Updated 6:14 pm ET, Thursday, January 12
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), one of the most prominent and outspoken critics of the House’s much-reviled Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister in the Senate, PROTECT IP, made waves around the Web monday by announcing that he will be leading a hearing on Wednesday, January 18 to give “technical experts” and critics of the bills the chance to testify before the House Oversight Committee, of which he is the chairman.
“An open Internet is crucial to American job creation, government operations, and the daily routines of Americans from all walks of life,” Issa said in a statement. “The public deserves a full discussion about the consequences of changing the way Americans access information and communicate on the Internet today.”
Among those invited to testify at the hearing were a number of high-profile SOPA/PIPA critics in the private sector, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
“It’s now public. I’m headed back to DC to address the U.S. House Oversight & Government Reform Committee about SOPA & PIPA. Wish me luck,” Ohanian posted on Google Plus on Monday.
SOPA and PIPA, of course, would allow the government to impose DNS blocking and search engine takedowns of links to foreign websites and webpages accused of piracy by copyright holders — namely Hollywood and the recording industry, both of whom are among SOPA’s most strident supporters.
But critically, neither the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), nor PROTECT IP (PIPA) were actually mentioned by name in the official hearing announcement posted on the website of House Oversight Committee.
Instead, the official announcement states that the hearing is being held “in light of policy proposals affecting the way taxpayers access the Internet,” and will “examine the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on American cyber-security, jobs and the Internet community.”
That’s not, pardon the pun, an oversight as much as it is a deliberate omission. According to TPM’s conversation with staffers of the House Oversight Committee, the hearing will not cover any specific proposed legislation — neither SOPA, nor PIPA. That’s not the “point” of the hearing, according to staffers.
Rather, in accordance with its mandate as being the arbiter of “oversight of virtually everything government does,” the Oversight Committee is holding the hearing to examine the issues of search and DNS blocking from a broader perspective than has been covered so far in hearings on SOPA and PIPA held by the House Judiciary Committee.
“What Oversight can bring to the table is the cross-cutting nature of what it can explore,” a staffer told TPM, “When there are issues that cut across many committees, we can bring folks together to figure out how they will impact them all. We’re like the Congressional research arm.”
But the question remains just what precisely the hearing will accomplish.
Only the Judiciary Committee hearing can actually advance or table SOPA at this point, not the Oversight Committee, which has only limited legislative power anyway, as staffers confirmed to TPM.
Only six members of the House sit on both the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, including Issa and Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Mike Ross (D-AR). Issa and Chaffetz are prominent critics of SOPA, while Ross is a supporter.
Reps. Quigley, Jordan and Gowdy haven’t yet taken a position on SOPA, so the Oversight hearing and testimony could presumably sway them to vote against it in the Judiciary Committee, but that seems like an awful lot of fuss for just three representatives to move against the bill, especially given supporters of SOPA currently outnumber avowed opponents by 10.
Most problematically for SOPA critics, the Judiciary Committee is controlled by Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), the lead sponsor of SOPA, which is why many critics decried the initial Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill in November as unfair. Well, that and the fact that that hearing included mostly witnesses in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, and no technical experts.
The Oversight Committee’s hearing on Wednesday, January 18, would seem to be an effort to correct at least those disparities, with most of the witnesses listed having already come out against SOPA and most of them being “technical experts” in the sense they work for Web-related companies.
Still, it remains to be seen whether their testimony to Oversight will actually be allowed to be admitted into the Judiciary Committee.
“The Oversight hearing is separate from anything in the House Judiciary Committee. They are different Committees with different rules,” a House Judiciary staffer told TPM.
Perhaps most troubling of all, staffers of at the Judiciary Committee told TPM that Chairman Issa did not reach out to Chairman Smith and that there had not been any discussions between the two men, nor the two committee staffs about Issa’s hearing, at least to their knowledge. Updated: As it turns out, Issa did, in fact, on Monday send out letters to Smith and other House Committee Chairs inviting them or any of the members of their committees to attend Wednesday’s hearing in person or to submit written questions. Issa staffers told TPM that they could not say at this time whether any of the other Committee Chairs or members had decided to attend.
If Issa is holding his own hearing simply to bash SOPA, it is unlikely that Smith, who, as Chairman of Judiciary, actually controls the progress of SOPA through the House at this point, will be sympathetic to Smith’s efforts to introduce said testimony to Judiciary.
More to the point, Smith has yet to actually decide when to resume the SOPA markup hearing and whether to hold any additional Judiciary hearings on the potential technical and cybersecurity effects of SOPA, as he said he would consider doing. Now that Issa has thrown down the gauntlet and launched a technical hearing of his own, perhaps Smith won’t be as inclined to hold any of his own in Judiciary.
There’s at least an argument to be made that the Oversight hearing will at least raise the public profile of SOPA and PIPA and if that happens, more voters may end up pressuring lawmakers to vote against it.
