The face of Occupy Wall Street for many of those who've never made it to New York City says he’s under increasing attack from other protesters, and was assaulted recently during a march.

Tim Pool, a mini-celebrity for giving OWS the Walter Cronkite treatment through his nonstop web-based, TimCast live video stream, was involved in some kind of scuffle at around 9:30 p.m.  Sunday night -- there is, of course, video evidence. On other occasions, marchers have been seen harassing him and yelling for him to turn off his camera.  And there are ominous statements directed at him online, like this one: "I suggest you stick by his side because unfortunately he's probably going to need protection."

The conflict surrounding Pool raises myriad issues for Occupy Wall Street, as it wrestles with tension between goals of transparency to the public but secrecy to protect members from arrest and to stay one step ahead of police.

It also reveals some of the fundamental tensions facing journalists covering protests, or anyone wielding a camera in the ever-increasing world of always-on video.

For his part, Pool doesn't mince words about his predicament.

"I probably will get severely injured in these next coming months,” he said. “...I pretty much expect to wind up in the hospital. The threats I'm hearing, with words like 'protection' in them, sound awfully Mafioso."

Pool has been called a snitch who has helped police identify protesters for arrest. But he says transparency is one of the primary goals of Occupy Wall Street and he plans to keep his camera on, no matter what it reveals -- even events that might be counterproductive to the protesters' cause.

In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, when the protest was confined to and then kicked out of, Zuccotti Park, Pool was treated like a rock star. His live stream was regularly viewed by 10,000 or more Internet users, many of whom were following the movement from across the globe. He was eventually profiled by several major media outlets, including msnbc.com, in a story named “A Ustream star is born”.

But tensions began to mount during a march in November when protesters let air out of police squad car tires and Pool showed the alleged vandalism on camera, refusing to stop streaming when protesters yelled at him to turn off his equipment.

Pool straddles a delicate line between being part of the Occupy Wall Street movement and an objective observer. He said he is not actually a member, but also declined to call himself an "outside journalist." 

“I'm trying to help people understand what's happening and make a clear report," he said. "We cannot rely on the mainstream media to do that."

But he says some members expect him to show only video that helps the cause.

"That would be propaganda. ... I don't take orders," Pool said.  "I film what's happening around me. I do it because people need to know what's going on. ... In reality, anybody who throws a bottle should be accountable for their actions. They should be upset at themselves for being in the vicinity of cameras when they do it."

Pool said he's received veiled threats ever since the November incident, with critics becoming more vocal in recent days. There have even been accusations that he's getting paid by law enforcement.

On Sunday night,  one such critic shined a light directly into Pool's camera in an effort to block his stream.  Then, a scuffle ensued with another unidentified person. While Pool lost control of the camera, it never shut off.  After about 10 seconds of yelling, someone yelled, "I have Tim's phone (and camera) but I don't know where he is." Later someone shouted, "Someone just attacked Tim."  Moments later, Pool can be heard saying, "He just chopped my arm and smashed my camera. ... The dude hit me because he doesn't want me streaming."

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Tim Pool

(The incident occurs at about the 17:30 timecode on this recording)

The alleged assailant was wearing a mask, as were many protesters that night, participating in a type of march called a Black Bloc. While some alleged images of him are circulating on the Web, he has not been identified.

Pool, while shaken, was uninjured and says he would not press charges against the alleged attacker. He also said he won't stop streaming the protests, come what may. 

In another video from that night, Pool got in a shouting match with protesters who demand that he not show their faces. 

"Put your f%$#g camera away and get the f%$#g out of here. You have no respect," said one.  A more moderate voice chimes in: "Sir, this would be a lot easier if you would just put the camera down."

Pool held his ground firmly: "Information is free. ... Transparency is what brings me here. ... transparency prevails.”

Among Pool’s detractors is Occupy organizer Jason Ahmadi, who recently told “The Atlantic” that "the growing sentiment among people is that Tim, specifically, is putting people in danger and is serving as a tool for the police, whether he’s aware of it or not." Said another, Patrick Bruner:  "Many individuals don’t want to be filmed by him, including me. ... The larger issue is the ethics of filming someone without their permission."

