What is Congress browsing?
govtrack.us
govtrack.us
To go the next step, govtrack could adopt some proper ad-based cookies to track users across multiple sites. But that would cost money. I'm surprised Larry Flint, and anyone else looking for dirt on politicians, haven't done this already.
The assumption behind this effort seems to be a sort of retribution-based. So there's a couple things wrong with that - staff are the only ones using computers, not Members, and it doesn't bother us too much. We expect none of our browsing history to be private and are used to having every part of our jobs as public information - see Legistorm.
Members are not going to care if their staff's web browsing information is public - even if it did go beyond just who is visiting govtrack and when. They'd fire the staff they needed to without hesitation and still show no remorse for their vote.
This is without even mentioning that only Republican offices voted in support of the rollback of the FCC regulation.
It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. Having privacy groups come meet with Congressmembers helps - setting up an organized campaign helps somewhat too. But for Republicans, this bill was only a matter of what made economic sense.
It's not to harm you, the staffer who already knows everything you do is being tracked.
Instead, I think it is to start conversations with less technically-inclined people about privacy. That the conversation can start with data from the offices of people who passed this legislation is important, because explaining it in a more broader sense can be difficult and, potentially, scary.
It's good to hear you, as Congressional staff, know that your history is already tracked. GovTrack is doing nothing more than what you already expect. Just think if CNN started dumping this data for everyone in the country to start a conversation, though; that would be scarier and more of an invasion of privacy against unwitting citizens.
Because GovTrack is only publishing your internet accesses of its site - rather than the much wider amount of information on Legistorm - this gives me a great way to inform people about what happens.
I've already started a conversation with my friends and family about what tracking really happens on the internet.
I have been surprised at the misunderstandings many of my friends have about what can and cannot be tracked by various actors online. The huge reach of Facebook and Google in tracking people and knowing what you like has confused many people about the difference between what those private companies know and what the ISP knows.
I applaud GovTrack for providing this. Releasing it close to when the recent bill was passed by both houses of Congress is handy timing that will let that conversation continue with my less-tech-oriented friends and family.
> It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns.
And that's the conversation I can continue to have with my friends and family, thanks to this history readout on GovTrack.
It's interesting how many people do use their website from within the federal government IP ranges.
Voluntary, widespread, even "boycott the ones who don't do this!" All of that's free speech. But not mandated by law.
This question implies something else: what are all the URLs referenced/accessed by Congress? The page says something different, and I believe the headline is misleading:
> This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.
Of all pages one can browse on the web from within Congress machines, how relevant is GovTrack.us overall in that data? It's like saying the ISP publishes only my browsing data that happens to hit on my ISP's own website itself. Did I misunderstand something?
A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.
Except that would be illegal (and no ISP is going to sell raw data, even if they could)
I personally think this a fantastic and appropriate way to demonstrate the privacy issue to legislators, within the bounds of what is actually possible with the information that's out there
But that wouldn't be a very popular message with most Silicon Valley lobbyists.
This isn't an either-or scenario. If you want to do that, do that. Go raise a lot of money. In the meanwhile, there's this, and it didn't cost anything.
> from House (PC / Windows 10 / Edge 14) > from Senate(PC / Windows 7 / Chrome 56)
Will be fun to do some analysis after a while and see if there are any obvious trends (House vs Senate, where do outdated browser/OS combos visit the most).
> This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.
Also, the paper doesn't ascribe any reason for the effect. All that stuff about campaign finance is just editorializing from that video. It's just as possible that, for example, wealth and education are well correlated and Congress is siding with the well-educated 6% of the time.
They are ultimately accountable to the public, to an overwhelming degree. When the public does not care, that allows the other influences, which are ultimately much smaller to have an outsized influence.
By not being consistent in caring about the outcomes of votes, the public has allowed other groups to not only have an influence, but to have it often. That trains representatives to consider those other groups on all votes, as those other groups are much better about keeping track of what the representatives do and holding them accountable later.
So in the end, a small and weak but consistent group ends up having a disproportionate amount of influence compared to a large and powerful but largely inconsistent and absent group.
What this means is that it both is, and is not a myth. It's true that donors and party bosses have a lot of power, but it's also true that the constituents control all the power, and it's only their lack of involvement that allows those donors and party bosses to have the power they do. Were constituents to become much more interested in everything their representative did starting tomorrow, the power of those donors and party bosses would vanish fairly quickly (depending on how likely the representative considered the increased interest to continue).
The truth is congress does what donors/etc ask when people don't ask them otherwise.
So it only happens on a small set of issues where people don't seem to care.
Additionally, the mechanism that causes this is not actually the money. It's nice to think that, but it's really: They don't understand the issue, they mostly trust the lobbyists they know to tell them what the good thing to be doing is. IE the lobbyists are long time friends.
This page is about as pointless as possible. It shows when someone from the "House" or "Senate" visits a page. Okay, and from that we will strike a blow at the evil congressmen somehow?