This is not wholly surprising, but after some debate and some half-hearted attempts at pretending they care about the public's privacy rights, the House has passed CISPA, 288 votes against 127. The vote breakdown did not go fully along party lines, though it was clearly Republican driven. 196 Republicans voted for it, while just 29 voted against it (despite numerous conservative groups coming out against the bill). The Democrats split down the middle. 92 Dems voted for it and 98 against. If you compare this to last year, it looks like a lot more Democrats went from opposing to being in favor of trampling your privacy rights. Last year, 140 Dems voted against CISPA and only 42 for it. Either way, this seems like a pretty bi-partisan decision to shaft the American public on their privacy rights. That said, there is still the threat of a Presidential veto (though, with the vote today, the House is close to being able to override a veto). The bigger question is now the Senate, which couldn't agree on a cybersecurity bill last year, and has shown no signs of improvement this year. If you want to protect your privacy, it's time to focus on the Senate, and make sure they know not to pass a privacy-destroying bill like CISPA.

Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama's technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there's an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds. The world class team of technologists who helped build up Obama's campaign tech are trying to release their work as open source -- but Democratic Party operatives are trying to keep it secret, believing (almost certainly incorrectly) that this gives them a proprietary advantage:

But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign’s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app. When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It’s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.

The politicians who want to keep it locked up are making a huge mistake for a very large number of reasons that people who are steeped in technology understand. Let's list out some of the ways in which it's stupid to keep this secret:

1. It basically makes the technology useless. As one of the techies who worked on the project notes, the software "will be mothballed," meaning that four years from now it'll be useless. What the politicians see as keeping an advantage is really just squandering a useful framework.
2. It completely misunderstands how technology advances and works. No one expects software from today to be the same four years from now. By mothballing the tech, it will mean that the next campaign will effectively be starting from scratch. Open sourcing it would allow additional work to continue on this.
3. You can learn from others as well. The really shortsighted part is this insistence that open sourcing it "helps the other side." Again, what will be used four years (or even two years) from now will be quite different as the technology advances. And having it open sourced means that lots of folks can jump in and build on the tech in the meantime. And, yes, even Republican techies might work on it, and the Dems can learn from them as well.
4. Keeping it closed pisses off the techies, who will be less likely to contribute or join the team next time around.
5. If the Democrats believe they have stronger technologists, then next election they should still be able to make innovations faster than their opponents.
6. It quite possibly violates some open source licenses, since much of the code was built on open source software, some of which requires any additional work to also be open sourced.
7. Keeping the tech secret also means that other campaigns (beyond just elections) can't make use of the technology as well, which could actually hurt causes that the Democrats support.

In many ways this is the same old battle we've seen from legacy companies vs. more open upstarts for years. The legacy players think their advantage is in keeping the code secret. The upstarts know that's wrong: the pace of innovation and the rate of change means that by being open you can better keep up and do more. Keeping it closed guarantees stagnation and falling behind.

Over the weekend, I saw an article on Salon about how shameful it is that supporters of President Obama, who were loud in their condemnation of attacks on civil liberties by George W. Bush, seemed to ignore that President Obama has been worse in many ways (despite many public promises to the contrary). We've already noted that the Democratic Party -- which had fixing civil liberties abuses in its 2008 platform -- has removed all traces of that from the new platform. You would think that, for those who believe strongly in civil liberties, this would be a major concern. Rather than fix them, President Obama continued or expanded many of the very questionable policies of his predecessor, and then added a number of terrifying new ones.

Of course, if civil liberties is the issue you vote over, the other major party offers you no help either (as you should already know, based on Bush's presidency). As Adam Serwer notes, when debating issues of civil liberties, there really is no significant choice between Obama and Romney on this particular issue. There may be some differences at the margins, but that's about it.

Serwer's piece argues that much of this is driven by the American public, who seem particularly fond of giving up our own civil liberties in the face of non-stop fear mongering about terrorism. It seems likely that there is also something to the fact that, once in power, people generally don't like to scale back their own ability to "do stuff." Either way, it amazes me that avid supporters of one side or the other, who absolutely hate the idea of the "other side" getting into power, never seem concerned about how the other side will make use of the same policies they put in place to support themselves.

There are, of course, real differences in many of the other policies from the two candidates, but the lack of significant differences on civil liberties is a real shame. We should demand better.

