fightforthefuture

I think we can put an end to CISA for good. We just need to kill it so bad that it becomes toxic and no one in Congress wants to go anywhere near it ever again. That's what happened to SOPA, so we know it's possible. The companies behind this would no doubt continue to try to sneak it through in some other form, but making Congress afraid to touch CISA or similar bills would be a huge step in the right direction.

Lots of big legacy monopolies like big banks, telecoms, and defense contractors. Most tech companies have come out against it for privacy reasons. We're hearing that Facebook is the lone major tech company that is quietly lobbying for it still.

MapLight has a good list of supporters (the opposition doesn't seem to be up to date): http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/114-s-754/6636586/total-contributions

As you can tell, we think it's important to reach out to folks about pressing issues, especially because email is still one of the most powerful ways to reach people, organize, and open up the political process. Ideally, and we're working on this and I know EFF and others are too, we figure out ways people DO want to help out and be informed about what's happening, like with either a mobile app or other notifications, and to get your specific feedback about what you don't want to hear about and what you do want to hear about. As we're trying to win on some of the biggest issues of the day that must be won and fought on, we have to build a system and movement together, so we hope you'll help us do that by giving us ways that you do want to be in touch and pitch in with contacts to decisionmakers.

My understanding is: the way the law is written, whenever the FCC releases draft rules they have to open up a public comment period, which takes weeks or months.

So if they released it before the vote, they'd need to open up another comment period. Then if they made changes and released it again, another comment period – an infinite loop. Given the law as it stands, there's always one last phase where they have to go heads down and vote on a rule.

Yes, that means that nobody outside a tiny number of people at the FCC has read the final version. And yes, it's crazy the law is written this way.

That said, there are several people in the community of groups that have been working on this who were in constant conversation with the people drafting these rules and have a good idea of what's in them. That includes Free Press, as well as experts like Barbara van Schewick. So once we got close to the vote, and had good intel that the rules were pretty strong, it would have been crazy to ask them to be released.

It would've given Comcast and friends another 8 weeks or maybe more to regroup and figure out a way to block the rules. (And we'd still not be in a position to know exactly what the final rules were until after the vote, due to the problem above.)

Next up: bring American regulatory agencies up to modern standards of transparency! Who here wants to work on that? (Gah, not me)

It seems like we need something like that, though it would be quite the sea change. Right now, they keep bringing back failed legislation and in the last 24 hours of this fight, we really can't risk not signing petitions, calling, tweeting and sharing online like here on reddit (which turns out matter a lot) to make sure we kill this bill first. But, that's why we do need to change the way politics is done and not just money in politics, but open up the political process in millions of ways, including by demanding public accountability every step of the way using online and other means, and building a new kind of political movement that is resilient to the Chamber and other big industry doing this kind of thing, and passing possibly something like you suggest.