

Show HN: My (late) holiday hack: SOPAOpera.org - danso
http://sopaopera.org/

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dlikhten
NY Senators are paid well. 500k for both NY senators. Crazy.

And Al Franklet is a supporter? Something is wrong here....

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bayleo
Franken is one of the co-sponsors of PIPA.

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pasbesoin
He comes out of / is a product of the entertainment industry. What did you
expect?

Also, "Hollywood" had long been a... "bastion" of Democratic support. And, of
course, the juice flows both ways.

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seagreen
It might be useful to be able to toggle a "Details of next election" overlay,
bringing up info on how vulnerable each representative is in his or her next
primary and general elections. This would allow people to focus attention on
the few representatives who have close races coming up.

My guess is these candidates will be by far the most receptive to public
opinion.

Even better would be to include information on challengers and their stance on
SOPA as well. That would make it easy to focus attention on ideal candidates:
those who are for SOPA and have close races coming up against challengers who
are against it. Maybe we can get a couple of them to switch.

Let me know if you think that's a good idea and want help implementing it. My
email's in my profile.

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danso
You read my mind...I had actually thought about that and put it off
because...the FEC data is just an annoying unnormalized Excel spreadsheet. It
wouldn't be hard to include, I just didn't get to it yet.

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seagreen
Another good feature would be a summary of how SOPA currently stands, or a
link to a website that has that information and keeps it current.

I love HN, but it is NOT the place to get up to date political info. I believe
at one point there were articles saying "SOPA postponed until January" and
"SOPA will be voted on before Christmas" up at the same time.

Also, a lot of those representatives have facebook pages. Is it worth SOPA
opponents time to go on there and give them a hard time in the comments, or
should we stick to phone calls? It might be worth including a link to their FB
pages anyway, though I'm not sure on this one.

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danso
Yep, that was one of my feature creep ideas too:

<http://sopaopera.org/sopa/>

Unfortunately I decided on an ad-hoc database model for "Events" (when I
originally just wanted to record statements by congressmembers) and never
quite got reorganized in time. Not too hard to rectify, of course.

In case you're wondering, there is an official place to get this info...the
Library of Congress's THOMAS system: <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@X>

There's still a lot of space for people who can create the links between
entities, though...

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stcredzero
Let me take the devil's advocate position:

This new Internet thing is threatening the business models of some of my
biggest supporters, as well as aiding illegal activity. A legal remedy would
seem to be in order.

Is this a free speech issue? No. People will still have the right to make new
websites or post on websites what do not infringe, or go on talk radio or
publish newspapers, so they will still have free speech.

A bunch of scofflaws just want free downloads, and websites naturally don't
want to be saddled with enforcing things. A legal remedy would seem to be in
order.

The question we need to ask ourselves, is how do we reach people who think
like this? Once we've done that, then the legislators will have to listen.

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obtu
Nice. Is there a data source for amendments? Is there a way to tag the people
who are in the Judiciary committee?

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danso
Yeah....that info is actually in there, on the profile...obviously, that's not
of much help. I originally envisioned this as showing every active member as
once but realized that sending 500 images on every frontpage load would be
annoying...So, not all judiciary members will be visible. I guess I could just
put them on their own page.

The House committee markup page can be found here:
<http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/mark_12152011.html>

One think I've learned (even more clearly than I knew beforehand) was that our
government is not very data-oriented. You can tell from the amendment voting
that there are a few people (who I didn't have time to go through and include)
who could be classified as opponents because they are voting in a bloc with
Issa and the other OPEN act advocates during the amendment process.

However, to programmatically parse that...requires OCR fun:
[http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/12152011RC3%20-%20Is...](http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/12152011RC3%20-%20Issa%20Amdt7.pdf)

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science_robot
Suggestion: add sort by state.

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danso
My bad...that had been in there and I must have deleted it accidentally. Now
it's back in. Thanks for pointing that out.

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Lukeas14
It's amazing how diverse each side is in terms of democrats vs. republicans
considering how partisan every other recent issue has been. What's the
dividing line? Education about tech and the internet maybe?

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jonnathanson
_"What's the dividing line?"_

Probably sources of campaign financing, and/or makeup of companies and
industries doing business in one's represented state.

This isn't a partisan issue, so much as a "who butters my bread?" issue.

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wallawe
Great job! Makes it easy to get all of the information in one place.

I just made a call to my representative (whose position was not stated) and
the person who answered was "not allowed to comment on it."

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rosariom
Nice holiday hack! Are you planning to keep it up-to-date? I would like to
visit it every now and then to track updates along side other sites I have
been checking for SOPA related stuff

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danso
Yes...the low hanging fruit has mostly been collected. The fact of the matter,
from what I can tell, is that on any given issue, most representatives won't
say what their position is because they don't _have to_...there are very few
legislators like Ron Paul who are just going to just say whatever they think
when put on the spot.

So, other than the official co-sponsors, to determine someone's position, I
just extrapolated from any historical information. For example, anyone who was
on the judiciary committee who approved of PROTECT-IP's precursor (COICA in
2010) is likely, as far as we can know, a supporter of PROTECT-IP too.

I don't think such judgments of position can be made on campaign donations
alone though. So it's an interesting challenge to think of ways to discern how
engaged a Congressmember is on an issue based on the less publicized
interactions he/she may have. Hopefully there's an easy way to collect such
information that doesn't involve being a full-time researcher...but I plan to
collect what I can and update for the time being.

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rosariom
Thanks sounds like you have a good plan... Amazing that officials can keep
quiet on issues until they vote... I think your approach can at least provide
hints and motivate people to call and get direct answers

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colanderman
Nitpick: for some reason everyone's chin is cut off. This is in Opera and
Chrome. Otherwise looks really cool!

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danso
Yeah, I got a little aggressive in my background-position setting (fixed it a
bit). The problem is that some portraits are close ups, and others are two-
thirds body...hard to get chins in the former without cutting off heads in the
latter :)

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ThaddeusQuay2
What's most surprising here is that these lawmakers are being bought off for
so little, especially when you consider how much money the backers of these
special interest groups have, and even more so when you consider how much
financial damage these laws will cause to the average Joe and Jane Internet.