Last week we wrote about weaknesses in the Republican's platform on internet freedom, noting that the MPAA's endorsement of it showed that it wasn't recognizing the importance of fixing copyright law, rather than expanding it. And, of course, we've now been pointing out significant issues with the Democrat's platform as well. Once again, on internet and innovation issues it falls down completely when it comes to copyright and patent issues.

Tim Lee has a perceptive piece (as per usual) noting that both party platforms appear to be in denial about the need for copyright and patent reform. He also mocks how both talk about "vigorous" enforcement of certain laws when they relate to the internet (porn for the Rs and copyright for the Ds).

But the reality is that neither party is willing to take a really principled stand on the need to reform copyright and patent laws in the name of freedom and innovation. That's not surprising, really. Doing so in either party would upset some of the "old guard" who tend to donate a lot of money to political campaigns. But, from the viewpoint of what really matters when it comes to internet freedom and innovation, it's yet another sign that the major parties don't want to deal with reality.

For years, we've pointed out that neither major political party in the US seems to be very good on the issues that concern us most around here -- which is truly disappointing. With the Democratic National Convention going on this week, some are pointing out what a difference four years make. Back when President Obama was the outsider running for office, he made reversing Bush-era attacks on civil liberties a target for change in his platform. And then he won. Not only did he leave in place most of the programs against civil liberties, but he often expanded them. So here we are, after four years in power, and with the new platform out, some are noting that the strong defenses of civil liberties found four years ago are conspicuously absent this time around. Adam Sewer goes through this year's platform and the one from four years ago and points out all of the differences. Here's just one example, but click through to read them all:

Warrantless Surveillance/PATRIOT Act

2008: "We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war...We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years."

2012: The platform is silent on this issue.

This is not surprising, but it's depressing just the same. Once they're in power, people tend to want to keep power, and one way to do that is to suppress the civil liberties of the public. Wouldn't it be nice if we actually elected a principled politician? Do they even exist any more?

There's been an awful lot of important talk about internet freedom and its importance this year. It's certainly permeated the political sphere. But is it a national political agenda item? We'll see. The Republican National Convention kicks off in a couple weeks, followed a few weeks after that by the Democratic National Convention. The folks at Demand Progress are urging both parties to add basic internet freedom issues to their official platforms. According to US News, both parties are considering it, with the Republicans saying they'll be discussing the topic at the RNC, while the Democrats have said that early drafts of their platform "advocated Internet freedom globally," though its unclear if the provision remained in.

Either way, both seem to at least recognize that this the internet is a major area of interest for a very large number of voters.

That said, just having it in a party platform may be a bit meaningless if they don't live up to it. But recognizing the issue is, at the very least, a first step in truly understanding how important it is. I doubt very much that the leadership of either party truly understands the importance of internet freedom, or is really willing to go all out in support of it. Yet. But, building up interest and general support -- along with the recognition that voters care about this stuff -- is at least an important first step in having politicians recognize that they can't just sell out internet freedom when lobbyists or "friendly" repressive governments come calling.

Well, this is not too surprising, but it is unfortunate. As the Obama administration has said it would veto CISPA, the House has now turned this into a partisan fight. As with IP issues, I tend to think it's dangerous and stupid when privacy fights become partisan. Once the debate is partisan, it seems to lose all sense of reason and perspective and just degrades into name calling. And there's a chance exactly that is happening with CISPA and other cybersecurity bills, as the Republicans are "daring" the Democrats to support these bills, with the political calculus being that if they don't support these bills and something terrible happens (planes falling from the sky, etc.) that they can then blame the Democrats for being soft on cybercrime. That narrative, of course, ignores the very real privacy concerns that are being raised by a variety of parties. It effectively shifts the entire debate away from finding a real solution, and into a situation where some are pressured to accept a bad solution for the sake of political optics.

We've noted how intellectual property issues are historically non-partisan. Sometimes, that's good, because it means that debates on the issues don't fall into typical brain dead partisan arguments. Sometimes, it's bad, in that it basically means both Republicans and Democrats are generally really bad on IP issues... happy to give industries greater and greater monopoly rights for no good reason. However, we noted an interesting thing happening on the way to the collapse of PIPA and SOPA: the Republicans were first to come together as a party and decide to speak out against these bills, recognizing the groundswell of public interest. That resulted in Republican leadership coming out against the bills, and Republican Presidential candidates all rejecting the approach in the bill. The Democrats, who have traditionally been considered more "internet friendly," simply couldn't bring themselves to go against Hollywood and unions -- two regular allies.

