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Congressional Research Service Products: Taxpayers Should Have Easy Access. From the report: “$81 million of tax-payer money funded the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in FY 2002. CRS authors products at the request of current Members of Congress, many of whom become lobbyists, but CRS products are made difficult if not impossible for the public to …
Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) introduced H.R. 490, The Instructional Materials Accessibility Act of 2003, on January 29, 2003. The bill would “define the specific technical parameters of the national electronic file format to be used by publishers of instructional materials in the preparation of electronic files suitable for efficient conversion into specialized formats.” Thanks to …
Recent postings on the ABA SOLOSEZ listserv highlighted two useful resources for state law research, each compiled by members. From Bob Ambrogi, State Laws On The Internet, and from Frank J. Kautz II, A Directory of States that includes links to: state homepages, state courts, state statutes, state bar homepages, state consumer protection resources, and …
Congressional Quarterly’s legislative tracking tool, CQ.com, recently launched a re-designed portal with new features and enhanced services for subscribers, such as realtime breaking and analysis, a more user friendly interface, and options to personalize customer tracking and monitoring preferences using a “My CQ” feature. See the press release here.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), is the sponsor of S. 223, a bill to prevent identity theft, and for other purposes, introduced on January 28.
C-SPAN has a public service called CapitalHearings.org that allows you to listen live, via streaming audio, to selected Senate hearings. The site provides a schedule indicating the committee, time and location of each respective hearing.
Only a partial text is available to non-subscribers, but here is a link to a new Salon article, Total Information Awareness: Down, but not out, that contends Congressional efforts to limit the program may be a case of too little too late. “The federal government is unlikely to stop doing research into how to glean …
New Jersey State Senator Shirley K. Turner introduced Senate Bill No. 2245, the New Jersey Financial Information Privacy Act, that “protects privacy of an individual’s financial information by prohibiting disclosure without the prior informed, affirmative consent of the consumer.”
Senator John Edwards introduced the National Cyber Security Leadership Act of 2003, S. 187, “A bill to provide for the elimination of significant vulnerabilities in the information technology of the Federal Government, and for other purposes.” For more information, see this Government Computer News article.
This is actually a new posting on yet another net taxes moratorium bill, this one sponsored by Virginia Senator George Allen . “Senator Allen’s legislation will permanently ban taxes on Internet access, as well as taxes on Internet transactions by multiple jurisdictions, and discriminatory taxes that unfairly target Internet transactions.” The bill, the Internet Tax …
According to this press release from the House Committee on Financial Services, Rep. James A. Leach reintroduced the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act in the 108th Congress. See H.R. 566 for the text of this bill from the 107th Congress. The new bill number is H.R. 21 (not yet available on Thomas). For reference, …
A new Missouri law went into effect on January 1, 2003 that “requires public (elementary and secondary) schools and public libraries that provide access to the Internet to either: use filtering software; purchase Internet service through a provider that provides filter services; or otherwise restrict minors’ access to the Internet by local rule.”
