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Someone Built a Tool To Get Congress' Browser History (vice.com)

A software engineer in North Carolina has created a new plugin that lets website administrators monitor when someone accesses their site from an IP address associated with the federal government. It was created in part to protest a measure signed by President Trump in April that allows internet service providers to sell sensitive information about your online habits without needing your consent. Motherboard reports: A new tool created by Matt Feld, the founder of several nonprofits including Speak Together, could help the public get a sense of what elected officials are up to online. Feld, a software engineer working in North Carolina, created Speak Together to share "technical projects that could be used to reduce the opaqueness between government and people," he told Motherboard over the phone. "It was born out of just me trying to get involved and finding the process to be confusing." The tool lets website administrators track whether members of Congress, the Senate, White House staff, or Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staff are looking at their site. If you use Feld's plug-in, you'll be able to see whether someone inside government is reading your blog. You won't be able to tell if President Trump viewed a web page, but you will be able to see that it was someone using an IP address associated with the White House. The tool works similarly to existing projects like CongressEdits, an automated Twitter account that tweets whenever a Wikipedia page is edited from IP addresses associated with Congress.

17 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Nice by nospam007 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just hope he will donate that tool free of charge to pornhub if they give him the data they collect.

    1. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      porn hub is a business, they aren't in the habit of burning their best customers.

    2. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "porn hub is a business, they aren't in the habit of burning their best customers."

      If that were true there'd be a lot less malware on their page.

    3. Re:Nice by Higaran · · Score: 2

      Forever, just ask facebook, and google.

    4. Re:Nice by courteaudotbiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When you get stuff for free, you ARE the product. The stuff you get for free is the bait.

  2. Misleading headline by the_saint1138 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This does not have anything to do with Congress' browser histories.

    This tool makes it easier to determine if Congress visits YOUR WEBSITE ONLY.

    This info is in the summary, but come on SlashDot, there is no need for the clickbait headlines.

  3. Hilarious by Orgasmatron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is good. The website end has always been able to store visitor information and do whatever the hell it wants with it. So, this guy writes a tool that uses the #1 privacy invasion in the world today to protest letting ISPs store which IP addresses clients on your home network connect to, which doesn't even crack the top 100, thanks to SSL and browsers pushing auto-SSL.

    Just for comparison, Facebook knows who you are, where you live, what and where you like to eat, who your friends are, what your politics are, what websites you visit, what products you purchase, and everything else about you. What does you ISP know about you? They know that you spend a lot of time on Facebook.

    Oh, but Zuckerberg is a progressive and Trump is a Republican. Everyone get your pitchforks and torches so we can go protest the second one.

    --
    See that "Preview" button?
    1. Re:Hilarious by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can avoid using Facebook.

      I cannot avoid using my ISP.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Hilarious by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Trump is a Republican.

      Trump may be many things be he isn't a Republican. The Republican Party was a convenient tool for him to use for his own ends; but in the end he only cares about what is best for Trump, the Republican Party or anyone else be damned. If destroying the Republican Party enables him to get the adulation he so desperately craves he'll be the first to toss on gasoline and light a match.

      --
      I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    3. Re:Hilarious by kainosnous · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I can avoid using Facebook.

      I cannot avoid using my ISP.

      You can use a VPN to hide your traffic from your ISP. They would only know when and how much your location makes connections. VPN technology is pretty easy to setup and is generally good for security.

      On the other hand, to block Facebook, you would have to null route their hostnames. That can become a chore. Even if you don't intend to visit Facebook, unless they are null routed somehow, simply surfing most popular sites will connect you to Facebook. And that's just one site. There's tons of other trackers on the web, and most people couldn't even name a few of them. Yes, there are tools to restrict these, but they aren't as effective as a simple VPN.

      --
      There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
  4. in Sweden, 'creeper' has been around for ages. by ard · · Score: 3, Informative

    So here's an existing system tracking Media and government access in Sweden:

    https://mediacreeper.com/index
    http://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste

    Basically, you put the 'creeper' tag on your home page, and it logs accesses from netblocks known to be used by media and gov't.

  5. Re:Trump viewing a web page? by Nidi62 · · Score: 2

    Trump's national security briefings include little text, many pictures and a box of crayons.

    Still sounds more useful than Trump's circle jerk Cabinet meetings where all the Cabinet members prostrate themselves and praise him like they are a bunch of North Koreans seeing Kim Jong Un

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  6. Re:Gitmo in 3, 2, 1... by AC-x · · Score: 3, Informative

    You do realize that Trump is not a SoCon right?

    He is very big on "security" though -

    "We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” - Trump, Nov 2015

    "We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people." - Trump, Dec 2015

  7. Re:Gitmo in 3, 2, 1... by AC-x · · Score: 4, Insightful

    NeoCons (ex Socialists who became Conservative in the 1970s - and their intellectual descendants) who, as we all know, are big interventionists.

    George W Bush and Dick Chaney are ex-Socialists? Never heard that one before!

    Trump is for security against Islamofascism.

    Lets not forget as well as hating privacy he also hates freedom of speech -

    "I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money."

    I hope he's not into nation building and other such things (so far no indication of that).

    Indeed, in fact he's very into nation destroying right now.

    Trump is for the US following existing law regarding immigration.

    What I'm talking about affects American Citizens, not immigrants.

    He's not an ideologue for either free trade

    He refused to label China a currency manipulator, refused to withdraw from NAFTA, hasn't reviewed "foreign trade practices that hurt American workers", so his anti-globalization stance has been luke-warm at best.

    or interventionism

    Stepping up bombing campaigns counts as intervention.

    You mock him with the Bill Gates quote. I hope you, like me, equally mock AntiFa and SJW

    They're not the president, they don't control the house, they don't control the senate. Trump and the Republicans do, so when they say they want to do something that attacks freedom of speech, privacy or liberty, you should actually take notice because they have the actual political power to enact it.

  8. Re:Gitmo in 3, 2, 1... by GLMDesigns · · Score: 2
    The original NeoCons were ex-Socialists from the 1960s who became conservative in the 1970s. They formed the intellectual framework of what we call Neo-Cons. They convinced others of their interventionist viewpoint and became an important force in the Republican Party during the 1990s. Patrick Buchanan and other (those we now call PaleoCons) railed against the NeoCon viewpoint.

    This quote from Wikipedia is pretty good:

    The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism.[2] Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism.[3][4] The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee.[5][6] They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement.[7][8] C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973),[9] though in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse.

    --
    If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
    Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
  9. Re:Gitmo in 3, 2, 1... by AC-x · · Score: 2

    Trump is for security against Islamofascism.

    Oh, and don't forget he did a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the one of the world's biggest exporters of Islamofascism extremism, Saudi Arabia...

  10. Re:Gitmo in 3, 2, 1... by GLMDesigns · · Score: 2

    What makes neo Conservatism separate from Paleo Conservatism is

    1. foreign interventionism.
    2. the rejection of social issues.
    3. the general thought that the success of international trade (multi-national companies) is good for world peace and the world economy.

    Paleo Conservatives were

    1. isolationists
    2. thought social issues were of primary importance
    3. were more for main street economy and jobs in the US (as opposed to multi-national companies) and were for tariffs.

    The quintessential PaleoConservative was Patrick Buchanan -

    1. opposed to the Gulf War
    2. big on social issues
    3. against NAFTA, etc...

    --
    If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
    Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond