judiciarycommittee
Latest
Senate Republicans want to subpoena Twitter CEO over blocked Biden story
The company said the 'NY Post' article violated its rules on doxxing and hacked materials.
Google’s CEO will testify before Congress about bias and China
Google CEO Sundar Pichai will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in November, following the midterm elections. He met with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior Republicans Friday to discuss accusations that Google is biased against conservatives (a charge the company has denied). McCarthy told Reuters that Pichai had agreed to appear before the committee.
Watch tomorrow's social media congressional hearing right here
Hey, if you were wondering when we were going to get another congressional hearing about social media, you're in luck. On Tuesday, executives from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will testify before a House Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Examining the Content Filtering Practices of Social Media Giants." The people representing these tech companies are members of their public policy teams, so expect them to be grilled by US Representatives about the toxic and harmful content that shows up on each of their sites.
House Judiciary Committee hearing on social media called a 'hoax'
A few weeks after Mark Zuckerberg appeared in front of Congress, House Representatives once again discussed social media, however, this time the guests were a little different. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) convened a hearing on "Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms," without the attendance of any executives from Facebook, Twitter or Google in an event that ranking member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said "prioritized a hoax." Alongside David Chavern of the News Media Alliance and American Press Institute, Berin Szoka of TechFreedom and New York Law School professor Ari Waldman were self-titled social media stars Diamond and Silk.
Senate committee asks Facebook, Google and Twitter to testify on privacy
The list of people that want to hear from social media giants in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal keeps getting longer. Senator Ron Wyden wants to know how the data collection happened in the first place, and Facebook talked to Congressional staffers last week. The FTC is investigating the whole debacle, as well. Mark Zuckerberg is predictably sorry. Now the Senate Judiciary Committee has invited the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter to testify on April 10th over data privacy procedures.
Apple and FBI to testify at Congressional encryption hearing
As the battle between Apple and the FBI over unlocking a terrorist's iPhone rages on, the US House Judiciary committee will discuss encryption next week. The committee scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday (March 1st) where FBI director James Comey will testify alongside Apple SVP and general counsel Bruce Sewell. This isn't the first time the Judiciary committee has met on the subject of encryption, including briefings from both the government and representatives from tech companies.
SOPA hearing delayed until the new year as petition signatures top 25k
Hearings in the US House of Representatives to finish markup on the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) were slated to resume tomorrow, but it looks like things will remain at a standstill until next year. The holiday break has now pushed the committee hearing back to a yet-to-be-rescheduled date, with nothing more specific than "early next year" being promised at the moment. That news comes as a Whitehouse.gov petition asking President Obama to veto the bill and any future ones like it passed its goal of 25,000 signatures, well ahead of the January 17th deadline (as of this writing, the count stands around 29,000).
The AT&T / T-Mobile senate hearing: deciphering the war of words
Over the course of the next year, AT&T and its opponents will be in the ring, duking it out in a war of words in attempt to convince the government that a $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile by AT&T should or should not take place. Consumers have the most to win or lose here, yet we are resigned to watching from the sidelines as both sides lob countless facts and stats at each other like volleys in a tennis match. If you look at the merger process as a stairway to climb up, AT&T is still near the very bottom. Every rung will be full of intense scrutiny as it is: if the two companies are allowed to merge, the national GSM market becomes a monopoly, and the wireless industry as a whole would shift to only three national players plus a handful of less-influential regional carriers. The carrier's going to blow as much as $6 billion if the merger is not approved -- almost enough to buy Skype -- it can't just expect to put up some feel-good facts and stats to win the hearts of the decision-makers. AT&T has to be absolutely sure it'll come out victorious in the war, else it risks losing the trust (and money) of its shareholders. But to accomplish such a feat, it has to be on top of its game. There was no better time to show off what it's made of than last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing conducted by the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. When the Committee entitles a hearing "Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?," it's either exercising a sense of humor or a preconceived notion of the merger due to the implication that Ma Bell is simply reforming. CEO Randall Stephenson appeared as a sacrificial lamb, going before Congress and his opponents to explain his side of the story, answer hardball questions, and endure a hard-hitting round of criticism. Continue reading as we take you topic by topic and examine what he -- and his opponents -- had to say about the merger.
Senate committee hearing on mobile privacy now underway, watch live
You might want to put on a pot of coffee for this one, but the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on mobile privacy and locating tracking is now underway, and you can watch it live at your choice of the links below. The hearing is broadly titled "Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy" and, as the early going has already shown, it will be covering issues far beyond the recent privacy issues surrounding Apple and Google, although representatives from both companies will be on hand to answer the Senators' questions. Update: You can read Google's full testimony to the committee on its Public Policy Blog. Its main argument is that location-based services provide "tremendous value to consumers," but that they can't work without the trust of users, which is why it has made location sharing on Android devices "strictly opt-in." You can also read Apple's testimony here (PDF). In it, the company's Vice President of Software Technology, Bud Tribble, flatly reasserts that "Apple does not track users' locations -- Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." He also insists that the location data Apple has collected is actually the location of cellphone towers and WiFi hotspots, not the users' location, and that it is being used for a crowd-sourced database as it has previously stated. As an independent expert also testifying pointed out, however, that data could still be used to pin down a location or trace a person's movements to as close as a few hundred feet or so -- assuming they aren't in a rural area with few WiFi hotspots and cellphone towers.
