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Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

681 points by cjoh 15y ago

remyroy 15y ago
All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.
- pingswept 15y ago
  That's not an accurate summary. A better summary comes in the last paragraph of the article: It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    In particular, with law enforcement, it's not as much an issue of how much money is spent on law enforcement (though that also matters), but whether the right things are prohibited. There are some things that few people would argue for decriminalizing (say, driving a truck bomb into a building), but a lot more questions past that.
- cq 15y ago
  That is one side of it, yes. Congress takes your money to do a lot of horrible things, like the hundreds of thousands of documented civilians that were killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Congress takes your money to do a lot of things, and some of them are absolutely important, like taking care of the medical problems that older people have.
jameskilton 15y ago
No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.
- davidw 15y ago
  That's the cynical take at least. It's a great way of telling yourself that trying is futile and therefore not worth the time. It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Dude, the amount of money that politicians get in campaign contributions is tiny compared to the amount of money that is spent on lobbyists. The problem is that we have this class of people who are personable, who are well informed, have spent years creating relationships with other people in Washington, and who are very experienced at providing simple, one-sided explanations of the issues to congress-critters. If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.
- divtxt 15y ago
  More generally, this kind of legal corruption is an obvious and yet unacknowledged flaw in representative democracy. By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy". The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.
- waqf 15y ago
  Congress: "No, we are all very aware of how the Internet works. OMG P1R4CY!!!1"
- Sayter 15y ago
  If that's the case, then how does that explain SOPA? Take the two primary backers, the MPAA and RIAA: 2010 revenue for the movie industry in the United States was about $10B, while the 2010 revenue for the music industry was approximately less than or equal to that figure (RIAA's FAQ suggests $7.7B in 2009). Compare that to tech companies: Apple alone had $28.57B in the Q3 of this year (to say nothing of yearly revenue). Certainly revenue does not equal profits or market share, but the point should still be made: one technology company is arguably larger than both the movie and music industries in the United States. If the matter were as simple as money equaling laws, then SOPA should never have seen the light of day.
rasur 15y ago
With respect, "The Internet" also exists beyond the borders of the United States of America, so while we outside of the US can look on at this spectacle with a mixture of amusement and dread, it's just a little galling to be told to understand something we have little control over. I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, I'm just trying to explain this slow-moving car-crash of a situation has effects outside of your own continent..
- waqf 15y ago
  Funnily enough, individual Americans also have little control over Congress. I think we're all in the same boat here (and I don't even think the article implied otherwise).
  - darklajid 15y ago
    I think the GP refers mostly to the title. No, the 'internet' doesn't need to learn about Congress, since the internet is a world-wide thing. I won't learn about politics in the USA anytime soon (no disrespect here, it's just of no interest to me and that's how I like it), but the article addresses me too.
    - brycecolquitt 15y ago
      I personally think that the "internet" does need to learn about Congress, or at least be aware of what is going on. ICANN controls the root DNS servers for TLDs, and before ICANN, the US government did.
      - darklajid 15y ago
        (addressing both you and waqf, bringing up the same point: The US is in control of some nice part of the internet infrastructure): You are right, of course. That means that I care about a world-wide disruption caused by (local) laws in the US. I read about those and follow the development of these laws to a point. The article addresses the internet first (me included) and then talks about educating the US congress and throwing money at US lobbyists, while fixing the US system so that it doesn't _need_ this kind of involvement anymore. I'm sorry, but that leaves me out. - I cannot take part in the education of statesman overseas/abroad and doubt that they'd listen to me - I certainly won't (especially on an individual level, but even corporate that would be waaaay weird and wrong) throw money at lobbyists in another country - I'm not allowed to take part in the political system in the US, so I cannot realistically help with any systematic change I think while you are, as I already admitted, entirely correct about the fact that Congress might affect the whole world, the article is still wrong in calling out to 'The Internet' to fix it. The issues have to be resolved locally. My way of influencing it _might_ be voting for a party that wants to wrangle for informational freedom in the EU and more independence from the US, but that's about it.
JonnieCache 15y ago
American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists. * Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff. * You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation. * Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is. * Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome. Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at. Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.
- eli 15y ago
  Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list. http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    The Sunlight Foundation's APIs look great and some of their projects are pretty cool (and well-designed). Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists. PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated. http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html
jaysonelliot 15y ago
I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair. I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years. With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for naught. I literally got a chill up my spine as I sat there, thinking about the stifling, bureaucratic, inflexible DMV mindset that led to an abomination like that, and realizing that even at the highest levels of government, that's what it's like. Our entire government, from municipal planning offices up to the top levels of the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House, lives in this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That. I mean, I knew this all along, but somehow seeing that screenshot - http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/feature_sheets/iq-correspondence_0.pdf http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/featu... - it hit me in a visceral way I hadn't thought about in a long time. All these years in corporate and startup America put me in a world where the need to move faster and compete has led me to believe that things had changed since the beginning of my career. In the world I live in, they have. But I had forgotten that in many places, things haven't changed much at all. Of course I'm upset and fuming at the massive bloated waste that is our government, and I wish we could just put on our Guy Fawkes masks and wipe it clean in one easy swoop. Clay Johnson is right, though. We need to learn how Congress works, make better tools, get our own lobbyists to educate the dinosaurs that are there now, and get new people into office who know more about the world we live in. It's a daunting proposition.
