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Old-school Washington trade associations and think tanks are taking their membership pitches straight to Silicon Valley’s doorstep.

Seeking to tap into the success of the sector, veteran influence groups are updating their rosters and opening offices to try and make inroads with the new wave of corporate giants.

“We’re seeing the elevation of tech as a significant driver of both economic and political events,” said Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, a lobbyist at Monument Policy Group who represents Microsoft and the tech-based Reform Government Surveillance coalition. “It’s a natural progression, and you want to capture that community, and it’s not a business community that plays by traditional rules,” she said. “You have to go to them as opposed to waiting for them to come to you.”

Chavern said the new Center for Advanced Technology and Innovation, which is still hiring staff and looking for a West Coast office, is likely to expand the Chamber’s focus on issues like immigration, tax reform, trade and infrastructure, which are important to the tech sector.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is defending a controversial move to limit broadcast companies’ ability to cooperate as merely an attempt to defend the laws on the book.

At a summit put on the by the American Cable Association, Chairman Wheeler accused broadcasters of carrying on a “charade” to skirt the rules. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out,” he told the supportive cable industry crowd.

“This concept of competition and diversity and localism was being undone by legal legerdemain,” he said. “It makes no sense to create a situation where you own a broadcast license, I want to get control of that license but I can’t because I own another station in town, and I’ll tell you what, I’m going to buy 90 percent of all of your assets... and you keep the license because that makes you the owner.”

Chairman Wheeler added: “What we were trying to do was say: ‘Look, this is harmful to competition. It is harmful to the marketplace of broadcast transactions. There is a set of rules, a set of concepts, that have been hallowed in communications law. We’re trying to stick to those concepts and say how do those apply in this world?”

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defended its practice of obtaining e-mails older than 180 days without a warrant.

SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White told the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services that her agency protects people’s privacy when it uses subpoenas -- rather than warrants, which have a higher burden of proof -- to access emails.

Under the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to access electronic communications that have been stored for more than three months. Attempts to update that law -- including from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Reps Kevin Yoder (R-KS), Tom Graves (R-GA) and Jared Polis (D-CO) -- have been largely supported by law enforcement agencies but have faced backlash from civil agencies, like the SEC.

Rep Yoder asked why law enforcement agencies need a warrant to access physical documents but not electronic communications.

“Paper documents versus the file folders contained in our email accounts all seem to ... have Fourth Amendment protections,” he said. As a civil agency, the SEC relies on subpoenas, not warrants, to obtain information for its investigations, SEC Chairwoman White said. She told Rep Yoder that the SEC’s investigatory practices have built-in privacy protections.

Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Communications Subcommittee, wants to shift the balance of power between broadcasters and paid television companies like cable and satellite firms.

Rep Eshoo pushed for a “rebalancing” of the federal video laws to prevent broadcast companies like ABC, NBC and CBS from being able to black out local stations during disputes with cable and satellite companies, which pay to retransmit the channels.

“I think that there needs to be, obviously, a rebalancing of the law,” she said. “Much of the law was written to produce localism, but you see so many trends moving against that today.”

Consumers, she added, are getting “screwed and tattooed” in the arrangements allowed under current law, which can add up to billions of dollars but are “a racket.”

A coalition of tech advocacy groups is backing the Obama Administration's move to relinquish oversight of the technical side of the Web address.

"This move could help thwart government overreach in Internet governance, which would have devastating implications for human rights worldwide," the coalition said in a letter to the top Republicans and Democrats on the House Commerce Committee. Signatories include the Center for Democracy and Technology, Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation and Access.

The letter of support comes before a hearing on the topic at the House Commerce subcommittee on Technology. The hearing will focus on the Commerce Department's announcement that it will be handing over its oversight role of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the technical side of the domain name system. That system is currently managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under a contract with the US government that must be renewed every two years and expires in September 2015.

Dozens of privacy, technology and political organizations are calling on Congress to radically overhaul surveillance programs at the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government offices.

