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.

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

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53 Comments
gorehound (profile) says:

Re: Government no longer represents the people

I agree and I look forward to their Fall and their Tar & Feathering.
I do not look forward to a Mad Max World but I do dislike this Government and I say honestly they have had it coming for Decades now.So I look forward to their fall from Grace.
We will not be forgetting who they are.They will not want to be around when that one happens.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Government no longer represents the people

Congress works like a marketplace: If you spend enough on lobbying, you can buy any law. Actually it is exactly like a stock exchange where the companies monetary commitment is what determines the price of a law. The more public interest, the higher the price for the industry at odds!

out_of_the_blue says:

Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

You’re all for “transparency”, right? Or only when you see some passing cheap shot to score for your notions?

And by the way, inquiring minds STILL wonder who funded your DC trip to stop SOPA.

Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Where fanboys assert that multi-billion industries are doing it all wrong!
07:43:43[i-850-7]

out_of_the_blue says:

Re: Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

Just a quick note to the FAKE out_of_the_blue:

My posts with tag line now include an automatically added GMT time stamp. So that’s the first thing you need to get right: it’s a trivial check for my convenience. The rest is by an algorithm that you’re not too likely to deduce. In any event, your putting effort into it goes beyond any reasonable free speech into deliberate fraud.

Oh, and by the way, the real out_of_the_blue will never say quit copying me.

And I again call on Mike to expose this fraud.

Niall (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

Why not just get an account? It’s not like you couldn’t use a disposable email address or anything. Seriously, it’s like the content controllers jumping around doing mad DRM schemes and convoluted Ultravacuous technology instead of just doing the simple and straightforward thing!

Gwiz (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

My posts with tag line now include an automatically added GMT time stamp. So that’s the first thing you need to get right: it’s a trivial check for my convenience. The rest is by an algorithm that you’re not too likely to deduce.

Simply to satiate my own morbid curiosity:

Why? What is the point to your silly timestamps? Anyone can duplicate something similar anytime they wish to. You are using an unregistered moniker and no ever gave you any assurances that someone else couldn’t use it too. What exactly are you trying to prove?

In any event, your putting effort into it goes beyond any reasonable free speech into deliberate fraud.

Once again, you are being silly here. It’s not even close to fraud when someone uses the same unregistered moniker as you. It’s completely your choice not to register an account and with that comes reality that someone else can use the same name too. To put it bluntly: Register an account or suck it up, Buttercup.

Beech says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

You missed the craziest part!

“My posts with tag line now include an automatically added GMT time stamp…it’s a trivial check for my convenience.”

Why the hell is he tagging his posts in a way that only he can identify, for his own convenience? Can he really not remember what he just fucking typed?

“What’s this? 10 minutes ago I said ‘I love Mike Masnick and want to bear his children’? That doesn’t sound familiar, but the time-stamp matches the algorithm code…it must be true! I am surprised to learn this about myself!”

into_the_orange says:

Re: Re: Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

Heh, I’m glad it’s missing from the post that claims it’s automatically added. Got a good laugh out of that one.
Oh, and by the way, the real out_of_the_blue will never say quit copying me.

And I again call on Mike to expose this fraud.
So you’ll not tell people to stop copying you, you’ll just try to pester Mike into stopping them.

As for the timestamps, why bother when we can’t verify that the code is accurate? Someone could post claiming that you’ve got the wrong code on one of your comments(and are therefore not the original), and all we’d have is your word that they weren’t right.

23:54:37[look-I-can-do-it-too]

into_the_orange says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

Bah, must have messed up the blockquote somehow. Anyway blue, interesting tidbit: Your “automatic” timestamp is off of GMT. The posting time for comments is displayed in GMT-7 (at least currently, probably changes when DST starts or ends) and your timestamps are either in GMT-11 or GMT+1, depending on whether they’re written in 24 or 12 hour time.

Gwiz (profile) says:

Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

And by the way, inquiring minds STILL wonder who funded your DC trip to stop SOPA.

Asked and answered awhile ago:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120405/13292918393/chris-dodd-suggests-backroom-negotiations-new-sopa-are-well-underway.shtml#c429

Maybe if you spent more time reading what is actually discussed here and less time creating lame-ass timestamps for your comments, you would have known this.

out_of_the_blue says:

Re: Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

@ Gwiz

Thanks for the link. — Now I know that Mike’s level of interest is beyond academic.

I don’t bother to go through and read, you’re right. It’s painful to see the level of response. — Discussed? No, it’s just excuse for fanboy-troll ad hom. Say what you want and let me say mine, all I ask.

Digitari says:

Re: Re: Re: Okay, now reveal how much Google paid to defeat SOPA.

You know, at first I always thought that OOTB was a failed movie maker, but as time has gone by I realized he is not.

I think that OOTB is a failed Police office that got his badge pulled for being an overbearing COP.

Most likely he beat a suspect that was already handcuffed, and it was vidoed, so he lost his ability to intimidate under the color of law….. it just fits his personality

Gwiz (profile) says:

Re: Re:

I really like OOTB’s comments. That amount of smugness coupled with that amount of utter cluelessness never fails to entertain.

I always get a chuckle when he asserts that “them there college boys” are too dimwitted to know what’s really going on and then follows it up with something so mind-boggling stupid that it hurts even trying to read it.

I also find it funny when he attempts to paint the community members here as “pimple-faced teenagers in the basement downloading stuff all day on Mom’s computer” when the actual demographics of Techdirt tell a very different story.

octopusgarden (profile) says:

Why is it that DLA Piper is NEVER mentioned in articles about CISPA? I’m beginning to think it’s some kind of conspiracy that one of the largest law/lobbying firms in the world, that just happens to be lobbying for CISPA, makes it their business to keep their name out of the headlines.

If you’ve seen that awful movie ‘The Firm’, THAT is DLA Piper. So where are they in the news? Nowhere.

Sunlight, the source listed for this article, lists their activity.
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/lobbying/search?q=dla+piper

But it doesn’t even come close to matching the activity on THIS.
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmbills.php?id=D000021569&year=2012

So, are reporters just THAT lazy or is there conspiracy?

Beech says:

My favorite part is where he says “CISPA wouldn’t allow government ‘monitoring anyone?s email or personal information.'” I like it because it’s probably true, CISPA doesn’t need to allow the government to monitor email/personal information because they already can/do do that. It’s like saying “This new law won’t let me take bribes from special interest groups…because there’s another law that lets me do that. This law let’s me do whatever I want with the bribe money.”

akp (profile) says:

Point of interest though: The posted tweet isn’t directly from Rogers’ mouth. It’s a “retweet.”

So all that means is that he saw it, misunderstood what MapLight was saying, and then deleted it.

I suspect he filled in the sentence with “received 15 times more [supporting messages] from pro-CISPA groups.”

I suspect he thought he was re-tweeting a report implying strong public support for CISPA, not lobbying dollars.

Anonymous Coward says:

This isn’t much of a surprise. The RIAA started off by boasting in the newspapers how many college students they were demanding from, every month – shortly afterwards, they pulled out of that little publicity stunt, because it was exposing their douchebag moves for them.

Now on the Internet, people are far less slow and forgiving when it comes to catching booboos like these. Small wonder that these organisations want technology hampered; it’s the classic contigency of ass-covering.

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