- untog 15y ago
  Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad? Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad. In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system to collate all the emails, letters, phone calls and visits into one single database. That sounds really useful, and I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used it. "this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That." I don't think this is the product of "We've Always Done It This Way", it's the result of "We Have A Strict Budget For This And User Interface Is Difficult To Quantify". As for "You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.", well, that's the stuff of government. I agree that it's overly restrictive, but I wouldn't want to see the government tip too far in the opposite direction. I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.
gasull 15y ago
This is an invitation to play the lobby game. To me it reads like "we should bribe Congress too". But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want. If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in California or Switzerland.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens voting on laws.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    There are at least 22 states that allow for both voter initiatives and referendums[1], and not all of them suffer from the issues you are outlining. Also, it isn't setup so that every issue is addressed in this manner. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in_...
  - gasull 15y ago
    The only difference with other states of countries is that California got the budget crisis sooner, so it woke up first. It's better to have the crisis when you can still raise taxes (or cut spending).
  - protomyth 15y ago
    North Dakota has ballot initiatives and is running a surplus. It isn't the ballot initiative that is going to kill California, it is the unfunded pensions and public union pressure.
jlind 15y ago
In regards to the infographic How Our Laws Are Made[1], where does SOPA and/or PIPA stand currently? [1] http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howlawsmadeWIRTH2.jpg http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howla...
TheCapn 15y ago
I wrote a post about this last week saying why this sort of thought is wrong. In summary it is basically this: As people of power in a position to make important decisions it is their PROFESSIONAL. ETHICAL. DUTY. to know all the facts that pertain to the situation. At no point is it our fault to not understand their system in its entirety but it IS their fault to be making conscious decisions that effect people and systems they do not entirely understand. As an engineer it boggles my mind to see someone weighing in on an issue they haven't rightfully studied before attempting to tackle. If there is a project I'm asked to assist on and I'm not confident I can work with my current level of knowledge> I tell my employer and I either get reassigned or scheduled for training. There is no faking it in my industry, why should they be allowed to fuck everything up because they were willfully ignorant. It goes past that though. They HAVE experts talking to them, or at least trying. The engineers, architects and experts that practically founded the internet have weighed in on how this is a bad idea and yet THEY'RE IGNORED! Don't pretend like this level of ignorance and pure negligence is acceptable for one minute because it just shows how complacent people have become with their representatives. /rant
- scott_s 15y ago
  In principle, I agree with you. But that gets us nowhere. Would you prefer to be "right" and not get what you want, or concede that this is just how things work and get what you want? I agree with the author of the article: we need to figure out a better way of educating Congress. I don't know how, but their ignorance makes this obvious. Blaming Congress for being ignorant does not get us what we want. I'm going to assume that we (where I define "we" as those people who have technical backgrounds and could explain the problem to someone in Congress given the chance) have done a poor job of educating Congress on how the internet works. With that as a given, and further assuming that we know organizations likes the RIAA are actively lobbying Congress, the current situation is inevitable. People in Congress are like passive journalists: they need to have a basic understanding of a wide range of topics, but sources come to them, instead of them going to sources. If only one side of an issue talks to them, then they're only going to understand that side.
  - TheCapn 15y ago
ggwicz 15y ago
"I don't complain about politicians because everyone does. This politician sucks, that politician is a fucking idiot. Yeah, we'll guess what asshole? YOU KEEP VOTING FOR THESE MORONS! You keep arguing about democrat vs. republican, you keep asking for things from the government, you keep on voting for the people you complain about. You legitimize the bullshit. This is what you get for wanting to be led like little children." - George Carlin I have this from an .mp3 I got from some weird torrent, but I haven't been able to find it on YouTube or on iTunes. I'll try to get it up on the web if I can...
- sp332 15y ago
  Give https://soundcloud.com/ https://soundcloud.com/ a try?
  - ggwicz 15y ago
    Thanks, I'm trying to find the original clip on my computer. Lotta Carlin audio in my iTunes...
iterationx 15y ago
Dear Internet, Its called The New World Order. They're not uneducated, its a conspiracy. Oh, look! our Congress is sooooo dumb, they decided to do away with the Bill of Rights on the 222nd anniversary of its signing, and declare that disagrees with them is a terrorist and that "terrorists" can be held indefinitely without recourse. From childhood we are told that we are smart and politicians are stupid. But maybe, just maybe, the average netizen is so prideful he believes that he cannot be manipulated by a powerful combine of men, pretending to act stupidly, but in truth acting maliciously.
OoTheNigerian 15y ago
And then the USG insists 'democracy' is the only right way for people to be governed. The reality is, it is money, not the 'right thing' that determines what laws are passed and how it is enfored. And who is elected to make thise laws. It is sad. Really.
zackzackzack 15y ago
Where is google/facebook in all of this? They are the dictators of the internet. Why aren't they educating the crap out of our representatives?