In the rumor-laden world of Occupy Wall Street, discussions of larger issues can be challenging. One Twitter user recently wrote that Pool "just tried to help NYPD arrest an occupier." There also are claims that the man who attacked Pool was actually a law enforcement official trying to cause trouble -- "it was either that or an anarchist," Pool said.  Of course, it's always possible someone was merely trying to steal his equipment, though that seems unlikely given the context.

On Tuesday, he spent much of the afternoon trying to beat back claims that he was profiting from his efforts and had already collected nearly $100,000.

"That's just not true," Pool told msnbc.com, saying donors have given him a little more than $10,000, which he’s using to pay for streaming costs.

He also said he has no plans to change tactics.  "I do what I do. I stand by my principle in regards to spreading the truth.  I will not compromise. The people deserve the truth above all else."

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UP FOR DISCUSSION

Because Thursday is Data Privacy Day, and thanks to Google's new privacy policy, Tuesday was “You’ve Lost More Privacy Day,” Helen Popkin and I began a dialog, one that will continue tomorrow in an open chat with readers.

From: Helen Popkin
To: Bob Sullivan
Given that the privacy policies for all Google products just got put in a BlendTec, and Facebook, Twitter and MySpace programmers have put together the “Don’t Do Evil” search engine, is it time to talk about what Google is really risking here?

-------

From: Bob Sullivan 
To: Helen Popkin

I have two immediate thoughts.

1) I think most users believed this “shared across all Google properties” thing was already true.  I mean, maybe you don’t quite connect YouTube video with Gmail ... but your Gmail ads already “read” your email. So what if they reflect recent videos you’ve watched, too?  I think this idea of data sharing across divisions is standard across financial services companies (why Bank of America customers get offers from Merrill Lynch). In other words, is this *really* new? Remember the old Larry Ponemon privacy interest scale which says that 60 percent of Americans say they care about privacy, but their actions belie their words; 33 percent say, “I have nothing to hide?” and only 7 percent are really privacy activists willing to take steps to protect their privacy. I suspect most users won’t notice this change, or if they do, it won’t be enough to nudge them to change their search engine habits.

2) The risk Google is taking here — and I think it’s a big one — is in blending Google Plus contributions with its search algorithm. Google Plus is still largely populated by early adopters, and many of them went there seeking greater privacy controls than Facebook had at the time G+ launched. Now, many avid social networkers there feel betrayed. While the general population tends to forget such insults, early adopters do not.  Many of them are privacy activists, and it’s very bad form to anger your early adopters. On the other hand, SearchEngineLand.com’s Danny Sullivan says that most of the frustration on this point isn’t from Google users — who haven’t complained much at all — but rather from wonks who are raising issues about it. (Read more about this issue here.)

3) OK, a bonus thought. At a time when Facebook is offering more granularity in its privacy settings (such as they are), Google is killing granularity here. Couldn’t you see some people being OK with all this sharing as long as YouTube wasn’t included? What about the contents of Google docs? If a user finds any of this spooky, there’s nothing he or she can do about it. And that’s trouble. 

4) OK, bonus thought two: There’s a steady, sad progression where companies like Google and Facebook encroach more and more on privacy, see what kind of firestorm they have to endure, and then try something else. I fear they are learning that the bar for really causing a cause celeb online is very, very high. Bit by bit, these large Web companies are becoming more emboldened by each incident like this.

5) Last bonus thought. I wonder if Google’s positive vibes from SOPA (“Hey, those Google folks stood up for us against the government!”) will afford the firm a partial mulligan for this.

---- 

From: Helen Popkin
To: Bob Sullivan

1) Blah blah blah. If we really cared about protecting our personal information, "password" wouldn't be a popular password and IT managers wouldn't have to enforce regularly changed and increasingly complicated log-ins that require both lower-case and capped letters, numbers, some sort of punctuation, and, I predict in the near future, wingdings. What we really want is a fat lady in a painting to guide us through our stuff, like them lucky kids in Gryffindor, but I digress.

Your average technology layperson won't care about Google's user data and privacy policy integration until #GoogleIsEvil starts trending on Twitter.

2) Re: "The risk Google is taking here – and I think it’s a big one — is in blending Google Plus contributions with its search algorithm." See above.  

