Congress plans spyware vote this evening
Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
The House of Representatives is ready to vote on two spyware bills in the next few hours.
On Monday afternoon, the House began debate on HR 29 and HR 744.
But for scheduling reasons (basically it's easier to group together votes of all the 17 bills up for review today), votes have been delayed until after 6:30pm ET.
The two bills propose radically different ways to approach the problem of invasive, infective, and malicious code. I outlined the differences in a column, but suffice it to say that HR 29 takes a regulatory approach without criminal sanctions while HR 744 has a general-purpose ban with prison penalties.