they provide. it's been remarkable and it's been going on a long period of time but to look at consumer price index, they've been very stable. there's very little if any inflation in the system so all of the pressure is to reduce cost. >> host: john castellani, president of the business roundtable. more details about the organization at businessroundtable.com. >> guest: thanks for having me. ..

>> cacique on "the communicators" interviewers from the congressional internet caucus 13th annual technology exhibition. every of this event highlights emerging internet technologies that shaped congressional policymaking. it's a race in the hart senate office building in january. we will begin with remarks from senator patrick leahy of vermont. the caucus cochair. >> i look at all the various

things being displayed and i have my 11 year grandson with me. you can draw pictures and play games. he said yeah, that's one. takes them outside of my hands and said i have to take over. it gets very complicated. last [laughter] so i am still, at least in the time we started this is a good have senators who are not quite sure what that computer screen was and why we couldn't get the news and we showed them yes they could, they could do that too. 150 members of congress, 200

diverse. i think that is great. i think the internet is to protect our rights and freedoms, the human rights of people everywhere. and look how and some of these countries where speech and the internet has allowed speech to improve and allow the secretary of state to confirm and reaffirm the nation to keep the openness and freedom on the net. sometimes i see things lastingly on the internet. maybe for a second, but then thank goodness because that means that people do feel free to speak about whoever they want. we have to do that, government has to do that, american businesses have to do that. i hope businesses will work together to promote internet freedom.

you promote global internet freedom coming from also are mounting freedom itself. that is something. we have to protect our nation cybersecurity, not just the security of our businesses, but our government. a lot of businesses here have faith attempts of attack, but their work product. the u.s. government does everything. and we have criminals who know how easy it is to use internet for crying. when alyssa prosecutor, i had someone do a 20,000-dollar bank robbery and i was a big deal. within a few miles of the bank. now you do much, much more.

my home state of vermont, we established the national center for the study of counterterrorism and crying at the university. some of that is funding by the justice if anyone wants to go up and see the public-private partnership, they can help all of us. as the chairman of the judiciary committee last year to ask congress to enact the identity theft enforcement restitution act. the new anti-cybercrime law next month i believe in our hearings, that will examine other ways of cybercrime. so, there's a lot to be done and i really felt the intention of a couple things. as long as i'm here to keep the internet open, to keep it as a

valuable tool. i also want to make sure that those who want to do damage, those who want to commit crimes on it will be able -- we are able to stop them, too. thank you. thank you very much. [applause] >> wire points of light and causes on facebook here today? >> well, we've partnered to build an online volunteer center that is completely integrated with facebook and allows people as they are searching for in signing up for volunteer opportunities to share that opportunity with all of their friends on facebook. >> how does that work?

>> so, the basic concept is when you -- when you're looking for volunteer opportunity on the causes/hands of white volunteer center, you'll be immediately shown a list of volunteer opportunities in your location, so you can tell from the ip address. so if you are here in washington we will tell you shirov for volunteer opportunities in the local area. if you have any friends who have signed up, we can ask or tell you that because this is all based on your facebook networks. and so, you can see what your friends are doing. if you want to sign up for a particular event coming will insert your information, which ties into a backend system that hands-on authority built with its volunteers. and then you are prompted to share that opportunity with your friends and say hey, i'm going to go to this site. i'm going to go to a soup kitchen on saturday and you should all come with me.

there are five spots last, hurry up and find out. and really the idea behind it is that they should increase the number of people doing volunteer work, should increase the actual turnout on the day that they send it to do something because they know that their friends are going to be there with them. and hopefully will increase repeat engagement, get more people coming back to sites to do volunteer work and make it a more social experience for people going as groups of friends to do really important work. >> how did points of lights get involved in this? >> so, points of light is an organization that encourages folks to volunteer. we inspire equipment mobilize folks to get out and volunteer and make a difference in american unity. this unit of points of light is actually hands-on network with hard-earned with them on facebook. they operate 250 different affiliates throughout the country, who all have their own ways of recruiting volunteers and posting their opportunities

and telling their friends about it. so without leather bag to use technology that arty access and top into the social networking that's going on anyway and have people sign up via a cause on facebook. and recruit their friends, tell them that they're volunteering and really make volunteering call. >> and why are you here demonstrating this for members of congress and staffers? >> i can take that one. essentially, we want them to know that their constituents are out there, they care about a lot of different issues. they want to volunteer, they want to make a difference in the community. and just because they don't have a chance to come here to the hilt to talk with them every day or even once a week or a month, that they are out there, that they're making a difference and that, you know, all the members have to do is check out facebook to see what their constituents are out there doing. so, pretty easy. >> is there any potential federal money involved? >> not that we know of right now.

