Reid is aiming to bring the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 to the floor at the end of next week after the Senate votes on Sen. Jon Tester's (D-Mont.) sportsmen's bill, according to Senate aides.

Last month Reid vowed to bring the cybersecurity bill to the floor in the lame-duck session, saying that Republicans "will have one more chance to back their words with action, and work with us to pass a bill."

The Senate resolution, sponsored by Sens. Francisco Javier Castellon Fonseca, Carlos Sotelo Garcia, Maria Beatriz Zavala Peniche, and Dip. Rodrigo Perez-Alonso Gonzale rejects the signing because it didn’t respect Mexican law on the approval of international economic treaties; it ignored the official Senate recommendation of September 6, 2011; and it violated domestic law and human rights.  This resolution asks the President to take the steps necessary to revoke Mexico's signature from the agreement, and it asks the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prepare a report on the reasoning behind the signing of the agreement.

The Chamber of Deputies resolution, sponsored by Dep. Jaime Aguilar Alvarez rejects ACTA and calls the executive's disregard of the legislature on this matter an “authoritarian and unilateral stance.”

A tweak by Sen. Debbie Stabenow made available last night would add to the trade bill her own measure, the Protect American Innovation Act. Among other things, the amendment would establish the position of "director of Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement" at Treasury, while boosting the ability of Customs and ICE to find and seize infringing materials entering the country or to be exported.

‘(G) it is a technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof the importation of which is prohibited under section 1201(a)(2) of title 17, United States Code.’.

Assange had an electoral learning process of his own which played out live on Twitter yesterday morning, with a first message from the Wikileaks feed announcing only that the organisation would be “fielding a candidate to run against Julia Gillard in her home seat of Laylor (sic)”. Very shortly afterwards, a second tweet declared: “We have discovered that it is possible for Julian Assange to run for the Australian Senate while detained. Julian has decided to run.” The spelling error in the initial tweet betrayed a curious ignorance of Australian history, given that the electorate in question is named after Peter Lalor, who led the famous Eureka Rebellion at the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. One would have thought that Lalor, a radical activist who saw his efforts crudely suppressed by the authorities before going on to a distinguished career as a parliamentarian, might have been better known to Assange – if not to the extent that he would have spelt his name correctly, then at least so far that he might have misspelled it in a phonetically correct manner (“Lawlor”). But I digress.

“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.”

"I think they're right. I think it could create some problems. That's why I've spoken Senator Leahy, the Chairman of the Committee. I've written a letter to the ranking member Senator Grassley, saying that some issues have come up. I think this needs to be a winner for everyone -- not just for the content people.... so we need to work on this."

• The good folks at Reddit are helping to crowdsource info about meetings.
• There's a Meetup.com page listing out known townhall sessions. Again, these often appear with very little notice, so check back often.
• Even without townhall sessions, you can and should reach out to your elected officials about meeting with them to express your concerns. Even if they don't actually take the meeting, hearing from enough people will alert them that there's widespread concern. Internet Freedom has set up a neat forum system, organized by state, that will both highlight when there are townhalls and, more importantly, provide details on how to request a meeting with your Senators. On top of that, it will allow coordination for those who do get meetings to go with a group of similarly concerned residents.
• EFF has a page about in district meetings, why they're important and how to set them up. It also has a one-pager with some basic facts that sums up the problems (pdf).
• Public Knowledge has also put together a quick two-page citizen packet (pdf) that highlights problems with the bills, and includes some "sample questions" that people might want to ask if possible.

On January 23^rd, the United States Senate will reconvene to begin legislative business for 2012. After the first order of business is taken care of, Majority Leader Harry Reid will then continue the process he started on December 17th of moving PIPA towards a Senate floor vote. This process is known as invoking "cloture," which is a rule that allows any Senator to impose a 30 hour time limit on debate subject to three-fifths of the Senate agreeing to end debate. Senator Ron Wyden has stated he will filibuster PIPA along with Senators Jerry Moran, Maria Cantwell, and Rand Paul and together they will use the full 30 hours available resulting in the cloture vote being held the next day.