- JamisonM 15y ago
  I think technology companies are sort of notorious for not being very good at the lobbying game. MS just started getting serious about it in the late '90s (and I think they have no dog in this particular fight) so we should expect Google to start figuring it out in a few years and Facebook later still. (MS's PAC was funded to the tune of $16,000 in 1995, 100x that 5 years later.)
  - zackzackzack 15y ago
    Hope five years from now is not too late.
- forensic 15y ago
  Google opposes SOPA. Facebook opposed it, but then supported it when a clause was added that protects Facebook. Truth be told, SOPA is actually beneficial for the big players, it actually gives the big players a competitive advantage. No court or congress is going to harm the Facebook.com DNS -- that's political suicide. But the public is not going to care/notice if Facebook-Competitor.com gets shut down. These laws will be used to crush sapling startups, which actually just eliminates the competition for Facebook/YouTube. It's Congress's way of saying: you can have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This is all the social media anyone should ever need. Anyone who wants more social media options than the Big3 is obviously some kind of criminal. SOPA essentially freezes the social media internet as it is and makes new social media companies impossible. It also makes borderline-popular social media companies like reddit unlikely to survive. Reddit is too free speech tolerating to survive this legislation. Facebook is borderline, but they're untouchable. YouTube is in violation. Twitter is shallow enough to be safe.
illamint 15y ago
You'd think that tech companies involved would have a stronger lobbying arm. Every one of those extremely wealthy individuals that signed onto that "open letter" to congress should be funding lobbyists in combination with Google, ISPs, etc. and every provider out there who stands to lose from the passage of SOPA. Seriously, look at it. The IP lobby is spending millions to buy out Congress and we've got the billionaires and corporations that are significantly larger, richer and more powerful than the IP lobby writing fucking letters?
- brown9-2 15y ago
  I think it's naïveté in a certain way, and also a belief that the power of ideas should win out above everything else.
- zmanji 15y ago
  If money influencing Congress is a problem then why should they contribute to it?
ck2 15y ago
lobbyist spent a long time [...] educating members of Congress This is exactly, EXACTLY why lobbyists must be banned. It's not education, it's propaganda. The country is run by people whose knowledge is solely based on propaganda?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- whyenot 15y ago
  It's not education, it's not propaganda, it's a legal form of bribery.
jhuni 15y ago
tl;dr I stopped at "our democracy."
JamisonM 15y ago
All the freaking out about SOPA reveals something very interesting about the technology crowd in general I think. Whatever happened to all those people who were always crowing about how legislation would never keep up to technology? Are there experts going in front of the committee explaining how technology will make circumventing these restrictions seamless for end users? Or are we admitting that this legislation has caught up and that technology and innovation has been defeated. Is not the way to defeat SOPA and anything remotely resembling it just to let it become law and then kick its ass in the real world. Congress would never take it up again once it has failed and a system put in place to ensure it can not be regulated in the future.
- snowwrestler 15y ago
  Along these same lines, I remember the fight over the DMCA. It's kind of funny to see the tech industry defending it so strongly today. There was a while there when it was probably the most hated law on the web.
x3c 15y ago
Logical recourse requires constant vigilance and discipline. Logic requires an environment where being illogical is detrimental to one's goals. Take the community of Hacker News for example. Any constructive and rational chain of thought is positively reinforced by the community and any name-calling or irrational rant fades away into oblivion. Such environment keeps every participant in the honest. The environment in politics is toxic. Not just in US but in almost all democracies. A representative, once elected, gets immersed in the political environment. He quickly adapts to the environment because its so much easier. When the time comes to be re-elected, they dont have to prove that they are competent but that they're not as bad as their competitor (or that their party is not as bad as the one they're competing against). To effect any change, the environment needs to change. And it will not change as long as seasoned and career politicians, cynical and jaded by the political climate, keep getting re-elected. Obama is a good example of this phenomenon. I'm not a from US but I closely followed the 2008 US elections. And I bought the idea of hope. But once Obama was elected, he was submersed in the political climate and he adapted. So, while educating congress is a step in the right direction, as the blog suggests; infusing new blood in politics is also crucial. Creating a healthy environment in the Capital (not just of US, but every country) can go a long way to affect the changes that are long way due in the political process.
boredguy8 15y ago
Attempting to post this link to facebook breaks it. http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works- deletes the trailing hyphen and becomes http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
  Post it with a trailing slash: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-/
NiceOneBrah 15y ago
This illustrates the folly of big government. The politicians in congress are not lacking intelligence, but are simply trying to do too much. It would be impossible for these 535 men and women to each have a thorough understanding of all the industries they attempt to regulate. Although the tech community is up in arms over SOPA right now, how many equally bad laws have been passed that affect other industries? The government is the entity that enables corporations to violate the rights of the people.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
The big problem with this, of course, is that word "educate" which the author encloses in quotes. The people who influence Congress "educate" representatives not with informative presentations but with money, and lots of it.
tomelders 15y ago
Who wants to sign up as the first ever crowd funded, open source lobbyist? I'd do it myself, but I'm not American. I will pay you £5 though. Get another 100,000 like me and you're making a cool £500,000 gross. Just be sure to properly document what you're doing and what you intend to do. I'll also give you £5 worth of slush money to grease palms and what not. And if you meet certain objectives and milestones, I may even give you a £5 bonus at the end of the year. Hell, I'll even give you £1 to give to every member of congress you secure, and £2 for every president you get!! (serving presidents only). All these numbers are in Pounds Sterling. Do the math.
- mseebach 15y ago
