congress

Earlier this week, we explored the political assault on Google bubbling up from an unlikely mix of companies and consumer groups--and noted none of its top executives had paid any recent personal visits to Capitol Hill in support of their company's practices.

Well, we may have spoken too soon.

On Thursday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt descended on Capitol Hill for meetings with a number of members from both chambers, the firm's Public Policy Blog reports. The list of seemingly wide-open topics included "health care, patent reform, immigration, privacy and consumer issues."

So what about the … Read more

Judging from recent events in Washington concerning peer-to-peer file-sharing software and allegations that it threatens national security, there's some doubt about Congressional competency in creating sound policy governing a technology they may not thoroughly understand. Following up on the scads of readers who responded to recent coverage of Senators seeming to blame security problems on P2P sites, CNET News.com editors decided it was time to get down to business and clarify the issue at hand, in case it wasn't plain enough: Is Congress really clueless about the relationship between P2P and national security?

CNET News.com writers Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh Wednesday produced a piece of Capitol Hill reporting whose central subject is a recent legislative gambit regarding peer-to-peer file-sharing applications.

"Politicians call peer-to-peer networks a 'national security threat' because they enable federal employees to accidentally share sensitive or classified documents."

The subject has been burning up blogwaves and comments sections all over the Web.

The general consensus among network geeks, security pundits and other observers seems to be that the U.S. Government should be way more cautious in their internal security practices and not try to pin the … Read more

WASHINGTON--Congress is already well on its way to bestowing new powers on an internal White House panel that's supposed to judge whether Bush administration programs like the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance regime pose privacy and civil liberties concerns.

But the board's chairman on Tuesday had one message for the politicians backing the new authority: thanks, but no thanks.

Civil liberties advocates have long dogged the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board--which was created within the White House by Congress in 2004 at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission but didn't meet until 2006--for … Read more

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate leadership, has opened the virtual doors of law writing to Internet citizens. This is a compelling idea as the Internet continues to find ways to democratize information and support the flattening of the political process in our country.

The senator writes in OpenLeft.com, the new project hosting this:

"Today I'm writing to invite you to participate in an experiment--an interactive approach to drafting legislation on one of the most significant public policy questions today: What should be America's national broadband strategy?"… Read more

Updated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has withdrawn anti-file sharing legislation that had drawn yowls of protest from universities this week.

Reid, without explanation, on Monday nixed his own amendment that would have required colleges and universities--in exchange for federal funding--to use technology to "prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

Instead, Reid replaced it with a diluted version merely instructing higher ed institutions to advise their students not to commit copyright infringement and tell students what actions they're taking to prevent "unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material" through campus networks. The revised … Read more

It's time to add onetime presidential hopeful John Kerry to the long list of politicians who have scant understanding of free speech and the Internet.

Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a press release on Friday that he wants to make it "illegal to transmit images of dog fighting, to run websites that cater to dog fighting."

Such a law could, of course, imperil news organizations and animal rights Web sites that "transmit images of dog fighting" as part of reporting on or, alternatively, condemning the practice. It could even make this article, which includes … Read more

In a move that high-tech companies have been advocating for years, a House of Representatives panel on Wednesday unanimously approved a controversial patent bill that high-tech firms argue is critical to correcting perceived flaws in the U.S. system.

The Patent Reform Act of 2007 cleared the House Judiciary Committee with a handful of amendments, paving the way for its consideration by the full House. Supporters say its provisions would help curb litigation costs, weed out bad patents and restore balance to a system they argue tilts too heavily toward the rights of patent holders.

"Our objective in passing … Read more

A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday approved a bill that backers say will help fix the problem of Social Security number misuse and identity theft.

By a vote of 41 to 0, the House Ways and Means Committee voted for a 56-page bill that the panel's chairman, New York Democrat Michael McNulty, said would "stop giving access to our Social Security number to every Tom, Dick or Harry who seeks it."

The bill, called the Social Security Number Privacy and Identity Theft Protection Act, was introduced earlier this week.

Some of its major components:

• A … Read more