CISPA Sponsor Tweets, Then Deletes, About How Much More Lobbying Dollars Have Come From Pro-CISPA Groups

from the read-before-you-retweet dept

Ah, transparency. The Sunlight Foundation put together Politwoops last year to highlight tweets that elected officials deleted. Mostly it’s innocuous stuff, but sometimes some real gems come through. For example, the account of Rep. Mike Rogers, who is the main Representative behind CISPA, retweeted but then deleted a MapLight tweet about how the House Intelligence Committee, which Rogers chairs, “received 15 times more from pro-CISPA groups than anti-CISPA orgs.” You can see MapLight’s data here.

Of course, we’ve said from the beginning that much of this “cybersecurity” stuff is really about money, and that tweet just highlighted that plenty of that money is flowing directly into Congress. Obviously, that doesn’t look too good for Rep. Rogers (or whatever poor staffer runs his Twitter feed), and it took someone all of 23 minutes to realize that Rogers was more or less promoting the fact that his side had received 15x more in lobbying dollars — and that probably doesn’t look too good. Still, for those who believe in transparency, it was a nice admission, albeit a brief one.

Update: Oh, and it gets better. Rogers has been using the hashtag #CISPAalert in a bunch of his tweets in support of CISPA. But that hashtag was set up by the EFF, and every tweet that uses that hashtag helps fund the EFF in its fight against CISPA.

Rogers (R-Mich.)’s official Twitter account has, since Wednesday, been using the hashtag #CISPAalert to address criticism of his Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CISPA). Activists are wrong, he says. CISPA wouldn’t allow government “monitoring anyone’s email or personal information.”

But the congressman—or whoever runs his Twitter account—doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. A domain name registrar called Namecheap is running a promotion: offering a dollar to Internet activists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for each tweet with that hashtag. The EFF is actively campaigning against CISPA, calling it a “privacy-invading cybersecurity spying bill.”

I’m sure once CISPA is in place, Rogers will figure out this Twitter stuff.

Filed Under: cispa, house intelligence committee, lobbying dollars, mike rogers, politwoops, transparency