However, as many more net savvy Democrats have explained, this appears to be a major miscalculation on the part of Democratic party leadership -- potentially losing an entire younger generation of voters to the Republicans. Already, mutliple strategists have been suggesting that the Republican Party use this as a chance to cozy up with Silicon Valley, despite its typically "blue" leanings (though, generally with a strong libertarian bent). It certainly appears that the Republicans are ready to do just that. House majority leader, Eric Cantor recently tweeted about meeting with Sergey Brin.

The Democratic leadership, however, still doesn't seem to recognize the importance of the tech community and the wider internet. Rather than learning anything from what happened last week, PIPA sponsor Senator Leahy is actually trying to blame the Republicans for killing PIPA. It's (yet again) an amazingly tone deaf response. It's as if he's pushing the internet and the tech community right into the Republicans' arms. Perhaps he's making a bet that those constituencies don't matter as much as Hollywood... but that seems like a pretty risky bet to make.

Looks like the next domino in the SOPA/PIPA fight just fell. Tony Romm is reporting that Senate minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell is calling on Democrats to drop PIPA. That has a high likelihood of killing off what little Republican support is left for PIPA, because where McConnell goes, so go most Republican Senate votes. As we predicted this morning, it's looking like this is becoming a partisan issue -- with the Republicans lined up with internet users... and Democrats lined up with a couple of big Hollywood studios who don't want to innovate. The real shame in that, of course, is that for many, many months, the only person keeping PIPA from moving forward was Senator Ron Wyden -- a Democrat... and it appears his entire party has totally abandoned him. I'm still worried this now becomes a partisan issue, but it's still pretty stunning that Democratic leadership appears to have made a really, really bad calculation on the politics of this bill.

Update: Here's McConnell's official statement:

“While we must combat the on-line theft of intellectual property, current proposals in Congress raise serious legal, policy and operational concerns. Rather than prematurely bringing the Protect IP Act to the Senate floor, we should first study and resolve the serious issues with this legislation. Considering this bill without first doing so could be counterproductive to achieving the shared goal of enacting appropriate and additional tools to combat the theft of intellectual property. I encourage the Senate Majority to reconsider its decision to proceed to this bill.”

Reading between the standard DC political lines... McConnell is making this partisan.

I've talked, in great detail, how the SOPA/PIPA debate has been a non-partisan discussion. It's not bi-partisan and it's not partisan. It's just non-partisan. The debate has nothing to do with traditional Democrat or Republican lines. This has confused cable news, who has a script to follow, but doesn't know what to do with strange bedfellows. However, some people have noticed an interesting thing in the response to yeseterdays' protests: it was mostly Republicans who moved decisively away from PIPA and SOPA. While a few Democrats did so, many took hedging steps -- saying they "heard concerns" and would "work to fix" things -- but still supporting the bill. This is -- quite reasonably -- infuriating internet savvy Democrats who point out that the party is on the verge of losing an entire younger generation by supporting not just this legislation, but the corrupt process that created it:

If you keep reading that story, the Democrats listed all remain adamant that they'll remain co-sponsors of the legislation but work to "fix it".

Bullshit.

It's been a while since we've seen Democrats this tone deaf, this oblivious to political reality.

You have an entire wired generation focused on this issue like a laser, fighting like hell to protect their online freedoms, and it's FUCKING REPUBLICANS who are playing the heroes by dropping support?

Those goddam Democrats would rather keep collecting their Hollywood checks, than heed the will of millions of Americans who have lent their online voice in an unprecedented manner.

Are they really this stupid? Can they really be this idiotic?

Indeed. Even worse, there are rumors that the White House itself may flip flop on its earlier statements, and pretend that any "new" deal meets the standard it set with last week's announcement. If true, it seems that the White House and the Democratic Party are making the bet that young people really aren't paying attention to this issue. It seems to me that that's a huge miscalculation on their part.

Those pushing for this quick solution don't seem to have understood the protests yesterday. They weren't protesting this bill per se. They were protesting the entire process through which these bills were made. Using the same backroom dealing to come out with another bill... and pretend that "all stakeholders" had been heard from and were in agreement seems like a very, very dangerous position to stake out.

Over the last few years, the Democrats have been considered the party who "got" the internet much more than the Republicans. Is that about to switch?