Indeed, the Oversight Committee Hearing gained even more attention after Reddit’s administrators on Tuesday announced they would be taking the so-called nuclear option, “blacking out” the entire website in protest of the proposed legislation.
Instead of the typical chaotic plethora of user-posted links, images, comics, discussions and other content that is usually hosted on the website (recently propelling it to 2 billion pageviews a month), Reddit will offer only a live video stream of the hearing and a simple message encouraging users to contact their Congressional representatives to tell them they are opposed to the bill.
However, as several Reddit commentators (Redditors) and tech writers outside of the website pointed out, much of Reddit is already opposed to the legislation, and not many members of Congress use Reddit, so it is unclear just how big of an impact the protest will have.
As such, several people have encouraged the blackout to be picked up by other websites, and on Thursday, Cheezburger, Inc. (the company behind LOL Cats, the FAIL blog and The Daily What, among others) announced it has joined suit. Wikipedia is also considering the idea.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a blackout of even more popular websites such as Google and Facebook — both of which are also strenuously opposed to the bill — not getting people’s attention.
But so far, those companies not actually committed to the January 18 blackout. A few weeks before the Reddit blackout was announced, Net Coalition — a trade organization that represents both Google and Facebook, along with a host of other companies, told CNET that there had been “serious discussions” about pursuing this option. We’ve reached out to Net Coalition to find out if those discussions have advanced or produced any plan-of-action and will update when we receive a response.
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
Wow, I agree with Issa....is this real life?
lmxb Agreed. Almost had vertigo there.
I feel like I ate the brown acid. Damn, but I hate it when that happpp..... fuckFUCKfuckkkkk!!! Bats!! Great hairyfukkinBATS!! EVERYWHERE!!!! It's gawddamned bat country all over again!!! lmxb
There's a countdown to the Blackout here http://vrsry.com/sopa
Are they playing Jenga in the photo?
Darrell Issa doing/saying something good is a jawdropper.
imfabulous13
Swine are awing and snow falls in Hades..
Techdirt has the story that Lamar Smith's pre-SOPA website had an unattributed (meaning illegally stolen) photo as it's background. Sleuths picked it up out of a cache; and are now spreading that story all over the internet.
They are asking that you CALL your Senators, loads of Dem's are on the list.
But sadly, SOPA and PIPA is the uterus to women in Congress and the Senate. Old white men who have no frackin' clue are trying to make decisions about something that they don't use, don't care about, and are too old to learn.
Seriously, do you honestly think your elected officials understand how the internet works?
The ONLY way this is going to work is if bloggers, social sites, Google, Yahoo, You-tube, etc., etc. literally put up a "Censored by SOPA" sign in preparation for this legislation.
And then watch the fun begin as elected officials websites are removed/blacklisted from the internet.
Wait till your MOM can't post one of her funny photo's on FB because she's linking.
But watch as CNN, TPM, MSNBC, Fox, etc. all scramble once their ISP turn them off while they investigate the stolen IP content.
And even funnier, watch as people are fined $150K, thrown in jail for five years -- and then realize that Michael Jackson's doctor who has been convicted of his death gets a shorter sentence of jail time.
Yes, all intelligence has left our Congressional and Senate offices.
As a Hispanic, CHOLO, GANGSTER & follower of the LOWRIDER culture from San Diego California, I hope the power of Rupert Murdoch & FOX News will be limited so they won't have an influence on future US elections.
chololoco1980 Well I'm glad to hear gangsters aren't fans of Fox News, but it might be nice if you guys stopped doing stuff like drive-by shootings, drug dealing and pimping too.
chololoco1980 I'm not sure what Fox has to do with this? This bill will sail through the Democrat controlled US Senate, and Democrat Obama will sign it. Your only hope to fight this thing is in the Republican House. Wake up Einstein.
Aftersevenchololoco1980 Obama and the White House has already threaten to veto it. He is a strongly opposed to it. Publicly
How does a lobbyist's fantasy bill get serious consideration in the halls of Congress? This unworkable mess points to representatives who are either clueless luddites or bought-and-paid-for corporatists. Perhaps both?
I'm surprised Reddit hasn't imploded over this. Good to see Ohanian will be on the scene. Meanwhile, you better have access to the Current network if you want to see coverage on a TV news channel. The media conglomerates are doing a stellar job of hiding this. They know the public would not stand for it.
janicemthomas money money money money.... Mooooney! Ask Lamar Smith (R-RIAA) how.
janicemthomas I still can't believe Leahy is so heavily involved in this POS, of all people.
Tim Seaverjanicemthomas And i still can't believe Al Franken supports this legislation and will not answer any of our e-mails or calls on it. The whole thing has become surreal to me. Here I am supporting Issa! WTF?
martyc35Tim Seaverjanicemthomas
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