Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said Tuesday that most opponents to his controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are teenagers in their basements as the Obama administration threatened to veto the measure for its potential to violate civil liberties.

"People on the Internet -- if you're, you know, a 14-year-old tweeter in your basement … I took my nephew, I had to work with him a lot on this bill because he didn't understand the mechanics of it," Rogers continued. "I hear that a lot. Once you understand the threat and you understand the mechanics of how it works and you understand that people are not monitoring your content of your emails, most people go, 'got it.'"

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, reflected concerns shared by the White House and many civil liberties groups, arguing that the bill did not do enough to ensure that companies, in sharing cyber threat data with the government and each other, strip out any personal data of private citizens.

"They can just ship the whole kit and caboodle and we're saying minimize what is relevant to our national security," the Democrat said. "The rest is none of the government's business."

Rogers stressed that his bill doesn’t extend any extra surveillance powers to the federal government, despite condemnation from critics that say exactly that. “It does something very simple: it allows the government to share zeroes and ones with the private sector,” he said. Rather, he called it "a critical bipartisan first step for enabling American’s private sector to defend itself" and "improves cybersecurity without compromising our civil liberties."

“We have yet to find a single United States company that opposes this bill,” said Rep. Rogers.

But companies do in fact oppose CISPA. Facebook rescinded their support of the act, according to Cnet’s Declan McCullagh, because a spokesperson for the social media site says they prefer a legislative "balance" that ensures "the privacy of our users.” Facebook made the decision to rescind their support for the legislation after facing pressure from Demand Progress, the Internet freedom advocacy group founded by Aaron Swartz.

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On 1T day in New York City, hundreds of college students from around the city gathered at Union Square for a rally and then marched downtown to Wall Street. At Union Square, some students publicly burned their student loan debt documents. "1T" stands for 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) dollars, which is now the official amount of student loan debt owed to big banks by American college students.

Students in other cities around the country are also rising up in protest, many signing pledges refusing to pay back their loans.

Via:

Several hundred protesters, mostly college students wearing placards noting the size of their debt loads, rallied in New York City's Union Square park on Wednesday.

They set fire to student debt documents and held signs reading "Debt free degrees" and "Education in America: Don't bank on it."

Hadi Nassar, 31, whose eight years of undergraduate and dental school education has left him $186,000 in debt, said he was having to rethink his plan to work at a community health clinic.

"It makes me angry. It makes me not want to do what I set out to do - which was, help people, take care of people," said Nassar, a dental resident. "That type of job isn't going to give me enough income, monthly, to pay this off."

While both Democrats and Republicans agree that it is imperative to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling to 6.8 percent, as they are set to do on July 1st, they part ways as to how to cover the loss of revenue estimated at $5.9 billion.

Democrats would close a tax loophole they have dubbed the "Gingrich/Edwards Loophole," which allows millionaires to avoid paying Medicare taxes. Republicans want to eliminate the preventative health fund, which House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called a "slush fund" on Wednesday.

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