  You'd also land your lobbyist in jail pretty quick. I'm fairly certain it's more than a little illegal (on the order of treason) to accept foreign money to influence congress.
  - robryan 15y ago
    Could you get around that though, what if foreigners could say buy an overpriced piece of software from the group?
    - maeon3 15y ago
      You could, but don't be too successful or its off with your head when political winds shift. Isreal has subconscious influence over this country. You might have heard the words "holy" and Isreal in a song played in the US in December... 50 million times and delivered as sermons in churches on every street corner in the US.
  - nl 15y ago
    There are plenty of ways for a foreigner to lobby in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#Foreign_Lobbying_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#F... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
itechnofuture 15y ago
Excellent Thinking on it
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I am reminded of the way the media handled the vaccination scare: they always had both sides represented, even though one side was rational science and the other was misguided if not openly fraudulant. I saw a lot of complaining on the Internet about journalists giving equal footing to "crazy" viewpoints. Of course we don't want that, either in journalists or legislators. The question is how to determine what is the "rational" view and what is the "crazy" view. If we can address that in some way, we may be closer to a solution. In government, it seems like following the money is a good start. The deeper the pockets of the original source of the money, the more crazy the source seems to be. If an idea is coming in being funded by a lot of individuals, it is probably more rational (where rationality is defined as the true will of the people). I agree with TFA that you have to work inside the system to change it (short of open revolt). It reminds me of a friend who wanted to get rid of highway billboards. His idea was simple: Raise money to buy a handful. Sell ads and use the profits to buy other billboards. Once they control all the billboards, take them all down.
jderick 15y ago
rootstrikers.org is trying to get money out of politics. I think that would go a long way.
curveship 15y ago
"Let's lobby for a rules change that allows our members to use the software they want to use." What could possibly go wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...
mdemare 15y ago
Hear hear! Finally an article placing the blame where it belongs - on our shoulders. It is naive to expect Congress to figure out what laws are best for the nation. Instead we should be forcing the laws we want down their throats. All that the MPAA/RIAA can offer to congress is money, but we have something they want much more: votes. When the NRA or the AARP cough, congressmen sit up and listen. The reason? They have millions of members. Now what about the organization representing our interests? Pro startup, pro contractors, pro net neutrality, anti censorship, anti patent? Why isn't there such an organization with a million members? We hackers are smart, we're prosperous, there's no excuse for being so damn unorganized. https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
- jimmyjazz14 15y ago
  I was about to pipe up and say the EFF until I saw the link at the end of your comment. Seriously though everyone who works with or cares about tech should donate (or better yet join) the EFF.
beefman 15y ago
No no no, a thousand times no. It is the job of the Congress to understand the things it regulates! They employ thousands of "expert" staffers and are supposed to be drawn from among the best and brightest of the citizenry. It may be hard to believe, but details actually matter when you're screwing around with a $15T/yr socioeconomic machine.
rickmb 15y ago
Been there, done that, and guess what: they really don't want to hear from their constituents. Period. (And this was on a local level in the Netherlands, which I'm pretty confident is considerable more accessible and less corrupt than US Congress.) This is about power, holding on to it and increasing it. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else matters these people, no matter how nice, intelligent and understanding they sometimes seem appear to be. Being a politician has become a career path with no goal that has anything to do with representing the will of the people. "Ill will or spite" doesn't come into it: it's just business. And the people have nothing to offer them in that respect except votes and obedience. As long as they get both despite everything, no strategy will give us any more access because there is simply no need for them to give it to us. The only way this will change is if it no longer pays to ignore the people.
charlieok 15y ago
To the extent that power over the internet is in the hands of a controlling few, we engineers haven't done a good enough job of engineering. Sure, educating congress is a good idea. But there is a lot of room for improvement on the engineering too. The more decentralized our creations, the less opportunity for congress to get their grubby hands on them.
lucian303 15y ago
Congress doesn't work. That's what the Internet doesn't know.
praptak 15y ago
This is how congress works: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back TLDR: They do not want to be educated, their goal is to obtain money.
atsaloli 15y ago
http://www.DownsizeDC.org/ http://www.DownsizeDC.org/ Mission: We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states. Technology: Our proprietary “Educate the Powerful System”SM (EPS) is not sending an email on your behalf. Usually, our system fills out the web forms located at the Congressperson's website. Our system gives your letter a more personalized feel — even increases the odds that it will be read. (I copied the above from their website.) So - you fill out a simple web form, personalize with your comments if you like, and DownsizeDC will deliver it to all your Senate and House representatives using their own Congressional web sites and web forms. All you have to provide is your address and DownsizeDC will figure out who your reps are. It makes it much easier for public to communicate with their representatives, which allows for the communication to occur more frequently and in greater volume. This is a cool hack and I use it several times a week every week to express my disapproval of the erosion of civil liberties in the USA attendant to the War on Terror.
aquanext 15y ago
giant technology union. that's the only way we're ever going to have the type of cash necessary to lobby congress to do anything.
SnowShadow 15y ago
This article made me think of the cool startup https://www.popvox.com/ https://www.popvox.com/ They are working to provide a two way bridge between Congress and Constituents. They won the Social Media Tech award in the SXSW Accelerator this year and Tim O'Reilly is a founding advisor. I think they're the kind of company that would love help from open sourcing l33t haxxors such as yourselves.
secretwhistle 15y ago
I was going to upvote this but it was at 666 points. So I just took a screenshot and forwarded it to the more religious of our representatives as proof that SOPA is indeed evil.

