - clarity, even with the best of intentions, is not simple. As an example, if you look at the original International Organizations Immunities Act, you will see that it is mainly concerned with amendments neccessary to other pieces of legislation (Internal Revenue Code, Social Security Act, Immigration Act, Federal Insurance Contributions Act etc.) Your original suggestion would have required that the full text of all of those should also be modified? Your last suggestion - i.e. show just the changed section in both its original and modified form - might be sensible in this case but not in all. And having different approaches depending on the context of the change would be even more confusing....

Obfuscation is partly intentional, because it's habitual. It's like the doctors never saying you got something simple, they obfuscate it by using Latin.

I agree that having different approaches, case to case, is awful, and costs a lot - someone has to categorize each particular instance, decide which technique (or which law) applies etc etc, endless. Although the case to case approach is inherent to common law countries - most of the laws have their definitions of who do they apply to - like the NC law we mentioned here a year or two ago, which forbids day-to-day loans... to military personnel only. The laws should apply to all, with few exemptions, or they are no laws, but high level deals.

OTOH, yes, show the changed section - but be wise with the size of the section, i.e. repeat only as much as is needed for the reader to understand what the change means. Consider Patriot Act, which consists completely (or so I heard) of amends to hundreds of other laws. Imagine yourself as a legislator, voting on a text which changes thousands of pages of law - without seeing the effect your change would make? Not my idea of responsibility. Or, if the delegates are seeing the change and amended text - fine, so the work was already, done, publish it so. So what if it's thousands of pages? This is public, laws are no secret (though I've heard there are exceptions to this as well).

>>Again you made it funny, Q.E.D.
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>As you may have guessed, I have no training in helping people combat paranoia :-{

OK, who said this: "it's not a matter whether I'm paranoid, it's whether I'm paranoid enough."?
And "I may be paranoid, but they're still out to get me"?