Silicon Valley Archives - Identity Woman

I think honestly we need to leverage the power of the web and our network as knowledge workers and ‘march on congress’…Maybe that is not it but something … PLEASE SILICON VALLEY SHOW YOUR POLITICAL MIGHT!!!
From CNET:

It didn’t take long for the idea of forcing Internet providers to retain records of their users’ activities to gain traction in the U.S. Congress.

Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Republican, gave a speech saying that data retention by Internet service providers is an “issue that must be addressed.” Child pornography investigations have been “hampered” because data may be routinely deleted, Gonzales warned.
Now, in a demonstration of bipartisan unity, a Democratic member of the Congressional Internet Caucus is preparing to introduce an amendment–perhaps during a U.S. House of Representatives floor vote next week–that would make such data deletion illegal.

I have been wondering about this for a while. Where is the companies in the Valley’s political might? and where is the political organizing amongst the people who work in this industry? In Europe the geeks organized to get the European parliament to ban software patents. It seems like it should be easy enough to organize to save the internet. I am going to do my part and organize Planetwork’s activities around One Web Day.
This was articulated by Marc Evans on his blog:

The Net Neutrality campaign (a.k.a. Save the Internet) to keep the Internet tollgate-free and/or tier-free continues to gain momentum. What’s troubling, however, is Om Malik’s contention that many start-ups and Silicon Valley companies and fairly of the issue and why it matters. One of the Silicon Valley’s weaknesses is a lack of political savviness. Sure, many companies and executives donate money to politicians and political parties but there does not seem to be a well-organized and effective lobbying team that can be turned on in Washington when needed. Peter Chester suggests a reason for the lack of activity among the bigger players such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft is they have relationship with carriers and cablecos that they don’t want to damage.