That said, Google is for sure getting desperate — hence collating its user data and privacy policies into one super product, while screwing other social networks via its new social search. "Facebook" is increasingly replacing of "Just Google it," in how we operate on the Internet,  and Facebook is capitalizing on its increasing presence as a portal of information by actively courting news outlets, as well as other sorts of information sites — along with e-commerce, of course — to create a strong Facebook presence to attract clicks.

3) Re: Granular privacy settings. Many people are still operating under Facebook's default settings (which are open to share the most of your info). We like privacy as an idea but in reality, we barely notice. It's a fact of Internet life people are already inured to — the Antiqued Pine Provence Bed, handcrafted in vintage pine reclaimed from floor joints of early 20th-century Midwest barns, which I'll never buy nonetheless haunts via ads on most any non-ecommerce website I visit hours after I leave the Sundance Catalog website where it lives, just because I clicked on the ugly-ass, overpriced  thing once. Once! (Ok, maybe twice.)  Such benign following we hardly notice, and it's right in our face.

It's not new that your Google search results are impure — your results are already based on your previous Internet behavior. Google's social search just makes that gated Internet community even smaller. Facebook, for all its Google smack talk, does the same thing. People are getting more and more of their information from Facebook, but what we see first on Facebook is based on our clicking behavior on that site, and off as well, depending on how much you've locked down your Facebook privacy.  

4) Google, Facebook etc., are always seeing what they can get away with. Check out how much both those companies are increasingly spend on D.C. lobbying budgets. Google spent $9.7 million on lobbying in 2011, up 88 percent from 2010. Facebook spent comparatively modest $1.4 million — but it's a 284 percent more than Facebook's 2010 lobbying budget.

Neither of those amounts are insane compared to other monoliths — Big Pharma is in the triple-digit millions — but those budgets gets bigger every year. Corporations that lobby are also more likely to spend money to get legislation to bend their way than to actually throw it in to something that benefits their customers.

5) Will Google lose its positive SOPA vibes? Sure, if Facebook has its way. As we saw with SOPA, if you rile up the masses via viral Facebook posts and trending hashtags, anything's possible. As you've already mentioned, Facebook, working with Twitter and MySpace (tee-hee), built a search bookmarklet to circumvent Google's social search — which throws those sites to the dogs — and called it "Don't Be Evil," mocking the guiding principal Google famously declared early on. Oh snap Facebook, Twitter and MySpace!

It's not the first time Google's had this thrown in its face, but "evil" is exactly what grabbed everyone's attention with SOPA, if another company can make "evil" stick to its competitor, what better way to sway public opinion.

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about privacy and then asks her to join her on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+. Because that's how she rolls.

Here’s a lot more reading material on Don’t Do Evil and the rest of the issues raised by Google’s announcement:

• Google’s Broken Promise: The End of "Don’t Be Evil"
• You Call That Evil?   (A good opposing viewpoint)
• How To: Escape From Google’s Clutches, Once and For All
• Google Stockpiles Data Ammo Through Privacy Merge, Guns To Win Relevancy War
• It seems Google's social search is here to stay — Larry Page told employees if they didn't like it, they should hit the road (Google denies that his happened)

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Monday’s Supreme Court ruling invalidating a conviction based on evidence gained by GPS tracking of a suspect's car might seem like a victory for privacy advocates. But on the critical issues of privacy and Fourth Amendment rights, the majority of the court actually punted. 

The unanimous opinion issued Monday morning is among the first in which the Supreme Court has decided a case at the thorny 21st-Century intersection of law, technology and privacy.  Police in Washington, D.C., had tracked a suspect by placing a tiny GPS device on his car, then tracking his movements for about a month. While the trial court held that evidence obtained through the GPS amounted to surveillance of the suspect's movements through public spaces, an appeals court ruled that it constituted an illegal search and seizure and a violation of Fourth Amendment rights.  The Supreme Court affirmed the decision. 

There was a remarkable amount of disagreement, however, in this unanimous decision. The court issued perhaps the narrowest ruling possible -- essentially that placement of the GPS on the car constituted a violation of property and effects rights, akin to trespassing, therefore spoiling any evidence garnered through the process.  Left undecided: What rights do citizens have when law enforcement uses other technological methods to track their whereabouts?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, while concurring with the decision, delivered a separate opinion dripping with disappointment.

