House votes down plan to block employers from Facebook snooping

AP Photo/Adrian Wyld

(CNET) The controversial - if not exactly common - practice of requiring job applicants to disclose their Facebook passwords briefly became ammunition for an unsuccessful Democratic effort to block an unrelated regulatory reform plan.

Full coverage of Facebook at Tech Talk

During the House of Representatives floor debate yesterday over a proposal (PDF) to reform the Federal Communications Commission, Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat, proposed that the bill be sent back to committee.

Then, Perlmutter proposed, the committee would be directed to send the bill back with a one-paragraph amendment allowing the FCC to prohibit telecommunications companies from requiring Facebook logins of prospective job applicants.

"If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password... People have an expectation of privacy!" Perlmutter said.

It was a transparent, if clever, delaying tactic. If Perlmutter actually wanted to add that pro-privacy section to the bill, he could have suggested an amendment instead of returning it to committee. And of the scarce reports that have trickled out about employers asking for Facebook credentials, the culprits seem mostly to be law enforcement agencies, which are not regulated by the FCC and would be unaffected by his bill.

Some background: the White House and House Democrats oppose the Republican-backed bill, titled the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, on the grounds that it's unacceptable to require the currently Democratic-controlled agency to be more transparent and prepare economic impact analyses. A statement (PDF) the White House released on Monday complains the GOP bill would prevent the FCC from exercising "its statutory duty to protect the public interest."

Rep. Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who chairs a communications and technology subcommittee, responded to Perlmutter during the floor debate by saying:

I think it's awful that employers think they can demand our passwords and can go snooping around. There is no disagreement with that. Here is the flaw: Your amendment doesn't protect them. It doesn't do that. Actually, what this amendment does is say that all of the reforms that we are trying to put in place at the Federal Communications Commission, in order to have them have an open and transparent process where they are required to publish their rules in advance so that you can see what they're proposing, would basically be shoved aside. They could do whatever they wanted on privacy if they wanted to, and you wouldn't know it until they published their text afterward. There is no protection here.

Perlmutter, by the way, isn't exactly a steadfast advocate of Americans' electronic privacy rights. He voted for legislation, for instance, designed to derail lawsuits against telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency's vast eavesdropping apparatus. He also didn't seem that familiar with the problem he was claiming to solve, referring during the discussion to "the user of the Facebook."

Facebook last week warned that companies making such requests may not have the right policies or training in place to deal with private information they obtain. The practice has also attracted some negative attention in the Senate (and advocacy groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center say a law preventing employers from doing this would be a good idea).

The House ended up rejecting Perlmutter's amendment by a largely party-line vote of 184 to 236. Then the underlying bill, the FCC reform measure itself, was approved by a vote of 247 to 174. It has not, however, cleared the U.S. Senate.

This article first appeared at CNET.

[dstrandberg]

Today the Maryland legislature passed a law that says employers can't ask for Facebook and social media site login info from job applicants. Source: Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-business/post/maryland-lawmakers-approve-bill-barring-employers-from-collecting-facebook-passwords/2012/04/10/gIQAK0Hc8S_blog.html

[StevevonMaas]

This article closes with the following penultimately misleading sentences:

"The House ended up rejecting Perlmutter's amendment by a largely party-line vote of 184 to 236. Then the underlying bill, the FCC reform measure itself, was approved by a vote of 247 to 174. It has not, however, cleared the U.S. Senate."

In order to understand what "the FCC reform measure itself" means, you have to go back up to the introductory part of the article, because someone has deliberately tried to obfuscate this fact by trying to make the reader think this refers to the facebook privacy measure. It doesn't. The "reform measure itself" is the Republicans' effort to deregulate and curtail FCC power over certain media outlets, and it includes nothing to protect facebook privacy.

CBS appears to have joined Republicans in trying to fool people into believing that the Democratic amendment, from Mr. Perlmutter, was holding up progress on facebook privacy. The truth is just the opposite. NO facebook privacy measure has passed the House, due to Republican obstruction of it.

Part of how the article does this is by trying to paint Mr. Perlmutter as an enemy of electronic privacy, because he, like nearly every member of Congress, voted for Republican-sponsored PATRIOT Act measures. Make no mistake, that wasn't good, but the Republicans ALL voted for the same bad legislation, too.

Then they quote the Republican House spokesman for their party line on this as he tries to mislead everyone into thinking that Mr. Perlmutter was only trying to divert the privacy issue to his committee, where it could be bottled-up or watered-down or twisted, rather than "simply" attaching it to the bill which was about to be passed. The truth is the Republicans wouldn't allow it to bypass Mr. Perlmutter's committeee, so the Democrats crafted an amendment directing the Communications Committeee to immediately return a version of the bill including a provision directing the FCC to stop employers from invading facebook privacy by demanding passwords.