681 points by cjoh 15y ago

remyroy 15y ago

All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.

pingswept 15y ago
That's not an accurate summary. A better summary comes in the last paragraph of the article: It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them.
- _delirium 15y ago
  In particular, with law enforcement, it's not as much an issue of how much money is spent on law enforcement (though that also matters), but whether the right things are prohibited. There are some things that few people would argue for decriminalizing (say, driving a truck bomb into a building), but a lot more questions past that.
cq 15y ago
That is one side of it, yes. Congress takes your money to do a lot of horrible things, like the hundreds of thousands of documented civilians that were killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Congress takes your money to do a lot of things, and some of them are absolutely important, like taking care of the medical problems that older people have.

jameskilton 15y ago

No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.

davidw 15y ago
That's the cynical take at least. It's a great way of telling yourself that trying is futile and therefore not worth the time. It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.
Symmetry 15y ago
Dude, the amount of money that politicians get in campaign contributions is tiny compared to the amount of money that is spent on lobbyists. The problem is that we have this class of people who are personable, who are well informed, have spent years creating relationships with other people in Washington, and who are very experienced at providing simple, one-sided explanations of the issues to congress-critters. If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.
divtxt 15y ago
More generally, this kind of legal corruption is an obvious and yet unacknowledged flaw in representative democracy. By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy". The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.
waqf 15y ago
Congress: "No, we are all very aware of how the Internet works. OMG P1R4CY!!!1"
Sayter 15y ago
If that's the case, then how does that explain SOPA? Take the two primary backers, the MPAA and RIAA: 2010 revenue for the movie industry in the United States was about $10B, while the 2010 revenue for the music industry was approximately less than or equal to that figure (RIAA's FAQ suggests $7.7B in 2009). Compare that to tech companies: Apple alone had $28.57B in the Q3 of this year (to say nothing of yearly revenue). Certainly revenue does not equal profits or market share, but the point should still be made: one technology company is arguably larger than both the movie and music industries in the United States. If the matter were as simple as money equaling laws, then SOPA should never have seen the light of day.

rasur 15y ago

With respect, "The Internet" also exists beyond the borders of the United States of America, so while we outside of the US can look on at this spectacle with a mixture of amusement and dread, it's just a little galling to be told to understand something we have little control over. I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, I'm just trying to explain this slow-moving car-crash of a situation has effects outside of your own continent..