"With increasing regularity, the government will be capable of duplicating the monitoring undertaken in this case by enlisting factory- or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones. In cases of electronic or other novel modes of surveillance that do not depend upon a physical invasion on property, the majority opinion’s trespassory test may provide little guidance," she wrote.

Electronic law expert Mark Rasch, former head of the Justice Department's Computer Crime unit, said the opinion has "almost given carte blanche to law enforcement to go ahead and try to find their way around" the ruling, such as enlisting the help of cell phone providers to track citizens in their cars.

Sotomayer clearly regretted that the majority did not take the opportunity to make a more definitive ruling on privacy and Fourth Amendment rights, Rasch said. In her opinion she raised the complex issue of law enforcement agencies increasingly using private firms to aid in surveillance and evidence gathering. Rules governing evidence originally obtained by third parties are unclear, but generally offer fewer rights that rules governing law enforcement investigative techniques.

"This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks," Sotomayer wrote. "People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. … I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every website they had visited in the last week, or month, or year."

Justice Samuel Alito also seemed frustrated by the court's failure to take on the deeper issues raised in the GPS tracking case.

"(This opinion) largely disregards what is really important (the use of a GPS for the purpose of long-term tracking) and instead attaches great significance to something that most would view as relatively minor -- attaching to the bottom of a car a small, light object that does not interfere in any way with the car’s operation,” he wrote in a concurring opinion.  "By contrast, if long-term monitoring can be accomplished without committing a technical trespass — suppose, for example, that the federal government required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include a GPS tracking device in every car — the court’s theory would provide no protection."

The Justice Department had asked for even more sweeping evidence-gathering rights. It argued that placement of the GPS device on the suspect's car was akin to other forms of electronic evidence-gathering that the court has already allowed. The most analogous situation, the Justice Department argued, was placing a homing beacon, or "beeper," in a device that is given to a suspect – for example, in the case cited by Justice, when illicit chemicals with a beeper attached were sold by a cooperating witness to a suspect.  But such beepers are placed into property with the permission of a third party and then accepted voluntarily by a suspect. That differs greatly from law enforcement attaching a gadget to a suspect's car, the court found. That makes the act less like surveillance and more akin to a search, affording it Fourth Amendment requirements.

"The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. "We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted."

Scalia was comfortable stopping there.

"It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question," he wrote, in a direct answer to Sotomayer's complaint. "There is no reason for rushing forward to resolve them here."

Rasch found deep faults in Scalia's logic. Police "attach" things to citizens' automobiles all the time. Parking tickets, for example, or chalk marks as a reminder to meter maids that cars may have exceeded hourly requirements. The act of installing something on a car is not itself trespassing, he argued – it’s the act of using such a device to track a citizens' movement over time without a warrant that raises constitutional issues. 

"'Hands off my car,' is the best way I can put this ruling," he said, adding that he thought the court had failed by issuing such a narrow ruling.

"They've avoided the issue. They were asked to address the Fourth Amendment issues, and they decided a trespassing case," he said. "You don't need the Supreme Court for that." 

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SOPA – Maybe I’m for it after all.

I’m as adamant a supporter of Web free speech as you’ll find. And there’s a lot to dislike about the Stop Online Piracy Act. But when my stories about Web free speech are stolen and posted in their entirety by “rogue” websites, my head hurts. Stealing content is a funny way to prove your anti-SOPA credentials.

Opponents of controversial anti-piracy legislation called SOPA have been gaining momentum in the past week, and on Wednesday, their show of muscle reached orgasmic proportions.  Perhaps swept up in the excitement of a protest that seems to be working, a long list of websites copied in its entirety a story I wrote about it over the weekend and placed it on their own sites. Here’s one example, viewed early Wednesday afternoon.

Sure, msnbc.com’s name appears there, but the Web site in question gets the clicks and the revenue.  Not fair, I’m sure you’d agree.