On January 24^th, Majority Leader Reid’s cloture motion will have matured its 30 hours and he will then be allowed to call for an up-or-down vote on moving forward to consider PIPA. If three-fifths of the U.S. Senate agree by voting yes on cloture (ending debate), then the bill can be taken up for consideration and the process where Senators can offer amendments will begin as well as another cloture motion (resulting in another 30 hours of debate). The general rule of thumb is a bill that has 60 Senators in support of its passage will take about three days to pass the U.S. Senate.

However, if 60 Senators do not vote yes on cloture, then Senators Wyden, Moran, Cantwell, and Paul will be allowed to continue to speak in opposition to PIPA forever. That being said, what would likely happen in the aftermath if PIPA fails to gain 60 yes votes is the bill is withdrawn and a compromise is negotiated. If no compromise is possible, then the bill officially dies. It is important to note that three-fifths of the Senate must vote yes to move PIPA forward. For example, if 59 Senators voted yes on cloture and 41 Senators voted present or do not vote at all, it fails to pass. The key factor in cloture is three-fifths of the Senate voting yes on cloture and not how many votes are against PIPA.

To begin with, the letter asserts that "Google faces competition from only one general search engine, Bing," suggesting that only Bing (and it, only ineffectively) could keep Google in check. In essence, the Senators are prejudging an essential question on which any case against Google would turn: market definition. But why would the market not include other tools for information retrieval? Is it not at least worth mentioning that more and more Internet users are finding information and spending time on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, while more and more advertisers are spending their money on these Google competitors? Isn't it clear that search itself is evolving from "ten blue links" into something more social, multi-faceted and interactive?

In a remarkable leap, the senators then identify the specific alleged abuse that Google’s alleged market power leads to: search bias. That's remarkable because, other than the breathless claims of disgruntled competitors (given plenty of air time at the September hearing), there is actually no evidence that search bias is, in fact, harmful to consumers—which is what antitrust is concerned with. (Read both sides of this debate in TechFreedom's free ebook, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet.)

As our colleague, Josh Wright, has thoroughly demonstrated, this "own-content" bias is actually an infrequent phenomenon and is simply not consistent with an actionable claim of anticompetitive foreclosure. Moreover, among search engines, Google references its own content far less frequently than does Bing (which favors Microsoft content in the first search result when no other search engine does so more than twice as often as Google favors its own content).

The letter also reports, again with no caveats, claims by the CEOs of Yelp! and Nextag that "75 percent of Yelp!'s web traffic consists of consumers who find its website as a result of Google searches, and . . . 65 percent of Nextag's traffic originates from Google searches," and that losing this much traffic to Google preferencing its own content would be catastrophic. But the letter fails to mention that most searches for brand names on Google are "navigational" rather than "informational." As Google competitor Expedia’s CEO recently explained:

The majority of, at least Expedia’s, and I believe Hotel.com’s traffic that comes from search to our site actually come through people searching for Expedia, for example. So in typing in Expedia in Google or so on, typing in Hotels.com in Google. So of the 25% for Expedia, for example, the majority of that traffic is someone who’s already looking for Expedia, and that person is going to find Expedia one way or the other because they are searching for something very specific. (Expedia earnings call, 10/28/10, quoted here).

Indeed, a recently published independent academic study conducted across search engines concluded that 52% of "business queries" (and 72% of organizational queries) were navigational. In other words, most of the Google traffic going to these sites was likely from users who simply typed in "Yelp" or "NextTag" as a convenient way of getting to those sites. Such searches are not diverted (and not even claimed to be diverted) to Google’s own sites, and the first search result for the search term “Expedia” will always be expedia.com. Thus, the majority of these searches that are claimed to make up 75% and 65% of the complaining companies’ traffic is not in any way threatened by Google’s business model, and is completely irrelevant to assessing the effect of Google preferencing its own content.

