Bill Banning Employer Requests for Facebook Passwords Reaches the House

Mashable - At the end of March, we learned members of the United States Congress were looking into drafting a bill that would disallow employers from asking potential hires for private login information for their Facebook accounts. States had been instituting laws on their own, but after more and more stories came out about people feeling pressured to hand over their private information by someone in the position of giving them a job, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said enough was enough — this is something that needs to be dealt with on a national level. And now, the Social Networking Online Protection Act has made it to the House of Representatives while the Senate continues to work on its own version. Important question: Do we get to call it SNOPA? I’m going to call it SNOPA.

SNOPA was introduced on Friday by Reps. Eliot Engel (NY) and Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and would ban employers from requiring someone to hand over their username or password to a social networking account. In case you’re keeping track of party lines, Engel and Schakowsky are Democrats, but Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is a Republican and was also working on a draft. So, this could very well have a lot of bipartisan support. We can all agree on this: human resources should not have the right to demand to poke around in our private business.            More

Stand Up and Fight: A Week of Action Against Internet Censorship

EFF - When the government claims the right to shut down websites by breaking the Domain Name System and forcing search engines to dump user requests to reach a site, there’s only one word for it: censorship. And when big media groups like the RIAA can essentially cut off the financial services to a website based on accusation alone, it’s censorship at the hands of corporations.

We’re not talking about China or Iran. We’re talking about blacklist legislation being debated by the U.S. House of Representatives this week.

EFF and a coalition of organizations, tech companies, innovators, and users are joining forces to fight back against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that would give the government and big content unprecedented authority to censor the web in the name of so-called copyright enforcement. This week, we need to pull out all the stops because the House Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a critical hearing on Thursday.

SOPA’s supporters are desperate to rush this bill through quickly by convincing Congress there’s no real opposition to it. We know better, but we need to make our voices heard. That’s why we’re calling on you to join us in a dedicated week of action against the SOPA blacklist bill.                 More