Broadcast Flag Sneak Not Attempted

Trizero writes "THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet has shown that no amendments occured to the CJS Appropriations Bill. Monday, Slashdot covered the EFF announcing a rumor that a senator was attempting to sneak an amendment to bring the Broadcast Flag into law. From THOMAS (scroll down to the bottom): "6/21/2005: Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Approved for full committee consideration without amendment favorably." Translation: No one attempted to sneak the Broadcast flag into law." Update: 06/22 18:55 GMT by J : The EFF's new Activism Coordinator, Danny O'Brien, sees this as a victory for swift citizen action. Impressive numbers. Nice work by EFF and Public Knowledge, and everyone who raised their voice.

Comments

Re:So what happened?

[ntk]

It's not over yet.

Just between you, me, and a few other passing Slashdot folk, here's the extent of what we know: there's a senator who is (or was) friendly to the idea of dropping a BF amendment into the Senate Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.

There are a number of opportunities for them to do this: drop it in sub-committee (Tues), full committee (Thurs), or even later in the passage of the bill.

If it's an uncontroversial amendment, and you're a sneaky senator, you're better off dropping it in early, because then the job is done, and someone else has to fight to get it out of the bill.

The more controversial it becomes, the later you should place it (when the bill has some momentum, and fixes are harder).

The BF got a lot more controversial this week.

The campaign switched this to becoming the "Broadcast what?" amendment, to the "Is this that Godforsaken thing that's been melting my staffers phones all week?".

It was always an even split whether the sneak move would go in Tues or Thurs (which was why it was a 48 hour campaign, and we've been targetting the full Appropriations Committee). They could still try and stick it in tomorrow, but that's becoming increasingly unlikely (we're betting 50/50 right now). Too hot a potato.

Next stop in this line of attack would be an amendment on the senate floor, but there's some time to go before that.

I've written about the effect of your messages on the EFF site, but that's mostly statistics on exactly how big the response was (summary: for a campaign targetted at a few senators in a short time-frame, it was huge).

I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?