As lawmakers spar over President Obama’s proposal to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, the groups called for them to take up broader changes to the country’s spy agencies.

“Overbroad national security surveillance raises a host of Constitutional, human rights, and practical concerns, and we urge Congress and the Administration to address systemic reform,” the organizations wrote in a letter to top lawmakers, along with President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. “The trust of the American people and the global public cannot be regained with legislation that achieves only modest changes to discrete programs.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, online forum reddit and conservative outfit FreedomWorks were among the 42 organizations signing the letter, which went to House and Senate leaders and top lawmakers on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees.

Congressional Democrats are cheering the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) votes to crack down on broadcasters and open up more space for Wi-Fi.

“I thank the FCC for answering my call to rein in the misuse of broadcast television sharing agreements, which has threatened the integrity of the FCC’s media ownership rules,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said. “Today's action on joint sales agreements is a positive step forward, and I am pleased by the agency's further inquiry into how it can monitor the possible impact other sharing agreements could have on consumers.”

In a closely watched 3-2 vote, the FCC placed new limits on those arrangements. Republicans had lambasted the move, and criticized commission Chairman Tom Wheeler for moving forward with the proposal before finalizing a years-overdue review of its media ownership rules. Both Republican members of the panel opposed the new ownership rules, and said that the crackdown will hurt small stations.

A measure to clear up space for Wi-Fi was met more positively on the commission. The FCC's unanimous vote to free up space for unlicensed spectrum “is a win for consumers,” Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) said. “It supports greater competition, it improves mobile services, and it enhances innovation.”

Comcast’s proposed $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable is “not particularly scary,” according to Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen.

In an interview on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators,” Cohen said that the planned deal would be good for consumers and help the cable industry compete against satellite, telecoms and online video companies.

“We’re going to have a serious governmental review of the transaction, but I’ll be honest with you: I think the transaction is a lot less scary, it's a lot less large and a lot less complicated than some people would like to make it,” he said.

The deal would combine the two largest cable companies, but executives have been quick to point out that the two giants do not currently compete in the same markets and Comcast has already pledged to drop some customers so that it takes up less than 30 percent of the market.

“In no local market will there be any less choice after the transaction than there is before the transaction,” Cohen said. Instead, the merger will help the cable industry build infrastructure, do research and invest for the future, in order to fight against satellite television, online video companies like Netflix and major telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T, he said.

The Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) repeated its calls for fixes to the current system for combatting online piracy and expressed optimism the system could be improved through a series of discussions with Internet companies being convened by the Commerce Department.

"We must create best practices that will allow the Internet to live up to its potential of fostering creativity and innovation, while also protecting the work of all kinds of creators," Ben Sheffner, the entertainment industry group's vice president of legal affairs, wrote in a blog post.

The Department of Commerce held the first in a series of meetings with copyright holders and Internet companies aimed at the "notice and takedown" system under current law.

Protections for Internet companies under copyright law are "being used as a free pass, making it a shield from taking responsibility to help the content community curb online infringement," Sheffner wrote. "Takedown must mean stay down," he said, adding that stakeholders at the recent Commerce meeting "recognized that the notice-and-takedown process must become both more efficient and more effective."

WhatsApp users don't want the social messaging service to be acquired by Facebook, privacy groups told the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), urging the agency to investigate the deal.

The privacy groups -- the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy -- added to their plea to the FTC to investigate the $16 billion deal from in early March 2014, citing comments from around the Internet.

"WhatsApp users continue to object to the proposed acquisition" and "believe that companies acquired by Facebook will lose the ability to keep user data private," the groups wrote. They pointed to comments on tech news sites decrying the deal between WhatsApp and Facebook. The comments quoted one Huffington Post user who said she "will most likely" delete WhatsApp if it is purchased by and integrated into Facebook, because the latter "isn't very big on privacy."

The groups added that the FTC's examination of the deal between Facebook and WhatsApp should be more rigorous than its examination of Google's acquisition of Nest, a company that makes algorithm-based home thermostats.