waqf 15y ago
Funnily enough, individual Americans also have little control over Congress. I think we're all in the same boat here (and I don't even think the article implied otherwise).
- darklajid 15y ago
  I think the GP refers mostly to the title. No, the 'internet' doesn't need to learn about Congress, since the internet is a world-wide thing. I won't learn about politics in the USA anytime soon (no disrespect here, it's just of no interest to me and that's how I like it), but the article addresses me too.
  - brycecolquitt 15y ago
    I personally think that the "internet" does need to learn about Congress, or at least be aware of what is going on. ICANN controls the root DNS servers for TLDs, and before ICANN, the US government did.
    - darklajid 15y ago
      (addressing both you and waqf, bringing up the same point: The US is in control of some nice part of the internet infrastructure): You are right, of course. That means that I care about a world-wide disruption caused by (local) laws in the US. I read about those and follow the development of these laws to a point. The article addresses the internet first (me included) and then talks about educating the US congress and throwing money at US lobbyists, while fixing the US system so that it doesn't _need_ this kind of involvement anymore. I'm sorry, but that leaves me out. - I cannot take part in the education of statesman overseas/abroad and doubt that they'd listen to me - I certainly won't (especially on an individual level, but even corporate that would be waaaay weird and wrong) throw money at lobbyists in another country - I'm not allowed to take part in the political system in the US, so I cannot realistically help with any systematic change I think while you are, as I already admitted, entirely correct about the fact that Congress might affect the whole world, the article is still wrong in calling out to 'The Internet' to fix it. The issues have to be resolved locally. My way of influencing it _might_ be voting for a party that wants to wrangle for informational freedom in the EU and more independence from the US, but that's about it.

JonnieCache 15y ago

American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists. * Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff. * You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation. * Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is. * Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome. Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at. Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.

eli 15y ago
Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list. http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  The Sunlight Foundation's APIs look great and some of their projects are pretty cool (and well-designed). Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists. PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated. http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html

jaysonelliot 15y ago

I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair. I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years. With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for naught. I literally got a chill up my spine as I sat there, thinking about the stifling, bureaucratic, inflexible DMV mindset that led to an abomination like that, and realizing that even at the highest levels of government, that's what it's like. Our entire government, from municipal planning offices up to the top levels of the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House, lives in this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That. I mean, I knew this all along, but somehow seeing that screenshot - http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/feature_sheets/iq-correspondence_0.pdf http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/featu... - it hit me in a visceral way I hadn't thought about in a long time. All these years in corporate and startup America put me in a world where the need to move faster and compete has led me to believe that things had changed since the beginning of my career. In the world I live in, they have. But I had forgotten that in many places, things haven't changed much at all. Of course I'm upset and fuming at the massive bloated waste that is our government, and I wish we could just put on our Guy Fawkes masks and wipe it clean in one easy swoop. Clay Johnson is right, though. We need to learn how Congress works, make better tools, get our own lobbyists to educate the dinosaurs that are there now, and get new people into office who know more about the world we live in. It's a daunting proposition.

untog 15y ago
Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad? Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad. In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system to collate all the emails, letters, phone calls and visits into one single database. That sounds really useful, and I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used it. "this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That." I don't think this is the product of "We've Always Done It This Way", it's the result of "We Have A Strict Budget For This And User Interface Is Difficult To Quantify". As for "You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.", well, that's the stuff of government. I agree that it's overly restrictive, but I wouldn't want to see the government tip too far in the opposite direction. I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.

gasull 15y ago

This is an invitation to play the lobby game. To me it reads like "we should bribe Congress too". But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want. If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in California or Switzerland.

jaysonelliot 15y ago
Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens voting on laws.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  There are at least 22 states that allow for both voter initiatives and referendums[1], and not all of them suffer from the issues you are outlining. Also, it isn't setup so that every issue is addressed in this manner. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in_...
- gasull 15y ago
  The only difference with other states of countries is that California got the budget crisis sooner, so it woke up first. It's better to have the crisis when you can still raise taxes (or cut spending).
- protomyth 15y ago
  North Dakota has ballot initiatives and is running a surplus. It isn't the ballot initiative that is going to kill California, it is the unfunded pensions and public union pressure.

jlind 15y ago

In regards to the infographic How Our Laws Are Made[1], where does SOPA and/or PIPA stand currently? [1] http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howlawsmadeWIRTH2.jpg http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howla...