For good fun, this “pirate” version seems to have been run through a translator, and back again. So my, “Opponents of controversial federal anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA seem to be picking up steam,” has been mangled into, “Opponents of argumentative sovereign anti-piracy legislation famous as SOPA seem to be picking adult steam.”

It’s the people who steal content and claim they are protected by free speech who are full of adult steam, otherwise known as hot air. I have no patience for Internet users who copy movies, music or software whole-hog, share it with their friends for free and then cry foul at efforts to stop this.

Of course, I haven’t been singled out for story theft.  You can find rogue copies of almost every msnbc.com story – and any NYTimes.com, and any CNN.com story – all over the Internet. I’m not talking about “aggregated” versions, which are gently rewritten copies of someone else’s work, made famous by the Huffington Post. I mean total rip-offs. 

I’m not in favor of SOPA. Blacklisting entire domains is a terrible idea that seems to have been beaten back by reason. Jailing alleged pirates would be Draconian in most cases.  Using the U.S. Justice Department to enforce multinational corporations’ intellectual property rights through the criminal court system makes me queasy.  Placing the burden of proof on small websites to show they aren’t violating copyrights is a dangerous turnabout of U.S. law. And perhaps most important, it’s highly doubtful that SOPA would be effective in stopping the kind of content theft I’m writing about here.

For a little more explanation on the reasons SOPA would have done more harm than good, I asked San Diego State University information systems teacher Robert Gillespie, about problems he sees with its enforcement mechanism.

"SOPA ... would leave a great deal of elbow room for interpretation, which is why so many corporations fear the ramifications of its passing," he said. "It can be implemented with far reaching effects.  For example, if some media site republished a New York Times article without permission, not only can they go after the site in question, but they can make the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), any add networks, and various other connected business entities (such as ISP, domain, and website host providers) cease connection with the website in question...This is a bludgeoning tool that is imprecise and clumsy when in the wrong hands. "

So thank goodness, SOPA in its original form appears dead. But if you don’t think there’s a piracy problem, you’re not paying attention.

How bad is it?  Even U.S. Senators steal content for their websites. (Though I am flattered, Sen. Bernie Sanders. I was proud of that story.) By the way, Sanders’ position on SOPA is unknown.

Photographers have been fighting this battle for years, and are doing a relatively good job of using watermarks and other technologies to enforce their rights. In fact, a cottage industry of photography IP lawyers has grown up around the problem, sending bills and other demand letters to photography infringers. (See a discussion of this in “When is sharing, stealing?”) Writers, so far, have gotten nowhere.

You could argue, of course, that imitation isn’t just flattery – it’s actually good business in the Digital Age. If enough people copy your stories, eventually that comes back to you in a social network-y,  wisdom of crowds-y, long tail-y kind of way.  Except in rare cases, I don’t buy that.  The math just doesn’t add up.

The real problem is Web culture that suggests everything is free, or should be free. That’s just not a grown-up way of looking at the world.

So tonight, while you’re patting yourself on the back for being a part of a genuine Internet movement that has successfully influenced Congress –  an impressive feat, mind you –  know that there’s much more work to be done.  Tell a friend they should link to a story instead of copy a story onto a blog.  Because if we don’t find a reasonable way to protect intellectual property rights, you can bet an unreasonable one will rear its ugly head again soon.

Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal. Microsoft publicly opposes SOPA in its current form, while Comcast/NBC Universal is listed as a supporter of SOPA on the House Judiciary Committee website.

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Online retailer Zappos.com is telling 24 million customers that their personal information has been hacked, and forcing all of them to reset their passwords.  Cyber criminals may have accessed customers' names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, and the last four digits of consumers' credit card numbers, the firm said in an announcement that was posted on Zappos' Web site late Sunday night.  Full credit card numbers were not stolen, the firm said, because they were stored separately.

The announcement included the text of an e-mail that Zappos customers will soon receive.

"We were recently the victim of a cyber attack by a criminal who gained access to parts of our internal network and systems through one of our servers in Kentucky. We are cooperating with law enforcement to undergo an exhaustive investigation," says the e-mail,  which is signed by Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO. "For your protection and to prevent unauthorized access, we have expired and reset your password so you can create a new password. Please follow the instructions below to create a new password.  We also recommend that you change your password on any other web site where you use the same or a similar password."

