It may come as a surprise to many a citizen of the United States that our elected officials in the Congress and Senate do not actually read the laws that they vote on. And with bills that are usually hundreds of pages long, I don’t blame them… almost.

It is actually common practice for our elected officials to skip their duty to read what they vote on, and simply skim over a one-page sheet summarizing the legislation only a few minutes before the vote. Even worse, it is common practice for the people sponsoring the bill to change/add key parts to the text, no more than an hour before the vote, therefore sneaking laws into our legal system. This is how the much loved Patriot Act became law in our nation.

Just today I Stumbled Upon the Read the Bills Act, which is a piece of attempted legislation by the Downsize D.C. activist group, aimed at making our elected officials actually read what they vote on. Among other things, it would require that any bill due to be voted on would be posted on the Internet a week before the voting, and that during that time it could not be edited in secret.

The idea behind this act is so simple, I see no reason why anyone would vote against it. However, that is exactly what will happen if the lobbyist crowd in D.C. is more active about this issue than we are. It is important that we make our voices heard on this issue.

If you would like to let your senator or congressmen know where you stand on this issue, please click here. You’ll be taken to a simple form where you can fill out your contact info, and personalize the email that will be automatically sent to your elected officials.

I will come back to my ranting about political parties, but I want to talk about something else first: Network Neutrality.

What is Network Neutrality? Instead of trying to frame it in my own words, I’ll use the definition given on Wikipedia.

Network Neutrality is a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams. (emphasis mine)

To sum it up, this means that on a neutral network, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot discriminate (throttle or block entirely) against the types or sources of content users access. This also means that the ISP cannot determine how you use your connection, the types of devices you use it with, etc. This was the standard policy until just a few years ago.

Unfortunately the debate on Network Neutrality has been one mostly unheard of other than by geeks like myself. This is strange, because primarily it is not an issue about technology, but about freedom. There is a variety of reasons why many people believe that Network Neutrality is important, but these reasons can be boiled down a few points:

• Bandwidth caps: One of the things that a lack of neutrality on the Internet allows is bandwidth caps. This means that you have a monthly allotment of bandwidth you can use each month. If you go over that limit, you can ether twiddle your thumbs until the next month, or pay a higher price for more bandwidth. This means that with more and more websites including lots of multimedia, you might soon need to watch your bandwidth usage to avoid overages, much like you do with your cell phone minutes. Think this sounds too crazy to be true? Time Warner cable is already testing such a plan, and such behavior is the norm with most satellite Internet.
• Anti-Competitive Practices (aka monopoly): Imagine that your ISP just made a deal with News Corporation, the owners of Fox News, Myspace, 20th Century Fox, and many other companies. Suddenly you can view/browse Myspace, Fox News channel, movies produced by 20th Century Fox, and any other content owned by News Corporation at blazing fast speed. Also, if you try to use Facebook, CNN.com, movies produced by Warner Brothers, etc. you might find that the content is ether slow or completely unaccessible. Usually this would be called anti-competitive practices, which is illegal in the United States. When it is the telecom industry doing this, it is called business as usual.
• Censorship: The previous point touched on this one, in that filtering a competitor’s content is a form of censorship, but what about political censorship? During the live Internet stream of a Pearl Jam concert in 2007 the lead singer was muted just as he sang lyrics critical of George Bush. There are many more examples of such behavior, with a variety of motivations. What happens though when certain ideas become illegal? AT&T and other telecoms companies already help the government illegally spy on ordinary citizens (pesky 4th Amendment!), and the same technology can be used for filtering undesired viewpoints from the web.

HR.5353, titled “Internet Freedom Preservation  Act of 2008″ is where politics comes in. The summary of this bill is as follows:

To establish broadband policy and direct the Federal Communications Commission to conduct a proceeding and public broadband summits to assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues relating to broadband Internet access services, and for other purposes.