there is a social innovation fund, which is going on in their organization is fighting for money to further their technology and make their, you know, programs bigger and better. so, there's a possibility, maybe in the future. yeah. >> thanks. >> are welcome. some >> blood is to me.gov? to me.gov is a speech-based application with a one-stop shop for government related questions. imagine that someone has a

question about a government related question, whether it's federal state. health care related are education related, where would they go today. they're carrying a mobile phone. there is no one place to go. and with the website of the prototype with full data so that any question you have the government related is one place to go and will give you the answer. we will not try to give you pages to read. it will simply give you the direct answer. >> how do you get from prototype to reality? >> so, they're certainly many components that have to come together to scale a service like this to make it a reality. we actually partnered with a startup company called chart up and we will do a consumer version of a system like this, where consumers can ask him a question that's available on the iphone store. you can ask any question, you can type it or speak it. we use at&t speech recognition technology and then we will use charges database what they have acquired over 400 million questions and answers. so that gets human aversion

authority appeared as a prototype available to consumers to download and play with. the government version is still in a prototype mode of what we're looking for right now is, you know, government customers or ones who are interested in the technology of helping their sword of to bring that sort of information out to their society. so we're looking for partners right now to work with to break something like that out. >> what is: cancer? >> you can see how fast it was. i asked the question, what is: cancer indicate me several possible answers to this. but enough are able to see this on the screen, but basically it walks you through what it is and how you get it. now we do know i only the question, i also got very other related questions to that. for example this one says what are the stages of colon cancer and this is relevant to what i'm looking for. i may give you a couple ideas of

how fast it is. how do i apply for medicare? okay, few can see a very similar thing. >> so why bring it here to the congressional internet caucus expo? there are several reasons for that. one is that this is a place about how the internet is revolutionizing the way we access information and we interact with each other. and this is truly an application where really simplifies the way people access information wherever they are. i could be in china and have a question about medicare, medicaid, medicare part d and i can basically asked that question and get the answer to my question wherever you are. that's one important aspect. the second part of this is that simplifying the way consumers access that information. at the moment today, there is only one place for people to get information. there are many places to get

information. to get one place it's very hard basically to do that. the resort of body here is a way to sort of expose it to the masses here as to how can we bring information together and allow our consumers, our people out there to have a one-stop place where they can access the information. the third one is from an at&t point of view we believe in an open internet. and we believe that by having technology like this that fit in our clout in our network and exposing it to the masses, the technology here doesn't have to come off from at&t. economic technology that can make complementary to this that can't fit in our clout to make it a variable to the masses. again this is the idea as you heard earlier about open internet. that's exactly what we're shooting for. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> what is the entertainment software association? >> where the u.s. trade association that represents the computer and video game industry. right now we have about 30 members and they are all coming out, all about and publishers. three of them are complementary site you can see behind me. microsoft, sony and nintendo. so today we are showing our latest consoles, the nintendo wii, the sony playstation three and the microsoft xbox 360. these are the latest consoles out on the market. they also have handheld devices. each of these companies. we didn't bring them today, but we wanted to shout, you know, we wanted you guys to see the latest consoles and what controllers, you know, were using with them. a week is really -- it's a great

console because it has a motion sensor controller and there are wireless, encouraging hippity for, you know, all gameplayers. and we've been a member of the internet caucus for quite a few years now and coming you know, we just like to show everyone what some of our latest technology is and also let them know how people are placing and so did their daily life. you know, it's not just for entertainment purposes anymore. they're also be used for medical training, been used for fitness, education, rehabilitation. there's some really wonderful uses now. so we try and encourage that. that's why we're here today. [inaudible conversations] [inaud conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> okay, what is this not that we're looking at? >> well, over the past three years, we have been not been broadband and were as broadband available in tennessee and where it is not. we have good way to display to pdf maps and other online tools, but folks have asked us a lot of different ways, can i do this, can i do that, can i look at it in this way? well, broadband stats allows us to show the data in a various formats based on what your needs are. for example, this is just a

general map, to give you an idea of where the cursor is is nashville. so this is looking at upper middle tennessee. and anywhere that you see the red color means broadband is available. the very briefly, you can look at and see that broadband is available and you can scroll across the state of tennessee and see that the areas in the pockets where broadband is and more importantly where broadband is not. so you can look at it in a number of different ways. so this is just looking at those server areas. so what if we wanted to look at where its coverage with one provider in worse coverage with multiple providers. so what now is showing, anywhere in pink means that broadband is available by one provider, wears an orange means it's for multiple providers. so that's another thing that a lot of folks have asked me.com is broadband available?

