Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1700, the Do Not Track Kids Act. Sen. Markey (D-MA) introduced the bill back in November, but it seems stuck in the Commerce Committee, so you might want to call Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), at 202.224.6472, and Ranking member Sen. Thune (R-SD), at 202.224.2321. S. 1700 would keep online and mobile applications from collecting personal information about children, which the Children's Online Privacy Act of 1998 didn't exactly foresee; S. 1700 would also prevent corporations from collecting geolocation info from kids, would require parental consent before corporations could disclose any private info belonging to kids under 12, and would give kids and/or their parents the means to erase such information from public networks. I can't imagine why this bill's stuck in committee, especially since Rep. Barton (R-TX) sponsors the House version, H.R. 3481. So your calls could start something.
Meanwhile, H.R. 3826, the so-called Electricity Security and Affordability Act, would hamstring the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions in at least four ways. Section 2 of the bill would forbid the EPA from issuing any standard for emissions reductions unless "such standard has been achieved on average for at least one continuous 12-month period" -- which essentially lets coal corporations write the regulations. You think they'll reduce carbon emissions any more than they have to? No -- that's why we make it a "have to." Section 2 would also prevent the EPA from using data from a demonstration project to write emissions rules, and Section 3 would let Congress set the effective date for any EPA carbon emissions rule, when the date they'd most like to set is "never." Finally, H.R. 3826 would also repeal the EPA's recently-issued carbon emissions standards. If Republicans want to cut red tape, why do they create so much of it? The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell Congress to reject H.R. 3826.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to enact net neutrality rules with teeth, then Roots Action and the People's Email Network help you do that. If the FCC won't enforce regulations that make your internet service providers treat all data they receive equally (or "neutrally"), what will happen? Verizon and Comcast and their ilk can slow down and/or block pages you want to see but they don't want you to see -- and that can be ominous (you think Verizon and Comcast would ever want people to see writings touting the importance of network neutrality, for example?) as well as mundane (Comcast owns NBC, so maybe they'll try to "dissuade" you from watching, say, The Simpsons or American Dad!). In either case, they're slapping you in the face -- after all, you paid for them to deliver you a service, and you have more of a First Amendment right to free association than they do. That's because you're a person, you know, and they're, well, not people. So assert your importance and demand net neutrality.
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