Today the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has overcome another legislative hurdle heading towards passage in the House. The resolution pushing the bill forward passed 227-192 primarily along party lines with 8 Democrats crossing party lines to vote with the Republicans – Barber, Costa, Gutierrez, Schneider, Ruppersberger, McIntyre, Owens, and Matheson. Final vote [...]

Today I want to tell you three American stories. The first story is about one of the most celebrated American entrepreneurs of all time – Steve Jobs. When Jobs was a young adult he and his friend Steve Wozniak started a business centered around an innovative piece of technology. This piece of technology was called [...]

In a country full of stupid laws – written by corrupt politicians, refined by maniacal bureaucrats, and enforced by ruthless careerists – few are stupider than the current version of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On the surface it seems sensible, first passed in 1986 as a basic legal protection against unauthorized access of [...]

One post-election question up for debate is where the Republican Party would go to try and capture the areas of the electorate they cannot penetrate – particularly minorities and the youth vote. The watered-down version of the DREAM Act suggested a policy path for reaching some segments of the minority electorate. And for about 24 [...]

The Senate will vote on a cybersecurity bill that’s taken years to get to the floor. The House has already passed a bill known as CISPA, which raised the ire of privacy and technology activists. Even the White House threatened a veto. Now the Senate will get their turn, after a series of maneuvers designed [...]

Some Senate Democrats and even some Republicans are concerned about a controversial trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which critics have denounced as “NAFTA for Asia.” And they are making their opinions known to the Obama Administration about the relative secrecy under which the deal is being negotiated. As first reported by Zach Carter [...]

If we see military action in Iran in the next several months, you can trace part of the reason back to a redistricting quirk in the San Fernando Valley. Rep. Howard Berman basically ran the state’s redistricting maps, through his brother, when they were drawn by the legislature. But California voters passed an initiative setting [...]

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and [...]

PIPA will not survive next week. The latest whip count from Open Congress shows 45 Senators now opposed to the legislation, with 41 of those on the record in the media. That would be enough to stop the bill on the floor. Moreover, Mitch McConnell has asked Harry Reid to postpone the legislation, a pretty [...]

UPDATE: The update from this morning is that Harry Reid has postponed work on the bill. Go read that. We are very close to being able to predict a loss for the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, in next week’s cloture vote in the Senate. According to the Open Congress whip count, which is user-generated [...]

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the [...]