Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » U.S. Congress

CISPA Passes Through The House

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 02:48:52 +0000

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has passed through the House Of Representatives with a 248-168 vote this afternoon. This is currently one of the most controversial bills. The bill is going to allow companies to share information about cybersecurity threats with one another and the U.S. government.

The bill was created by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich). Some of the amendments that were made into the bill restricts the use of information collected under CISPA and ensures that most of the collected data will be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Facebook and Microsoft believe that CISPA would allow businesses to share knowledge about cyberattacks, which would increase their ability to defend their networks. Opposition of the bill believe that this bill would allow companies to send personal information about users to the federal government without permission.

Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology opposed the bill dependent on the amendment process. The two amendments were blocked from debate, which lead the CDT to renew opposition.

Senior advisors at the White House were going to recommend President Obama not to sign the bill if it reaches his desk prior to being amended. Before reaching the White House, the bill must pass the Senate.

How Tumblr Is Combating The Stop Online Piracy Act

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:30:23 +0000

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith [R-TX] and 12 initial co-sponsors. This bill is intended to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online piracy of intellectual property.

Today the House Judiciary Committee had a hearing where a representative from Google represented opposition of the Act. Google opposes the Act because the bills would introduced website blocking at the DNS level causing censorship.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga sent a joint letter to Congress about the issue. Tumblr decided to go the extra mile to bring public attention towards the SOPA issue. When logging in to Tumblr, the stream of content has been replaced with censored blocks. At the top of the Dashboard, there is a banner that says “Congress is holding hearings today and will soon pass a bill empowering corporations to censor the Internet unless you tell them no.”

When clicking the banner, users will be prompted to enter their phone number and street address. Tumblr will then call you and give you talking points along with information about how to call your House Representative.

Users were averaging 3.6 calls per second earlier today. If you click on “next page,” the censor blocks go away.

[TechCrunch]

President Barack Obama Calling For $53 Billion 6-Year Plan To Spend On High-Speed Rail

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 06:59:39 +0000

President Barack Obama is calling for a 6-year $53 billion spending plan for high-speed rail. The initial $8 billion will be spent on a budge plan that the President is releasing on Monday. If Congress approves of the President’s plan, then the money would go towards developing trains that could go as high as 250MPH.

During the State of the Union address, President Obama said he wanted to give about 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. The Obama administration awarded $10 billion in federal grants for high-speed projects last year. This includes a $2.3 billion project to build an 800-mile-long, high-speed rail that connects Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area to L.A. and San Diego. About $1.25 billion will be spent on connecting Tampa, Florida to Orlando.

[Huffington Post]

Opening Day Of New Congress To Be Live-Streamed On Facebook

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:59:08 +0000

The new Congress will be live broadcasting their first meeting on Facebook. The announcement was made by incoming House Speaker John Boehner (pictured above). The live-stream will be at noon on tomorrow. To view the meeting, go to the “Pledge to America” Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pledgetoamerica) to see the GOP-controlled House. [CNN]

March 21, 2010: Health Care Reform Bill Passes House [16 Homepages Compared]

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:11:03 +0000

In the evening of March 21, 2010 – history was made. The health care bill was passed by the House of Representatives with a vote of 219-212. All of the 178 Republicans voted against it along with 34 Democrats. The bill passed the Senate this past December. The next step is that the bill will be passed to Obama to sign into law. Below are homepage screenshots of 16 major political websites as of right now (clicking the image enlarges them). It is interesting to see the reactions:

1. The Huffington Post

2. CNN

3. Drudge Report

4. FOX News

5. The Atlantic

6. Michelle Malkin

7. Michael Moore

8. Politico

9. The Washington Post

10. Memeorandum

11. MSNBC

12. Talking Points Memo

13. Wonkette

14. GOP.com

15. Democrats.org

16. Green Party

More Than One-Third of Congress Members Have A Twitter Account

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:37:05 +0000

Over one third of Congress members are using Twitter according to a report by the Los Angeles Times. Many of the members of Congress spent time on Twitter during President Obama’s first major televised speeches too. Over 200 of 535 members are on Twitter and most of them are Congress representatives. There are a less number of Senators on the micro-blogging service. There also seems to be a larger number of Republican representation than Democratic. TweetCongress.org does a good job of maintaining the list, stream, hash tags, photos, videos, and analytics of Congress members that use Twitter. I highly recommend checking them out too. [LAT]

LimeWire Chair Mark Gorton Tells Congress Not To Worry About Doc Sharing

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:01:38 +0000

LimeWire has sent a response (PDF from Wired.com) to Congress where he explains the steps that the P2P company is taking to prevent document sharing. This will prevent users from sharing government documents or inadvertently sharing tax return letters.

LimeWire had to add extra safeguards due to Congress re-opening an investigation against the company. Information regarding President Barack Obama’s helicopter “Marine One,” along with medical records and tax return information had leaked over the a P2P network recently.

“LimeWire 5 by default does not share documents even if a user purposely attempts to do so,” stated Gorton. “LimeWire will not allow it. In fact, LimeWire 5 [released in December] goes so far as to automatically un-share documents that a user may have shared using a 4.x version of LimeWire.”

A response was demanded from Gorton by The House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This is because Marine One data was downloaded by an IP address in Iran. Older versions of LimeWire by default asked if you would like to share folders containing audio, video, documents, and software.

[via Wired]