is it available for multiple providers? you can start to do more analysis. so we can zoom into a particular area and start looking and see what is available and it'll refresh every time that you zoom in t show what's available and what's not available. one of the other ways to look at it -- let me let it catch up with me -- is by looking at the density of the areas that are unserved, what providers and what folks that are making funding decisions want to know is what's the impact of the dollars spent. so, by looking at the density of the unserved areas and that's what it's going to load now is the density of those unserved areas, we can make those decisions on where can we get the best bang for buck. so this is showing the density. so you can keep zooming and to a

particular area and continued to see how many homes are in a particular area. so in this area right here, this represents over 85 homes per mile, per square mile. so you can see that there is a dense area there. well, you want to learn as much as you can about that area, so you could even switch to a satellite view and look at it from a satellite standpoint to see exactly where those homes are located here and you can zoom down even further and look at those homes. but if you're wanting to see, let me switch off that, what a larger impact broadband would have, you can look at a particular area, select the tool and it'll tell you to highlight of the census blocks in a particular area that you designate so that you can look

at if i build in this area, this is what i can expect on availability. these will be the number of homes that we would pass that are already served and this is the number of homes that would pass that are currently unserved. >> how does all this tie into the national broadband land? >> in tennessee, we have been working on mapping for some time. with the national broadband plan, is asking for a number of factors that we have a look at yet. what broadband will allow us to do in tennessee is to show those additional layers. but what broadband they can also choose to display the same data that's being displayed in tennessee for any state in the country or for the nation for that matter. so the areas where population is the lowest bar where income is the lowest, that availability is the lowest. we can look at that to adoption. so the dda that the sec is good but dean, the data through the census, we can take all that data finish in, piece it

together and try to come up with the best way to attack he unserved areas. and that's where it all starts to come together, that all the great technology that's here today, most of it meets the internet. and if you live in rural areas, in particular rural tennessee and broadband is not available, then all discrete applications are not usable. so this allow us to know where those gaps are, know where those areas are in the best decision we can about addressing those areas. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> what is yahoo! demonstrating today here? >> well, today we're demonstrating our ad interest manager and what we call clear out notice. so congress has been looking a lot at the issue of online privacy. actually last year he testified in front of the chief commerce committee over this issue. we're trying to give users under notice about what kinds of information are collected and used for online behavioral advertising and get them really meaningful choice over what categories are used and choice over whether they can opt-out entirely online behavioral advertising. so that's what were demoing here today. >> you mentioned two different technologies. what does each of them do specifically? >> clear out notice gives users an icon and a label that comes with the ads. as are served online various websites, where they will chop a label. they can click on the icann and find that to a serving that add

to them and they can find out where they can opt-out of payroll advertising. so without opt-out choice they can go to her ad interest manager that we unveiled actually in december of last year and they can see the categories that we have about them and they can opt-out of those categories are all behavioral targeting categories from yahoo!. we think that's kind of transparency and choice that users ultimately are looking for that will give them more comfort with the whole process of behavioral advertising. >> and why bring it to the internet caucus? >> well, the internet caucus, this is really all the members and the staffers who are really interested in technology issues. this is a key technology issue that the energy and commerce committee is looked at. so we want to let people know that industry self-regulation in this particular way can work, but we are one of the leaders in that space and really let them know that industry is taking this very seriously. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> got that from the congressional internet caucus event. if you want to watch this or other programs, go to our website e-stamp.org. >> now senate debate on republican senator jim bunning's decision to stop a bill to extend unemployment benefits.

lawyer from senate majority leader, harry reid, and senator bunning. >> every night, too many out of work nevadans and americans, people who want to work and need to their families, but can't find a job go to bed with at least the comfort of having unemployment insurance and health benefits. but last night, more than a million of them, people throughout america went to sleep lying on those benefits, woke up without the confidence they will be there now. early this morning, when they would rather be spending their mornings working, mothers and fathers in every state woke up at the unemployment office in a long line. news reports today said these lines are really long today all over the country. from virginia to nevada to kentucky. they are long because these

people are worried about how they're going to put food on the table and pay bills. for far too many americans, those benefits were set to expire last night. so six times last week, democrats asked to one extend by working on an extension. six times, republicans said no. they didn't just say no to us, that is the members of the senate, they said no to the families of their own states and all our state, too, must to act when they need action. economists respond in the event of emergency. this is an emergency. the republicans in the senate are standing between these feelings and a healthy need of these benefits expire and expired. my work under the senate rules to do that, but it certainly doesn't work for working families. they need to buy groceries does not expire. the need to teach her homes, put

gas in your car, make payments or your furniture you bought, the car you bought, your house payment. the need to take medicine or support an aging parent or take care of your kids, they don't expire. those opposed to helping our hello citizens at the time of greatest need, want to talk about process. republican colleagues came to the floor and talked about process. they had a right to do that. well, under the world, i guess that's true, mr. president. when you can't afford to feed your kids, that doesn't mean anything -- mean anything to them about process. we talk often about the cost of inaction. it's the reason we insist on creating jobs and making health care more foldable and strengthen nations security. when we talk about the cost of inaction, it's more than just rhetoric. it comes with dire consequences.

the americans a woke up this morning without the benefits they need now know that better than anyone else. mr. president, "the associated press" runs all over the country, newsletter. among other things come of this article says this morning, 2000 federal transportation workers will be furloughed without pay today. and mr. president, the reason we're talking about 2000, and this doesn't count the thousands of thousands come up to a million people are not going to have any jobs as a result of not extending the highway bill. that's want to do for just a while, but these people work because what's happened is that even the areas can't go out and do their jobs, so people are walking away from these jobs. secretary lahood, secretary of transportation, by the way, republican congressman kelly was