While passwords that may have been stolen were cryptographically scrambled, Zappos said, it is still requiring all consumers to change their passwords. Zappos also recommends that consumers who use their Zappos password on other sites — a common, if unsafe, practice — should change those passwords, too.

Zappos has set up a special Web page for customers to visit and change the password: http://www.zappos.com/passwordchange.

Anticipating a flood of customer service calls in response to the notification e-mail, Zappos is taking the unusual step of turning off its customer service telephone lines and forcing consumers with questions to send them in via e-mail.

"Due to the volume of inquiries we are expecting, we realized that we could serve the most customers by answering their questions by email," Hsieh said in a note to employees, also posted on the firm's Web page. "We have made the hard decision to temporarily turn off our phones and direct customers to contact us by email because our phone systems simply aren't capable of handling so much volume. (If 5% of our customers call, that would be over 1 million phone calls, most of which would not even make it into our phone system in the first place.) "

Hsieh said the firm would have "all hands on deck," to help customers with questions.

Judged by the number of customers impacted, Zappos' data breach is among the biggest thefts of customer information ever, but still considerably smaller than last year's incident involving the Sony Play Station Network, which reportedly impacted 77 million customers.

Hsieh struck an apologetic tone in both the e-mail to consumers and the memo to staff.

"We've spent over 12 years building our reputation, brand, and trust with our customers. It's painful to see us take so many steps back due to a single incident," he said in the memo. "I suppose the one saving grace is that the database that stores our customers' critical credit card and other payment data was not affected or accessed."  

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Amid the glitz and glamour of Consumer Electronics Show, a grey cloud hangs over the annual geek-fest in Las Vegas: The future of controversial anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA, which threatens to cause a bit of a civil war among technology firms, pitting content firms against distribution companies.

A staunch opponent of the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, Rep. Darral Issa spoke at the show Wednesday, and announced plans to hold a hearing Congress on Wednesday, Jan. 18 that would give SOPA opponents a high-profile platform for their concerns. Meanwhile, Jan. 18 will apparently be the day part of the Internet goes dark for some. Reddit.com plans a black-out to call attention to SOPA that day, and others are following suit.

Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), sponsor of the Senate companion bill to SOPA, called The Protect IP Act, or PIPA, on Wednesday seemed to back off one of the legislation's most controversial elements -- the ability for law enforcement to shut down so-called "rogue websites" by making them inaccessible through the Web's domain name systems.  Leahy said in a statement on his website that he would be willing to delay that portion of the legislation's enforcement provisions. 

SOPA's supporters say the bill would give intellectual property rights holders -- such as TV studios -- a powerful new tool to protect their creative works. But opponents say it would allow federal authorities to shut down entire portions of the Internet without due process, and fundamentally alter the Internet's ability to provide a platform for free speech.

For complete CES coverage, click here

Strange bedfellows Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) jointly held a press conference Wednesday at CES, calling SOPA and its Senate companion The Protect IP Act (PIPA) a legal quagmire. Issa said SOPA was "massive legislation that would be expensive (and) hurt the Internet."

Issa's hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will be heavy on testimony from SOPA opponents. Lanham Napier, the CEO of Rackspace Hosting, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, will reportedly appear.

That day, Reddit says it will essentially go dark from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., providing only a link to a video stream of the hearing. Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales posted a note on his personal page saying that website might consider a similar blackout. The hacker group Anonymous also encouraged others to join in the 12-hour blackout, garnered a lot of attention with its Twitter post using the hashtag #BlackoutSOPA.

The Consumer Electronics Association, which operates the CES trade show, is a vocal opponent of SOPA. A panel at the trade show was devoted to arguing the pros and cons of the legislation’s anti-piracy efforts.

The House Judiciary Committee was slated to revise and prepare SOPA for a vote -- a process called the "markup" -- in December, but the process was delayed one month. The date for a new markup session hasn't been released yet, but it is expected within the next three weeks.  A vote on the Senate version of SOPA, PIPA, is slated for Jan. 24.

On Thursday, Leahy said complaints from "human rights groups, engineers, and others" had convinced him to change his thinking on the bill.