TheCapn 15y ago

I wrote a post about this last week saying why this sort of thought is wrong. In summary it is basically this: As people of power in a position to make important decisions it is their PROFESSIONAL. ETHICAL. DUTY. to know all the facts that pertain to the situation. At no point is it our fault to not understand their system in its entirety but it IS their fault to be making conscious decisions that effect people and systems they do not entirely understand. As an engineer it boggles my mind to see someone weighing in on an issue they haven't rightfully studied before attempting to tackle. If there is a project I'm asked to assist on and I'm not confident I can work with my current level of knowledge> I tell my employer and I either get reassigned or scheduled for training. There is no faking it in my industry, why should they be allowed to fuck everything up because they were willfully ignorant. It goes past that though. They HAVE experts talking to them, or at least trying. The engineers, architects and experts that practically founded the internet have weighed in on how this is a bad idea and yet THEY'RE IGNORED! Don't pretend like this level of ignorance and pure negligence is acceptable for one minute because it just shows how complacent people have become with their representatives. /rant

scott_s 15y ago
In principle, I agree with you. But that gets us nowhere. Would you prefer to be "right" and not get what you want, or concede that this is just how things work and get what you want? I agree with the author of the article: we need to figure out a better way of educating Congress. I don't know how, but their ignorance makes this obvious. Blaming Congress for being ignorant does not get us what we want. I'm going to assume that we (where I define "we" as those people who have technical backgrounds and could explain the problem to someone in Congress given the chance) have done a poor job of educating Congress on how the internet works. With that as a given, and further assuming that we know organizations likes the RIAA are actively lobbying Congress, the current situation is inevitable. People in Congress are like passive journalists: they need to have a basic understanding of a wide range of topics, but sources come to them, instead of them going to sources. If only one side of an issue talks to them, then they're only going to understand that side.
- TheCapn 15y ago

ggwicz 15y ago

"I don't complain about politicians because everyone does. This politician sucks, that politician is a fucking idiot. Yeah, we'll guess what asshole? YOU KEEP VOTING FOR THESE MORONS! You keep arguing about democrat vs. republican, you keep asking for things from the government, you keep on voting for the people you complain about. You legitimize the bullshit. This is what you get for wanting to be led like little children." - George Carlin I have this from an .mp3 I got from some weird torrent, but I haven't been able to find it on YouTube or on iTunes. I'll try to get it up on the web if I can...

sp332 15y ago
Give https://soundcloud.com/ https://soundcloud.com/ a try?
- ggwicz 15y ago
  Thanks, I'm trying to find the original clip on my computer. Lotta Carlin audio in my iTunes...

iterationx 15y ago

Dear Internet, Its called The New World Order. They're not uneducated, its a conspiracy. Oh, look! our Congress is sooooo dumb, they decided to do away with the Bill of Rights on the 222nd anniversary of its signing, and declare that disagrees with them is a terrorist and that "terrorists" can be held indefinitely without recourse. From childhood we are told that we are smart and politicians are stupid. But maybe, just maybe, the average netizen is so prideful he believes that he cannot be manipulated by a powerful combine of men, pretending to act stupidly, but in truth acting maliciously.

OoTheNigerian 15y ago

And then the USG insists 'democracy' is the only right way for people to be governed. The reality is, it is money, not the 'right thing' that determines what laws are passed and how it is enfored. And who is elected to make thise laws. It is sad. Really.

zackzackzack 15y ago

Where is google/facebook in all of this? They are the dictators of the internet. Why aren't they educating the crap out of our representatives?

JamisonM 15y ago
I think technology companies are sort of notorious for not being very good at the lobbying game. MS just started getting serious about it in the late '90s (and I think they have no dog in this particular fight) so we should expect Google to start figuring it out in a few years and Facebook later still. (MS's PAC was funded to the tune of $16,000 in 1995, 100x that 5 years later.)
- zackzackzack 15y ago
  Hope five years from now is not too late.
forensic 15y ago
Google opposes SOPA. Facebook opposed it, but then supported it when a clause was added that protects Facebook. Truth be told, SOPA is actually beneficial for the big players, it actually gives the big players a competitive advantage. No court or congress is going to harm the Facebook.com DNS -- that's political suicide. But the public is not going to care/notice if Facebook-Competitor.com gets shut down. These laws will be used to crush sapling startups, which actually just eliminates the competition for Facebook/YouTube. It's Congress's way of saying: you can have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This is all the social media anyone should ever need. Anyone who wants more social media options than the Big3 is obviously some kind of criminal. SOPA essentially freezes the social media internet as it is and makes new social media companies impossible. It also makes borderline-popular social media companies like reddit unlikely to survive. Reddit is too free speech tolerating to survive this legislation. Facebook is borderline, but they're untouchable. YouTube is in violation. Twitter is shallow enough to be safe.

illamint 15y ago

You'd think that tech companies involved would have a stronger lobbying arm. Every one of those extremely wealthy individuals that signed onto that "open letter" to congress should be funding lobbyists in combination with Google, ISPs, etc. and every provider out there who stands to lose from the passage of SOPA. Seriously, look at it. The IP lobby is spending millions to buy out Congress and we've got the billionaires and corporations that are significantly larger, richer and more powerful than the IP lobby writing fucking letters?

