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The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the controversial ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act’ today, a bill that could be used to crack down on many BitTorrent sites and other file-sharing platforms. The bill would give the Department of Justice the unprecedented power to take over domain names of websites that are deemed to facilitate copyright infringement.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"If rightsholders get their way, overseas pirate websites could soon be inaccessible to US users, lose their ability to process US credit cards, and be banned from Google Adwords. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act is back this week in the US Senate."

This part is particularly ominous:

"A service provider, as that term is defined in section 512(k)(1) of title 17, United States Code, or other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address."

In September, digital rights advocates and Internet engineers helped to delay the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), a terrible bill that would have allowed the Attorney General to censor the Internet in the name of copyright enforcement. Now that the November elections are over, COICA is back on the Senate Judiciary Committee schedule for markup this Thursday and could pass out of committee during the "lame duck" session of Congress.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate requiring all airports to use full-body scanners lacks sufficient privacy safeguards, says a prominent watchdog group.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center says the bill, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), "contains particularly weak privacy provision[s] that ignore many of the problems with the devices already uncovered."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill that would provide medical care for firefighters and other responders to the September 11, 2001, attacks who developed illnesses from breathing toxic, dust-filled air.

For now, it appears that the U.S. Attorney’s threat has realized its goal; the sponsor of the Texas bill has decided to concede defeat in this battle, but remains committed to fighting the war. “I will pull HB 1937 down, but I will stand for liberty in the state of Texas,” said Senator Dan Patrick, the bill’s sponsor. As such, as of right now, the bill has died

In March, Kevin Brady (R-TX) introduced H.R.4180 (Sound Dollar Act) and Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced a companion bill (S.2247 Federal Reserve Modernization Act) in the Senate. These two bills are actually seven pieces of legislation, put into a single bill. There is nothing in this bill that would prevent the Federal Reserve from continuing to inflate the currency. Nothing to prevent future cycles of “boom and bust.” The “Sound Dollar Act” is another misnamed piece of legislation designed to trick the American people into supporting bad legislation.

Thousands of newly released documents about water contamination at Camp Lejeune add to the evidence that the military long knew about tainted tap water blamed for deaths and illnesses among Marines and their families, and that officials covered up the information for years, a North Carolina congressman said Friday. On Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., released more than 8,500 Department of Defense documents relating to the water contamination that continued at the base for decades.