Furthermore, the letter does not mention Yelp's recent boast that over 40% (and growing) of its searches are now conducted on its mobile app—insulating it from whatever "power" Google might exercise over traditional searches.

Bing: A Microsoft & Yahoo Production?

What really set off my alarm bells was this:

Bing, a partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo

Despite substantial amounts of staff time and money spent to have the hearings, the committee mistakenly believes that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is a Yahoo and Microsoft production.

It’s not. Bing is a wholly-owned part of Microsoft. Yahoo has no ownership in Bing.

But wait. Isn’t there a partnership? Yes, but one that gives Yahoo a minor role handling Bing’s ad sales to “high volume” advertisers. The deal came after Bing was launched. It wasn’t an essential part of it, nor does it help with Bing building consumer market share against Google.

If the committee fully understood the competitive space, they’ve have said instead:

Yahoo Search, a partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo

That would be far more accurate. That’s because Yahoo no longer has its own core search technology, nor its own search ad serving technology.  It gave all these up to partner with Microsoft (it would have kept them in a deal with Google. See our side-by-side comparison).

Heck, Yahoo’s former CEO Carol Bartz was quite specific that her goal was to use Bing’s technology as a way to somehow beat Bing at its own game. Bing wasn’t a partnership to her; it was the competition.

Bing & Yahoo Distant To Google?

Perhaps the committee thought that the “partnership” was the overall “search alliance” between Bing and Yahoo? If that was the case, then why did the letter go on to say

…which is a distant second in market share and is losing an estimated $2 billion annually…

Those stats only make sense if you’re talking about Bing itself, having a 15% share to Google’s 65% in the United States, as recently reported. If you’re talking about Bing and Yahoo combined, they come up to 30%, much healther competition.

Our fear, which is shared by many, is that S. 968 as currently written will have the unintended consequences of undermining our nation's national security and our goals to encourage innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation.

As currently written, the Protect IP Act and the companion Stop Online Piracy Act legislation in the House unnecessarily risk an overbroad application of the new and unprecedented tools they provide to the U.S. Department of Justice and the private sector. An excessively expansionary application of these tools would undermine our national security and economic interests.

We are particularly concerned that the proposal authorizes the use of remedies that will undermine the infrastructure of the Internet. The nation's leading technologists and security experts say these provisions will kill our best hope for actually making the Internet more secure against cyber attacks. We take seriously the alarm expressed by the nation's leading investors in new online startups who say the proposal will dampen interest in financing the new ideas and businesses of tomorrow, and to legal and human rights experts who caution that the proposal enables the silencing of speech.

The exhibit is an opportunity to showcase for lawmakers and visitors to the U.S. Capitol Complex the importance of copyright to creators across America, by focusing on people behind the lens, sharing stories about the images, and helping viewers understand the investment and commitment made by photographers capturing our nation’s many stories.

While we are sure that you would agree that government officials should not describe government authorities in a way that misleads the public, during your tenure Justice Department officials have -- on a number of occasions -- made what we believe are misleading statements pertaining to the government's interpretation of surveillance law.

The first set of statements that concern us are the repeated claims by Justice Department officials that the government's authority to obtain business records or other 'tangible things' under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is analogous to the use of a grand jury subpoena. This comparison -- which we consider highly misleading -- has been made by Justice Department officials on multiple occasions, including in testimony before Congress. As you know, Section 215 authorities are not interpreted the same way that grand jury subpoena authorities are, and we are concerned that when Justice Department officials suggest that the two authorities are "analogous" they provide the public with a false understanding of how surveillance law is interpreted in practice.

More recently, we were troubled to learn that a Justice Department spokesman state that "Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] is not a secret law, nor has it been implemented under secret legal opinions by the Justice Department." This statement is also extremely misleading. As the NSA General Counsel testified in July of this year, significant interpretations of section 215 of the Patriot Act are contained in classified opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and these opinions -- and the legal interpretations they contain -- continue to be kept secret. In our judgment, when the government relies on significant interpretations of public statutes that are kept secret from the American public, the government is effectively relying on secret law.

