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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Regardless if SOPA passes or not, let's make sure every single one of the people voting pro-SOPA and supporting it loses their position in Congress at the next elections.

We need to start being more pro-active about protecting the Internet, because it's obvious Congress won't do it for us, or at least not enough of them will try to do it. Otherwise we risk being in the same situation a year from now with a new SOPA/PIPA-like law.

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I considered this as an idea for a startup. Whenever legislation like this comes up, you pull up an app on your phone and express support or opposition. Then, whenever you go to vote, the app will infer which candidates you are looking at based on your location, and will show you the pluses and minuses of each candidate according to what you support/oppose.

That would be cool, actually, as a good way to help people keep tabs on what Congress is up to according to the things they support or oppose. It would be nice to have something that made some kind of report card and graded them on the things you care about, preferably with links so you could see how they voted on each thing and what the bills actually said or any responses they gave to why they voted for that, just to avoid punishing them for voting against cleverly misnamed legislation.

I've been thinking about that too. Mostly just a DB of who voted for what. Then you can punch in how you would like them too vote, and it does some basic best-match goodness. Although, does it even need to be a startup, I feel like this could almost be someone's weekend project. Is there a government site that info can be scraped from?

[edit] searching for said data, I found www.govtrack.us, which seems to do mostly this. They seem to like the idea that others start using their data.

Our confidence in congress has been declining rapidly for years. Last month, a poll reported 9% of the population thought they were doing a good job. They literally don't have 10% to lose. They've learned that they can do anything they want and we won't do anything about it.

The problem with those types of polls is that they measure support for Congress as a whole. Only 9% of Americans think that Congress is doing a good job, but the real issue is how many people still think their Congress(wo)man is doing just fine.

Everybody thinks it's somebody else's problem, and as soon as those somebodies else stop being idiots, things will change. Nobody realizes that they are somebody else's somebody else.

And that's the problem. My congressman opposes SOPA, but yours may support it. I can change my congressman in the next election, but I can't affect yours.

Congress ends free speech, and their punishment is.. early retirement? In that case, I should become a senator!

Are you American?

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