Congressional Support for H.R. 3261 (SOPA) | Hacker News Reader

Congressional Support for H.R. 3261 (SOPA)

spatialsituation.com

66 pointslandhar24 comments

Regardless if SOPA passes or not, let's make sure every single one of the people voting pro-SOPA and supporting it loses their position in Congress at the next elections.

We need to start being more pro-active about protecting the Internet, because it's obvious Congress won't do it for us, or at least not enough of them will try to do it. Otherwise we risk being in the same situation a year from now with a new SOPA/PIPA-like law.

I considered this as an idea for a startup. Whenever legislation like this comes up, you pull up an app on your phone and express support or opposition. Then, whenever you go to vote, the app will infer which candidates you are looking at based on your location, and will show you the pluses and minuses of each candidate according to what you support/oppose.

That would be cool, actually, as a good way to help people keep tabs on what Congress is up to according to the things they support or oppose. It would be nice to have something that made some kind of report card and graded them on the things you care about, preferably with links so you could see how they voted on each thing and what the bills actually said or any responses they gave to why they voted for that, just to avoid punishing them for voting against cleverly misnamed legislation.

I've been thinking about that too. Mostly just a DB of who voted for what. Then you can punch in how you would like them too vote, and it does some basic best-match goodness. Although, does it even need to be a startup, I feel like this could almost be someone's weekend project. Is there a government site that info can be scraped from?

[edit] searching for said data, I found www.govtrack.us, which seems to do mostly this. They seem to like the idea that others start using their data.

Our confidence in congress has been declining rapidly for years. Last month, a poll reported 9% of the population thought they were doing a good job. They literally don't have 10% to lose. They've learned that they can do anything they want and we won't do anything about it.

The problem with those types of polls is that they measure support for Congress as a whole. Only 9% of Americans think that Congress is doing a good job, but the real issue is how many people still think their Congress(wo)man is doing just fine.

Everybody thinks it's somebody else's problem, and as soon as those somebodies else stop being idiots, things will change. Nobody realizes that they are somebody else's somebody else.

And that's the problem. My congressman opposes SOPA, but yours may support it. I can change my congressman in the next election, but I can't affect yours.

Congress ends free speech, and their punishment is.. early retirement? In that case, I should become a senator!

Are you American?

I wrote my Congressman (Schiff, a SOPA cosponsor). I got a letter back making the claim that "it only creates tools that will allow the Attorney General, with an order from a Federal Judge, to take steps against foreign infringing sites."

My understanding is that even if it is possible to lawyer it this way, it isn't the intended or likely outcome, that the law creates such an onerous burden on anyone getting a non-adversarial complaint about a client that they'd be forced to shut them down or face severe penalties.

As to what to do about these bad actors, I'm not sure what the best plan is. Would huge billboards with the Congressman's picture and "Adam Schiff supports internet censorship" get the message across? What's the most effective way to communicate to constituents what's going on?

My representative is also Schiff. Did you write him an email or a physical letter? I'm considering personally delivering it to his LA office (I have a friend who works there). There doesn't seem to be much awareness about SOPA here in the Los Angeles area and it feels like this is ground zero for the whole thing. Is there anything we can do, as LA residents, to hit them where it hurts?

See, if Google just made a public announcement that they would donate $100k to the re-election campaign of every congressman who votes "no" on SOPA, and $100k to the election campaign of the challenger of every congressman who votes "yes", this map could get a whole lot greener.

That's a hell of a lot of cash. Even at $10k (1/10th of what you suggest), that's 538 critters * 10k = 5.38M of donations. At your level it would be $53.8M... just for one issue.

Your intention has merit, but I'm sure some financial wizard could create some structure that had a much better return or utilization for that kind of money.

Wow, I hadn't realized SOPA is kind of "Los Angeles vs. San Francisco" till I saw this map.

Is that really the case? Or is the data in the map incomplete enough that it only seems so?

Not even Los Angeles residents (who've heard of SOPA) support SOPA. I haven't met a single SOPA supporter here and I have friends in the entertainment industry (some signed to major labels).

It makes sense, it is Hollywood vs Silicon Valley

More like "Los Angeles and the entire east coast vs. San Francisco"

The site needs a way to update the stats. My representative (James Moran, D-VA8) opposes SOPA, but I have no way of inputting that information into the map.

Just updated to include James Moran. Thanks for the comment, you can e-mail me with the box at the bottom right of the map.

Agreed. My rep, André Carson (D-IN) also apposes SOPA.

Do you have a source to this? Couldn't find anything but I will happily update if I can get a source.

From tallying up this "straw poll" it would seem H.R. 3261 would pass. I seriously doubt that at this stage, though it's certainly not cut and dried.

A different visualization: http://www.popvox.com/blog/2011/house-judiciary-committee-an...

The actual POPVOX page for SOPA: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261

You can see what some of the constituents are saying: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261/report#nation

Note: POPVOX has an iPad2 app that seems to be filtering its way through lawmakers. The comments supporting and opposing a particular bill gets streamed into the app.

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