What is Congress browsing?

They should also track html referer tags. That should give insight into the blogs that staffers are reading, at least those that link people over to govtrack. Other data can be used to identify individual devices which, when tied to the known movements and appearances of public figures, should be enough to identify individuals. Heck, put the entire data dump online and crowdsource the project. Within weeks we&#x27;ll know which senators are reading which bills while they commute, and which don&#x27;t.<p>To go the next step, govtrack could adopt some proper ad-based cookies to track users across multiple sites. But that would cost money. I&#x27;m surprised Larry Flint, and anyone else looking for dirt on politicians, haven&#x27;t done this already.

So this is certainly an interesting idea - it&#x27;s entertaining and it feels enlightening but the reasoning behind it seems a bit off base.<p>The assumption behind this effort seems to be a sort of retribution-based. So there&#x27;s a couple things wrong with that - staff are the only ones using computers, not Members, and it doesn&#x27;t bother us too much. We expect none of our browsing history to be private and are used to having every part of our jobs as public information - see Legistorm.<p>Members are not going to care if their staff&#x27;s web browsing information is public - even if it did go beyond just who is visiting govtrack and when. They&#x27;d fire the staff they needed to without hesitation and still show no remorse for their vote.<p>This is without even mentioning that only Republican offices voted in support of the rollback of the FCC regulation.<p>It&#x27;s a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. Having privacy groups come meet with Congressmembers helps - setting up an organized campaign helps somewhat too. But for Republicans, this bill was only a matter of what made economic sense.

I won&#x27;t hold my breath, but this could be interesting if this caught on with other more mainstream websites, and they all shared the same tracking cookie. Google Analytics for congress. As is it&#x27;s obviously relatively limited.

I work for a local (County-level) government, and our firewall logs have been available by FOIA request for years. I can&#x27;t say if congress is as transparent, but if people really are intent on exposing congress&#x27;s web browsing habits, that would probably be a more productive way to begin.

&gt; What is Congress browsing?<p>This question implies something else: what are all the URLs referenced&#x2F;accessed by Congress? The page says something different, and I believe the headline is misleading:<p>&gt; This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.<p>Of all pages one can browse on the web from within Congress machines, how relevant is GovTrack.us overall in that data? It&#x27;s like saying the ISP publishes only my browsing data that happens to hit on my ISP&#x27;s own website itself. Did I misunderstand something?<p>A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.

So is there some image from this site we can all embed in our own sites and content so they get tracked more widely? Do govtrack welcome and have the bandwidth for that?

Someone in there is using Vivaldi? Wat?

How useful to now have a list of most popular OS&#x2F;Browser versions to maximize (spear)phishing attacks.<p>&gt; from House (PC &#x2F; Windows 10 &#x2F; Edge 14) &gt; from Senate(PC &#x2F; Windows 7 &#x2F; Chrome 56)<p>Will be fun to do some analysis after a while and see if there are any obvious trends (House vs Senate, where do outdated browser&#x2F;OS combos visit the most).

Title is misleading. Should be &quot;Is Congress browsing GovTrack.us?&quot; From their FAQ:<p>&gt; <i>This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.</i>

What a cool concept. Maybe there should be packages for major web frameworks that implements this.

Here&#x27;s a thought: why are we pressuring legislators when they&#x27;re mostly accountable to their donors and party bosses? Why don&#x27;t these sites track those people instead?

God, they&#x27;re all on Windows.

Wish the hyperventilating over this issue would die down some.<p>This page is about as pointless as possible. It shows when someone from the &quot;House&quot; or &quot;Senate&quot; visits a page. Okay, and from that we will strike a blow at the evil congressmen somehow?