It's that time again on the Congressional calendar. All the big, bipartisan tech initiatives that looked so good a few months ago are beginning to compete for time on the floor like fat men desperate to get through a small door. And tech lobbyists are doing their best to handicap the bills they hate while advancing those they like.
We open the Cyberlaw Podcast by reviewing a few of the top contenders. Justin (Gus) Hurwitz tells us that the big bipartisan compromise on privacy is probably dead for this Congress, killed by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and the new politics of abortion. The big subsidy for domestic chip fabs is still alive, Jamil Jaffer reports, but beset by House and Senate differences, plus a proposal to regulate outward investment in China and Russia by U.S. firms. And Senator Amy Klobuchar's (D-MN) platform anti-self-preferencing bill is being picked to pieces by lobbyists trying to cleave away GOP votes over content moderation and national security. All in all, it's hard times for fat men.
Next, David Kris unpacks the First Circuit decision on telephone pole cameras and the fourth amendment. Technology and Fourth Amendment law is increasingly agoraphobic, I argue, as the Carpenter decision has left aging boomer judges on a vast featureless constitutional plain, lacking principles to guide them and forced to fall back on their sense of what was creepy in their day.
