Show HN: My (late) holiday hack: SOPAOpera.org | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My (late) holiday hack: SOPAOpera.org

sopaopera.org

40 pointsdanso22 comments

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NY Senators are paid well. 500k for both NY senators. Crazy.

And Al Franklet is a supporter? Something is wrong here....

Franken is one of the co-sponsors of PIPA.

He comes out of / is a product of the entertainment industry. What did you expect?

Also, "Hollywood" had long been a... "bastion" of Democratic support. And, of course, the juice flows both ways.

It might be useful to be able to toggle a "Details of next election" overlay, bringing up info on how vulnerable each representative is in his or her next primary and general elections. This would allow people to focus attention on the few representatives who have close races coming up.

My guess is these candidates will be by far the most receptive to public opinion.

Even better would be to include information on challengers and their stance on SOPA as well. That would make it easy to focus attention on ideal candidates: those who are for SOPA and have close races coming up against challengers who are against it. Maybe we can get a couple of them to switch.

Let me know if you think that's a good idea and want help implementing it. My email's in my profile.

You read my mind...I had actually thought about that and put it off because...the FEC data is just an annoying unnormalized Excel spreadsheet. It wouldn't be hard to include, I just didn't get to it yet.

Another good feature would be a summary of how SOPA currently stands, or a link to a website that has that information and keeps it current.

I love HN, but it is NOT the place to get up to date political info. I believe at one point there were articles saying "SOPA postponed until January" and "SOPA will be voted on before Christmas" up at the same time.

Also, a lot of those representatives have facebook pages. Is it worth SOPA opponents time to go on there and give them a hard time in the comments, or should we stick to phone calls? It might be worth including a link to their FB pages anyway, though I'm not sure on this one.

Yep, that was one of my feature creep ideas too:

http://sopaopera.org/sopa/

Unfortunately I decided on an ad-hoc database model for "Events" (when I originally just wanted to record statements by congressmembers) and never quite got reorganized in time. Not too hard to rectify, of course.

In case you're wondering, there is an official place to get this info...the Library of Congress's THOMAS system: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@X

There's still a lot of space for people who can create the links between entities, though...

Let me take the devil's advocate position:

This new Internet thing is threatening the business models of some of my biggest supporters, as well as aiding illegal activity. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

Is this a free speech issue? No. People will still have the right to make new websites or post on websites what do not infringe, or go on talk radio or publish newspapers, so they will still have free speech.

A bunch of scofflaws just want free downloads, and websites naturally don't want to be saddled with enforcing things. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

The question we need to ask ourselves, is how do we reach people who think like this? Once we've done that, then the legislators will have to listen.

Nice. Is there a data source for amendments? Is there a way to tag the people who are in the Judiciary committee?

Yeah....that info is actually in there, on the profile...obviously, that's not of much help. I originally envisioned this as showing every active member as once but realized that sending 500 images on every frontpage load would be annoying...So, not all judiciary members will be visible. I guess I could just put them on their own page.

The House committee markup page can be found here: http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/mark_12152011.html

One think I've learned (even more clearly than I knew beforehand) was that our government is not very data-oriented. You can tell from the amendment voting that there are a few people (who I didn't have time to go through and include) who could be classified as opponents because they are voting in a bloc with Issa and the other OPEN act advocates during the amendment process.

However, to programmatically parse that...requires OCR fun: http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/12152011RC3%20-%20Is...

Suggestion: add sort by state.

My bad...that had been in there and I must have deleted it accidentally. Now it's back in. Thanks for pointing that out.

It's amazing how diverse each side is in terms of democrats vs. republicans considering how partisan every other recent issue has been. What's the dividing line? Education about tech and the internet maybe?

"What's the dividing line?"

Probably sources of campaign financing, and/or makeup of companies and industries doing business in one's represented state.

This isn't a partisan issue, so much as a "who butters my bread?" issue.

I've heard this summarized as "Hollywood v. Silicon Valley" which seems pretty accurate. That makes this an intra-party fight among the Democrats, leaving Republicans free to jump in opportunistically on either side.

Great job! Makes it easy to get all of the information in one place.

I just made a call to my representative (whose position was not stated) and the person who answered was "not allowed to comment on it."

Nice holiday hack! Are you planning to keep it up-to-date? I would like to visit it every now and then to track updates along side other sites I have been checking for SOPA related stuff

Yes...the low hanging fruit has mostly been collected. The fact of the matter, from what I can tell, is that on any given issue, most representatives won't say what their position is because they don't have to...there are very few legislators like Ron Paul who are just going to just say whatever they think when put on the spot.

So, other than the official co-sponsors, to determine someone's position, I just extrapolated from any historical information. For example, anyone who was on the judiciary committee who approved of PROTECT-IP's precursor (COICA in 2010) is likely, as far as we can know, a supporter of PROTECT-IP too.

I don't think such judgments of position can be made on campaign donations alone though. So it's an interesting challenge to think of ways to discern how engaged a Congressmember is on an issue based on the less publicized interactions he/she may have. Hopefully there's an easy way to collect such information that doesn't involve being a full-time researcher...but I plan to collect what I can and update for the time being.

Thanks sounds like you have a good plan... Amazing that officials can keep quiet on issues until they vote... I think your approach can at least provide hints and motivate people to call and get direct answers

Nitpick: for some reason everyone's chin is cut off. This is in Opera and Chrome. Otherwise looks really cool!

Yeah, I got a little aggressive in my background-position setting (fixed it a bit). The problem is that some portraits are close ups, and others are two-thirds body...hard to get chins in the former without cutting off heads in the latter :)

What's most surprising here is that these lawmakers are being bought off for so little, especially when you consider how much money the backers of these special interest groups have, and even more so when you consider how much financial damage these laws will cause to the average Joe and Jane Internet.

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