Americans will eventually and inevitably come to learn about the gap that currently exists between the public's understanding of government surveillance authorities and the official, classified interpretation of these authorities. We believe the best way to avoid a negative public reaction and an erosion in confidence in US intelligence agencies is to initiate an informed public debate about these authorities today.

As most of my colleagues remember, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 in an effort to give the government new authorities to conduct surveillance of foreigners outside the United States. The bill contained an expiration date of December 2012, and the purpose of this expiration date was to force members of Congress to come back in a few years and examine whether these new authorities had been interpreted and implemented as intended.

I believe that Congress has not yet adequately examined this issue, and that there are important questions that need to be answered before the FISA Amendments Act is given a long-term extension.

The central section of the FISA Amendments Act, the part that is now section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act itself, specifically stated that it was intended to address foreigners outside the United States, and it even required the Attorney General to develop procedures designed to make sure that any individuals targeted with this new authority are believed to be outside the United States. So one of the central questions that Congress needs to ask is, are these procedures working as intended? Are they keeping the communications of law-abiding Americans from being swept up under this authority that was designed to apply to foreigners?

In democratic societies, citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily keep information secret from the public but instead will act with secrecy only in certain limited circumstances.

• Dianne Feinstein, California (chair)
• Saxby Chambliss, Georgia (vice chair)
• John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia
• Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
• Ron Wyden, Oregon
• Richard Burr, North Carolina
• Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
• James Risch, Idaho
• Bill Nelson, Florida
• Daniel Coats, Indiana
• Kent Conrad, North Dakota
• Roy Blunt, Missouri
• Mark Udall, Colorado
• Marco Rubio, Florida
• Mark Warner, Virginia

• The U.S. Government and private industry have identified Internet security and stability as a key part of a wider cyber security strategy, and if implemented, the DNS related provisions of PROTECT IP would weaken this important commitment. DNS filters would be evaded easily, and would likely prove ineffective at reducing online infringement. Further, widespread circumvention would threaten the security and stability of the global DNS.
• The DNS provisions would undermine the universality of domain names, which has been one of the key enablers of the innovation, economic growth, and improvements in communications and information access unleashed by the global Internet.
• Migration away from ISP-provided DNS servers would harm efforts that rely on DNS data to detect and mitigate security threats and improve network performance.
• Dependencies within the DNS would pose significant risk of collateral damage, with filtering of one domain potentially affecting users' ability to reach non-infringing Internet content.
• The site redirection envisioned in Section 3(d)(II)(A)(ii) is inconsistent with security extensions to the DNS that are known as DNSSEC.
• The U.S. Government and private industry have identified DNSSEC as a key part of a wider cyber security strategy, and many private, military, and governmental networks have invested in DNSSEC technologies.
• If implemented, this section of the PROTECT IP Act would weaken this important effort to improve Internet security. It would enshrine and institutionalize the very network manipulation that DNSSEC must fight in order to prevent cyberattacks and other malevolent behavior on the global Internet, thereby exposing networks and users to increased security and privacy risks.

• Patrick J. Leahy -- Vermont
• Herb Kohl -- Wisconsin
• Jeff Sessions -- Alabama
• Dianne Feinstein -- California
• Orrin G. Hatch -- Utah
• Richard Blumenthal -- Connecticut
• Chuck Grassley -- Iowa
• Michael Lee -- Utah
• Jon Kyl -- Arizona
• Chuck Schumer -- New York
• Lindsey Graham -- South Carolina
• Dick Durbin -- Illinois
• John Cornyn -- Texas
• Tom Coburn -- Oklahoma
• Sheldon Whitehouse -- Rhode Island
• Amy Klobuchar -- Minnesota
• Al Franken -- Minnesota
• Chris Coons -- Delaware