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EFF Offers Embeddable Congressional Twitter Detector to Combat CISPA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been campaigning furiously over the past few days against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known on the internet as CISPA. The EFF argue...
EFF Offers Embeddable Congressional Twitter Detector to Combat CISPA
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  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been campaigning furiously over the past few days against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known on the internet as CISPA. The EFF argues that CISPA, which would allow companies to share personal information relevant to any vaguely-defined “cyber threat” with the government and private security agencies, is simply a power grab by the U.S. government and corporations who want to censor the internet. I’m inclined to agree, and I’ll point out that CISPA’s language is filled with subtler allusions to censorship than the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was, which makes it all the more vaguely threatening.

    This week the EFF began a Twitter campaign that encouraged Twitter users to tweet their representative in congress to oppose CISPA. The point of the campaign was to tweet representatives, using the hashtag #CongressTMI, with boring details of online life that would be available to them under CISPA legislation.

    Now, the EFF has provided an embed-able “Twitter Handle Detection Tool” that identifies your congressperson’s Twitter handle based on your zip code. The embed uses the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Congress API which allows searches of basic information about members of congress. The Sunlight Foundation is nonpartisan non-profit that promotes transparency and openness in government.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t actually provide the embed in the article about it, so, here it is. I know it looks cut-off, but there are actually hidden scroll bars across the bottom and right sides of the embed. Go ahead, find your member of congress and tweet against CISPA. Even if you don’t oppose CISPA you probably want know your representative’s Twitter handle anyway, don’t you?

    You can get the code for the embed for the embed at the EFF deeplinks blog.

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