Three to Watch: Tracking Congressional Hearings

You'd need a scorecard to keep track of the multitude of Congressional hearings these days. They're checking out a whole boatload of issues. All are highly politicized, but may be revealing nonetheless. The three key hearings are as follows:

China and Internet censorship:US companies testifying about their actions in China's censorship of the Internet.

U.S. lawmakers lashed out at Google Inc. and other prominent Internet companies on Wednesday, with one Democrat questioning "how your corporate leadership sleeps at night" because of the companies' alleged complicity in human rights abuses by the Chinese government.

As representatives from Google, Yahoo Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. looked on, lawmakers from both political parties delivered withering attacks and called for oversight on dealings with China.

"Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace. I simply do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on a House International Relations subcommittee on human rights. Lantos' California district includes the high-tech empire of Silicon Valley.

There's real issues of concern and Rebecca MacKinnon has much more analysis and background. Just keep scrolling.

Able Danger: This is perhaps the most far reaching and important of the hearings. The Able Danger program cuts to the heart of the intelligence community and whether the US could have connected the disparate dots. For the latest, check out any of the following bloggers:

Able Danger Blogging
Able Danger Blog
AJ Strata
Captain's Quarters
Flopping Aces
Mac's Mind
Tom Maguire
QT Monster
Mark Tapscott
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Hurricane Katrina disaster response: Finally, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has been grilling DHS Secretary Chertoff over the response to Hurricane Katrina. It hasn't been pretty. There's been a bunch of CYA, although Chertoff has admitted that there were problems at the federal level. That's probably the sound bite that most media outlets will latch onto, despite the fact that there were numerous failures at the state and local level that made the disaster response all the more difficult. To read the House report on Katrina response, click here.

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