The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 is currently going through the various US pillars of Government in an effort to stabilize the faltering economy. But there’s something else faltering under the pressure: the websites of the House of Representatives and individual members of Congress.

The worldwide financial crisis that is hitting everyone where it hurts; in the pocket, is forcing the American Government to take drastic action: giving $700 billion of taxpayer’s money to the exact same people who got us in this mess in the first place. And those same taxpayers aren’t happy footing the bill.

Rather than stay silent on the issue, many voters and members of the American public want to know exactly what is happening and have their say on the matter- which has caused a bit of a meltdown to the servers supporting the infrastructure of Government websites.

When the $700 billion bailout legislation was posed online on Sunday, the House of Representatives website immediately began receiving a ton of traffic it’s not used to having to deal with. That’s because most issues that go through the house are dull and not really of major interest to large swathes of, not only American citizens, but people around the world.

Monday saw the House vote on the bill, and traffic once again slowed the service down to an almost unusable level. The site became inaccessible for huge periods of time as people tried to find out what was happening as soon as it happened.

So on Tuesday, according to ComputerWorld, the House Office of the Chief Administrative Officer implemented a traffic management system that would attempt to ease congestion and keep the site’s traffic flowing more evenly. But there are still parts of the site not working properly, with the ‘Find Your Representative’ and ‘Write Your Representative’ applications the worst hit.

This is because this issue has rankled people like no other before it, and so even if they previously had no interest in politics, and maybe didn’t even know who their congressman was, they now want to email him or her to have their say on the issue.

This spike in traffic has even beaten the one caused when the 9/11 commission report was published on House.gov.

I think this a lesson for Governments around the world that although we have put you in charge of our affairs, we are still the ones who should have the final say. And to that end, systems should be in place to allow us all to have our opinion on matters as important as this heard by the right people.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 7:14 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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