"I remain confident that the ISPs – including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs – would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest.  Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it," he said in a statement on his website. "As I prepare a managers’ amendment to be considered during the floor debate, I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented, so that we can focus on the other important provisions in this bill, which are essential to protecting American intellectual property online, and the American jobs that are tied to intellectual property.  I regret that law enforcement will not have this remedy available to it when websites operating overseas are stealing American property, threatening the safety and security of American consumers."

Meanwhile, At CES, Wyden and Issa stumped for their alternative to SOPA, which they call the OPEN Act, or Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act.

"I do not believe you can go out and damage the architecture of the Internet in the name of anti-piracy," Wyden said at his press conference, according to Twice.com

Issa, who ran a technology company before entering Congress, has complained that SOPA supporters in Congress don’t know enough about technology or the Internet to evaluate the legislation. The OPEN Act would take responsibility for enforcing anti-piracy rules away from the federal court system and give it to the U.S. International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial body that advices Congress on international trade issues and has some enforcement power regarding unfair trade practices, such as product dumping or copyright infringement. The OPEN Act would also tone down some of SOPA’s provisions, such as the ability to quickly blacklist allegedly offending domains.

It's hard keeping track of who's for and against SOPA, and why the legislation is important in the first place. (Even the Daily Show's Jon Stewart admitted as much during Wednesday's show). Fortunately, there are some tools that can help. A website named SOPA OPERA allows visitors to search members of Congress geographically or alphabetically to see where they stand, based on public statements and other research.

The website TheoriesofConspiracy.com contains a list of what it says are about 350 companies that support SOPA. Most are media creation companies.

A more official list of supporters is published on the House Judiciary Committee's website (PDF).

The Center for Democracy and Technology is maintaining a list of firms that have "expressed concern" with SOPA, including heavy-hitters like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

But the battle lines drawn over the SOPA fight can be messy. As msnbc.com’s Kyle Orland has written, some industries -- such as gaming -- are evenly split for and against the legislation.

For general background on SOPA, Declan McCullagh offers a comprehensive Q&A.

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RED TAPE BRIEFS

Perhaps this is why we keep talking past each other.

In today's New York Times, Jason DeParle did a great job of exploring a new angle to the tired debate about the real problem with the American economy -- a decline in upward mobility, which once upon a time was a defining characteristic of the American way of life.  While liberals and conservatives argue over poverty.

This decline is also a good starting point for discussion about what's wrong with our country, because there's plenty of room for agreement across the political spectrum. While liberals and conservatives argue about the effectiveness of providing aid to the poor, experts on both sides have noticed that many lower and middle class Americans are suffering from stagnation -- and agree that must be fixed. 

I'll state it more plainly. Our economic malaise isn't about poverty, it's about being stuck. In fact, it's about nearly everyone being stuck. A Red State-Blue State fight to the death over extending unemployment benefits is a poor proxy for discussing the real problem. The first politician to realize this will really be on to something -- perhaps a unifying theme that could move us past the current poisonous state of partisan politics.

We can all agree that America isn't America without the Frontier spirit, the social contract that if you work hard, there's a brighter tomorrow. That spirit is in serious danger... right now.

In my opinion, here's why: Housing costs eat up more than twice a family's monthly budget today than budgets of a generation ago. Here's some data points: . A 1975 Census report showed that only 8.9 percent of mortgage holders spent 35 percent or more of their income — including insurance, property taxes, and utilities — on housing.  In 1999, 26.7 percent of U.S. households were considered house poor by U.S. Census Bureau standards, or spending more than 30 percent of income on housing. By 2006, the number had jumped to 34.5 percent. The bureau also found that 46 percent of renters were "house poor" that year, paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs.  (For much more on why life really is harder now, see this story. For more housing cost data, see this PDF at the Census Bureau site. The Bureau offers no more up-to-date data).

This extravagant increase in housing costs trumps any other data point you can find. It has created an unsustainable burden, and more important, it has glued families to their current homes and severely restricted labor mobility. You can't take that great job offer in another city if there's no hope you'll sell your current home.  Meanwhile, just where are young married couples who want to have a third child supposed to live?

Until we fix this, upward mobility will be severely hampered, and the American Dream will be, if not dead, in a coma.

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