Moreover, even their excuse that "we can't waste time with Agency rule-making" is a huge lie. The Republican spokesman tries to make it appear as if the FCC could get the whole thing fouled up and "nobody would know" until the proposed rule was published. He is hoping we will confuse "publication" of a proposed rule (a preliminary requirement of the Administrative Procedure Act) with promulgation of the actual regulation. The Republicans act as if that would waste too much time, which is utter nonsense. Thre would be nothing preventing them from passing a stand-alone measure in the meantime, even if the FCC were in the middle of crafting a regulation.

So, in conclusion, the entire article is one big steaming cauldron of rubbish, containing an even denser core of rubbish, all marinated in a broth of rubbish. It is one thing when Republicans give lame or spurious or misleading rationales for what they do, but now they are actually pretending they didn't do what they just did, and this is a shocking new low in American politics, I believe, and CBS appears to be helping them just as much as FOX. The Republicans have firmly concluded we are all fools, and that they might as well just lie to us regarding the basic nature of the facts, rather than persuade us by using facts. This entire misleading article should be retracted immediately, if CBS is to retain any credibility as a news organization.

[AmericanGrandma]

LOL. Look up 'useful idiot' and see your photo there. BTW, regardless of what Liberals think, people can read for themselves. We aren't buying your spin on everything anymore.

[MiddleMolly]

The key for me here was the comment:

"The White House and House Democrats oppose the Republican-backed bill, titled the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, on the grounds that it's unacceptable to require the currently Democratic-controlled agency to be more transparent and prepare economic impact analyses. A statement (PDF) the White House released on Monday complains the GOP bill would prevent the FCC from exercising "its statutory duty to protect the public interest."

"unacceptable to require the agency to be more transparent"? Without any explanation of what this involves?

Of course, I must admit, that I firmly believe that anything the Congressional Republicans do these days has got to go against the good of the "public interest", so the whole article, without knowing much about the details, does smell rat-tish.

[mstanislaus]

It's really amazing. Based on an article in the Orlando Sentinel, I was going to blast Republicans for this. I'm glad I Googled on and found other articles that gave more than just the bare facts, mostly fingering Republicans as privacy-hating hags, without providing the WHY of what they did. Funny how certain things are slanted.

[Rodeo_Joe]

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

[AmericanGrandma]

You elected Fascism in 2008 and it wouldn't even salute the American flag. Also, although the Koran is 'holy', the Bible is wrong, according to your Fascist Dictator wanna be. So, whoever made up that comment was obviously waaaay off base.

[MiddleMolly]

To Grandma (below): If we're going to throw terms like "fascism" around, it might be good to have some common definition. Here's a few to pick from:

1. A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
2. Any ideology or movement inspired by Italian Fascism, such as German National Socialism; any right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with an authoritarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism.
3. As a rule, fascist governments are dominated by a dictator, who usually possesses a magnetic personality, wears a showy uniform, and rallies his followers by mass parades; appeals to strident nationalism; and promotes suspicion or hatred of both foreigners and "impure" people within his own nation, such as the Jews in Germany. Although both communism and fascism are forms of totalitarianism, fascism does not demand state ownership of the means of production, nor is fascism committed to the achievement of economic equality. In theory, communism opposes the identification of government with a single charismatic leader (the " cult of personality"), which is the cornerstone of fascism. Whereas communists are considered left-wing, fascists are usually described as right-wing.
4. Today, the term fascist is used loosely to refer to military dictatorships, as well as governments or individuals that profess racism and that act in an arbitrary, high-handed manner.
5. (From Wikipedia): Historians, political scientists and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism. Each form of fascism is distinct, leaving many definitions too wide or narrow. Since the 1990s, scholars ... have been gathering a rough consensus on the ideology's core tenets.
...Fascism is "a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism" built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist "armed party" politics opposing socialism and liberalism and promising radical politics to rescue the nation from decadence.[28] Mussolini said that Fascism is revolutionary against liberalism "since it wants to reduce the size of the State to its necessary functions."[29]
Paxton sees fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."[30]
One common definition of fascism focuses on three groups of ideas:
The Fascist Negations of anti-liberalism, anti-communism and anti-conservatism.
Nationalist, authoritarian goals for the creation of a regulated economic structure to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture.
A political aesthetic using romantic symbolism, mass mobilisation, a positive view of violence, promotion of masculinity and youth and charismatic leadership."

So...what's your definition of fascism? And how does it fit?