Most of the media attention to congress right now is focused on health care, and rightly so. But the current congress is pushing through a lot of other stuff too, and one particular item recently caught my interest.
There is a bill going through the House and Senate to roll back broadband internet privacy rules enacted under Obama’s administration. It just passed the Senate, along party lines. There wasn’t much coverage of it in the mainstream media, as far as I can tell, but I did find one good NY Times article.
The House bill has not gone up for a vote yet. I was disappointed to see that my local rep, Leonard Lance, is one of the co-sponsors.
I first learned of this bill through a blog run by Private Internet Access, the company I use for my VPN. Here’s their article on the House bill, and another one on the Senate bill. Of course, it’s in their best interest to call attention to this kind of thing, and maybe exaggerate it a bit, but I don’t think they did that here.
And here’s an article from Consumerist that goes into some depth.
There is, of course, coverage of this at the EFF blog too. The EFF post includes the typical exhortation to “call your lawmakers today” to stop this from passing the House. In my case, I don’t think calling Lance would do me much good, since he’s never going to vote against legislation he co-sponsored. Oh well.
I haven’t really been using my VPN service when I’m at home, but maybe I should start doing that more often. There’s no need for my cable company to know how much time I’m spending looking at photos of corgis.
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