If you want a bit of interesting reading, go to the bill’s page on maplight.org, then click on the “Supporters & Opponents” tab. To see the list of organizations officially supporting/opposing this bill, click “Show organizations.” On the list of supportive groups, you have Google (a company that profits from open information), plus a list of mostly “liberal” organizations. The one pleasant surprise for me on that side of the table was the Christian Coalition of America. On the opposition side, there are absolutely no surprises. In addition to a few activist organizations, you have AT&T, Comcast, CTIA (an advocacy group for a huge number of wireless carriers), Time Warner, US Telecom Association and Verizon. Those names represent the vast majority of companies that stand to profit from the ability to decide what people can and cannot access.

Now what interests me, and the source of my recent frustration, is the information revealed by the list of the bill’s cosponsors:

Rep Ellison, Keith (D)
Rep Eshoo, Anna G. (D)
Rep Frank, Barney (D)
Rep Harman, Jane (D)
Rep Inslee, Jay (D)
Rep Lofgren, Zoe (D)
Rep Miller, George (D)
Rep Pickering, Charles (R)
Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. (D)
Rep Sestak, Joe (D)
Rep Walz, Timothy J. (D)

With the information above, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Almost all of them are Democrats. Why is this? Is it that Net Neutrality is an issue that is “un-conservative?” As this blogger points out, the gist of it is that we want to get what we paid for, don’t want our choices limited, and don’t want to be spied upon. Perhaps there are almost no Republican cosponsors for HR.5353 because part of it is about the ability to spy illegally, and the current party leader (aka POTUS) is certainly in favor of domestic espionage. Perhaps it is because the democrats are in favor of Network Neutrality, and an upstanding conservative certainly cannot agree with a liberal about anything.

As I said before, I no longer have any party affiliations, because I find both parties to be manipulative and petty. However, I do give credit where credit is due. No matter if Democrats are ether standing up for HR.5353 because the Republicans are against it, or they truly believe in it, my thanks goes out to them for standing up for something thats right!

The media has said almost nothing concerning this situation. I think that with public trust in the Big Media as low as it is, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. could go a long way towards regaining public trust by admitting their error openly. That being said, it does not surprise me at all that the media has been completely silent about the issue.

In an interesting new development, the Department Of Defense has released all of the documents that the New York Times used as their main source in their article (after the NYT sued the Pentagon for access to the documents). Given the fact that the documents are 8,000 pages long, it is not surprising that it took them several years to do their research. As pointed out in this post, the documents as released by the DOD have been uploaded in a format that is extremely difficult to index and search. However, the author of that post has already found some interesting tidbits in just the sort time that the documents have been available.

As I stated earlier, I am challenging everyone to contact their senators to demand a full congressional investigation into this program. We can be a catalyst for change, but only if we make our voices heard.

A great video summary of the scandal has been done by Free Press, a non-partisan advocacy group that focuses on reform in news media.

I believe that it is important that our elected officials hear from us about this issue. With the congress continually giving the administrative branch more and more unconstitutional powers, I do not believe that this trend will stop unless our elected officials hear from their constituency. Go to senate.gov to find your senator’s email address, and send them a letter. Feel free to copy the one I sent, which is posted below. Just make sure to substitute my name for your own.

—————————————————————————————————–

Dear Senator,

On April 20^th the New York Times published the result of two years of research, an article describing in detail a program created by Donald Rumsfeld and Victoria Clarke, in which the administration purposely mislead the American public in regards to the progress of the war in Iraq (see link #1). Under this program, the pentagon hired over 75 retired generals to reiterate Pentagon talking points, without citing sources. This willful omission lead the general public to believe that these “analysts” were expressing their own viewpoint. According to national law, for the Pentagon to use these analysts as messengers without any ethical disclosure is illegal (see link #2). In addition, many of these former generals are ether lobbyists for, or heads of large military contractor firms, which is certainly in violation of several laws regarding conflicts of interest.

In countries with repressive governments, one of the tools these governments use to control the populous is a carefully controlled media. This is exactly why freedom of the press is a part of the First Amendment, and yet the mainstream media has been almost completely silent on the issue. I ask that you to do your part to see that truth and justice prevails, and support a congressional investigation into this Pentagon program.

Sincerely,

Douglass Clem

Link #1: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html

Link #2: http://www.prwatch.org/node/7261