Senator Schumer, with David Tisch and Jessica Lawrence at his side.

Today, Senator Charles Schumer popped up to New York City for a visit to General Assembly and an announcement: Tomorrow he plans to introduce new legislation to the Senate--the snappily-named BRAINS Act--in an attempt to help alleviate the tech talent crunch by making it easier for startups to hire foreign-born workers.

"The bill will fix America's broken high-skilled immigration problem," he promised, by providing 55,000 new green cards available annually for foreign students graduating from US universities with advanced STEM degrees.

Everywhere he goes, said Senator Schumer, business leaders cite the lack of technical talent as their number one challenge. "With the introduction and hopefully the passage of the BRAINS Act, we're going to move closer to ensuring a more vibrant future for Americans not even born yet," he promised.

Silicon Alley's desperate need for workers made General Assembly a logical venue for the bill's debut. "We in New York have a big dog in this fight," said Senator Schumer. "Silicon Valley may have given us the semiconductor, but New York City is the birthplace of the next generation of Internet giants--but they won't become giants unless they can get the talent." And, while CornellNYC is already taking applicants, those candidates aren't going to be hitting the workforce any time soon.

"All of us here care so much about the tech community--it really is our future in New York City, New York State, U.S.A., and the world."

Of course, those common desires can make for some moments of cognitive dissonance. As the cameras were setting up for today's press conference at General Assembly, a lovely metaphor for the tech world's relationship with politics unfolded before Betabeat's eyes: A tattooed man wearing a t-shirt saying "Your Mom Makes Great Sandwiches" wandered through a cluster of suit-clad politicos and notebook-clutching reporters.

The problem with the status quo is this: Foreign students who graduate from American universities with STEM degrees have to compete for an extremely limited number of H1B visas. That means many are forced to go home empty handed, and even if a startup wanted to hire them, it's impossible.

"If the Yankees needed a new center fielder, and the best person available was from Japan or the Dominican Republic or Cuba, it's inconceivable they wouldn't get a visa," pointed out Senator Schumer. "But when one of the startup companies here has a brilliant engineer who they're almost certain could create a company that might create hundreds or even thousands of jobs, we won't let them come."

"We should run our economy the way we run our sports immigration," he added.

But the Senator was merely warming up to his topic. "All these talented people from overseas, they want to come here, and they want to stay here. And we kick them out! It's unbelievable," he said. "It's the dumbest, stupidest policy that one could devise."

"If someone wanted to devise a policy on how to prevent American from growing good-paying jobs in the future, they'd probably design our present immigration policy. It just doesn't make much sense."

As for the bill's prospects, well, it's far from a sure thing. The hope is that a window for political compromise might open up after the elections, during the lame duck session of Congress. And Senator Schumer was upbeat, emphasizing that his counterpart in the House, Lamar Smith, is introducing a similar bill with several potential points of compromise. "I believe we're closer to this compromise than we have ever been in the past," promised Senator Schumer.

Then again, he shared another anecdote that makes the odds look a little iffier: "I had one senator say to me, a conservative Republican, even if Albert Einstein wanted to immigrate I wouldn't want to let him into this country."

But Senator Schumer has a colorful, locally sourced rebuttal to that: "When I was a kid, we had this thing at Coney Island. It was a barrel you'd walk through as it turned," he explained. "New York is sort of like that barrel--it takes people from all over the globe, we turn into Americans, and their kids sally forth around America and do great things."

"I just wish the rest of the country would understand our experience on how positive immigration is."

Rep. Issa, Internet hero?

Detractors of the the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) may have reason to celebrate, albeit momentarily. According to Rep. Darrell Issa (CA-Rep.), an opponent of the bills,  House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has assured him that SOPA will not move forward in Congress until "a consensus" has been reached.

Rep. Issa also said that a hearing regarding SOPA's impact on cybersecurity scheduled for today has been postponed. On Friday, Rep. Lamar Smith (TX-Rep.), chief sponsor of SOPA, said he would take out a portion of the law that would allow the Justice Dept. to seek court orders requiring American ISPs to block subscriber access to foreign websites accused of infringing copyright, reports PC World.

Although Mr. Cantor's camp has yet to issue a public statement, Rep. Issa, who is pushing for alternate legislation called the OPEN Act claims:

"Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote. The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal."

Protest for the bills has been getting more vociferous and coming from harder-to-ignore corners of the internet. Reddit, Wikipedia, and the hacker collective Anonymous have all announced impending blackouts on January 18th to protest SOPA. New York's tech community has its own rally against Senators Schumer and Gillibrand planned for the same day.

But the most high-profile objection thus far has come from President Obama's camp.  On Friday, his IP, technology and cybersecurity chiefs wrote a joint statement on online piracy, saying, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.”

It was not the unequivocal dismissal some had hoped for, but the statement, co-signed by Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt did note that, “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small," adding, "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the internet."

The Senate is still scheduled to begin voting on PIPA on January 24th. Although if the internet keeps getting its way like this, perhaps we should expect further delays.

In response to a question about whether Reddit will continue its blackout, Redditor farmersam writes:

"Do not take this concession as a victory! This is an old trick. Please spread the word and call them out repeatedly. 1: Make crazy offer (SOPA) 2: Client rejects crazy offer (us) 3: Make a "reasonable" offer (PIPA) 4: Client accepts offer because it seems reasonable compared to crazy offer. Don't let up."

That thread quickly devolves into a discussion of whether that technique is called the contrast effect, the anchoring effect, door-in-the-face technique or Overton window. See, the internet is a fun place. Be careful when you're messing around with it.

NO SOPA FOR YOU MR. SMITH.

Including, it would seem, his own.

One of VICE's reporters has taken note of Rep. Smith's website, which—in an earlier iteration—apparently used a background image of some lovely trees.

Which were borrowed without the permission of the image's copyright holder.

Who does not recall ever licensing them to Rep. Smith or his staff for Rep. Lamar's uses, or receiving credit for the images used.

I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it. And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes."

VICE contacted Rep. Lamar's office and is waiting to hear back. By the standards of SOPA, Rep. Lamar's website could've been shut down (and theoretically, still could be) for being in violation of the law he helped draft. This is how utterly absurd the garbage pile of Hollywood-funded legislation that is SOPA actually, in practice, is.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek