SOPA sponsors return: "think of the children"

The first paragraph is completely wrong. Of the things listed in the first paragraph as things the bill requires, not a single one is correct.

The only factual statement in that paragraph is the link to the bill text.

In fact, I cannot find any even remotely plausible (or even an implausible) way to misread the bill so as to come up with his claims. Either the author is simply lying (to generate controversy and traffic perhaps), or is just repeating something he got elsewhere and made no effort whatsoever to verify.

This is not HN quality material. Flagging.

For those curious, here's what is actually going on. Under current law, an ISP has to cough up certain customer information to the government upon a proper legal request. That information is name, address, phone number connection records or session times and durations, how long the customer has been a customer and what services they use, subscriber phone number or subscriber number, temporary network addresses, means and source of how they pay for the service (including credit card number if that is how they pay).

As far as I can see, there is no requirement that the ISP retain this information. They just have to make it available if they have it. Practically, of course, most of it will be retained for business purposes.

What this bill adds to this is that the ISP has to keep a log for one year of temporary IP address assignments and mapping of them to the customer information listed earlier. So, it's adding a new data item to log, and it is making it so that the customer information mentioned early has to be kept a year (which in practice is not a change because it is almost certainly kept anyway regardless of legal requirements).

It also adds a section that says that access to this information may not be compelled except by a government entity. This may be good news for those who are doing file sharing, as on first reading it would prevent plaintiffs in civil suits from getting access to the information.

Anyway, there is nothing whatsoever that will "have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times".

They could use a new book, they've finished reading Brave New World a while ago.

Lamar Smith, creator of SOPA and this bill, is the same guy who killed the "Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011". Proposed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul, he cut it down before it had a chance using his rank of chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

It would have pushed legislation from the federal to the state level. . A lot of our young ones are ruined in our current penal system over trivial crimes.

He is a staunch anti abortion activist, and has signed multiple bills to make abortion as difficult as possible, if not impossible. Even signing a bill to prevent a mother from taking her unborn over state lines to perform an abortion.

If you ever want to know my political opinion on something, just check Lamar Smiths' position, I'll be on the other end of it.

It isn't unusual for votes to go against their party faction, though the parties do generally have rules that allow the party to demand they follow the party line in certain situations, though they can't legally enforce that. The worst they can do is exclude said person. There have been a number of situations where there have been important cases where they've tried to enforce a specific vote and members have left the party in question in order to vote as they pleased, which makes the parties careful about when they use those mechanisms.

But the ability for smaller parties to get in also mean that each of the parties are far more homogenous than the US parties, for example, so it's natural for them to toe the party line to a reasonable extent for important votes. In US terms, most of the parties in the current Norwegian parliament would've been members of the Democratic Party, but in Norway that span is considered so wide that it would be unthinkable for any of the current parties to merge.

In terms of barriers, there's a 4% limit below which you need to get in on direct votes, but no other limits (other than being able to fill a list, so you need at most a couple of dozen people willing to put their names on each regional list for parliamentary elections - a low enough number that even parties with a few hundred members have no problems fielding lists in parliamentary electins). The way the Norwegian system works is that most seats are tied to a region, so there's, say (I haven't looked up the actual number recently), 18 seats for Oslo. Each party provides an ordered list. So for the first 2 people on a party list to get in on direct votes, they need the total number of votes for Oslo / number of seats * 2, or more.

All the parties that get more than 4% nationwide then shares in a pot of additional seats that are used to even out their share to best match the actual nationwide percentages. Which regional party list is awarded the seat depends on who got closest to getting in, but the party is determined based on proportion of the vote.

The combination of this is that small parties have a chance of getting in - it takes 15.000-20.000 or so votes per region to win a seat - and larger parties proportions are further evened out so there's no tactical advantages in fighting harder for "close" seats. At the same time a regional link is maintained, which tends to be one of the thing people like to use as an argument for single seat constituencies.

In terms of compromises, I think Belgium has a big problem because it is too disparate. Belgium has two alternatives: Devolution of power (or splitting the country up), or compromises that nobody will be happy with but that are still better for either side than if the other side were to shove things down their throat. When these types of compromises are bad it is usually a sign that both sides to some extent would prefer to shove decisions down the other sides throat, or they could've agreed to devolve more power to the regions...

Norway does have enough conflict too where neither side are happy, but that's the nature of a system that represents everyone reasonably well.