brown9-2 15y ago
I think it's naïveté in a certain way, and also a belief that the power of ideas should win out above everything else.
zmanji 15y ago
If money influencing Congress is a problem then why should they contribute to it?

ck2 15y ago

lobbyist spent a long time [...] educating members of Congress This is exactly, EXACTLY why lobbyists must be banned. It's not education, it's propaganda. The country is run by people whose knowledge is solely based on propaganda?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
whyenot 15y ago
It's not education, it's not propaganda, it's a legal form of bribery.

jhuni 15y ago

tl;dr I stopped at "our democracy."

JamisonM 15y ago

All the freaking out about SOPA reveals something very interesting about the technology crowd in general I think. Whatever happened to all those people who were always crowing about how legislation would never keep up to technology? Are there experts going in front of the committee explaining how technology will make circumventing these restrictions seamless for end users? Or are we admitting that this legislation has caught up and that technology and innovation has been defeated. Is not the way to defeat SOPA and anything remotely resembling it just to let it become law and then kick its ass in the real world. Congress would never take it up again once it has failed and a system put in place to ensure it can not be regulated in the future.

snowwrestler 15y ago
Along these same lines, I remember the fight over the DMCA. It's kind of funny to see the tech industry defending it so strongly today. There was a while there when it was probably the most hated law on the web.

x3c 15y ago

Logical recourse requires constant vigilance and discipline. Logic requires an environment where being illogical is detrimental to one's goals. Take the community of Hacker News for example. Any constructive and rational chain of thought is positively reinforced by the community and any name-calling or irrational rant fades away into oblivion. Such environment keeps every participant in the honest. The environment in politics is toxic. Not just in US but in almost all democracies. A representative, once elected, gets immersed in the political environment. He quickly adapts to the environment because its so much easier. When the time comes to be re-elected, they dont have to prove that they are competent but that they're not as bad as their competitor (or that their party is not as bad as the one they're competing against). To effect any change, the environment needs to change. And it will not change as long as seasoned and career politicians, cynical and jaded by the political climate, keep getting re-elected. Obama is a good example of this phenomenon. I'm not a from US but I closely followed the 2008 US elections. And I bought the idea of hope. But once Obama was elected, he was submersed in the political climate and he adapted. So, while educating congress is a step in the right direction, as the blog suggests; infusing new blood in politics is also crucial. Creating a healthy environment in the Capital (not just of US, but every country) can go a long way to affect the changes that are long way due in the political process.

boredguy8 15y ago

Attempting to post this link to facebook breaks it. http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works- deletes the trailing hyphen and becomes http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works

ComputerGuru 15y ago
Post it with a trailing slash: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-/

NiceOneBrah 15y ago

This illustrates the folly of big government. The politicians in congress are not lacking intelligence, but are simply trying to do too much. It would be impossible for these 535 men and women to each have a thorough understanding of all the industries they attempt to regulate. Although the tech community is up in arms over SOPA right now, how many equally bad laws have been passed that affect other industries? The government is the entity that enables corporations to violate the rights of the people.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

The big problem with this, of course, is that word "educate" which the author encloses in quotes. The people who influence Congress "educate" representatives not with informative presentations but with money, and lots of it.

tomelders 15y ago

Who wants to sign up as the first ever crowd funded, open source lobbyist? I'd do it myself, but I'm not American. I will pay you £5 though. Get another 100,000 like me and you're making a cool £500,000 gross. Just be sure to properly document what you're doing and what you intend to do. I'll also give you £5 worth of slush money to grease palms and what not. And if you meet certain objectives and milestones, I may even give you a £5 bonus at the end of the year. Hell, I'll even give you £1 to give to every member of congress you secure, and £2 for every president you get!! (serving presidents only). All these numbers are in Pounds Sterling. Do the math.

mseebach 15y ago
You'd also land your lobbyist in jail pretty quick. I'm fairly certain it's more than a little illegal (on the order of treason) to accept foreign money to influence congress.
- robryan 15y ago
  Could you get around that though, what if foreigners could say buy an overpriced piece of software from the group?
  - maeon3 15y ago
    You could, but don't be too successful or its off with your head when political winds shift. Isreal has subconscious influence over this country. You might have heard the words "holy" and Isreal in a song played in the US in December... 50 million times and delivered as sermons in churches on every street corner in the US.
- nl 15y ago
  There are plenty of ways for a foreigner to lobby in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#Foreign_Lobbying_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#F... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act

itechnofuture 15y ago

Excellent Thinking on it

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

I am reminded of the way the media handled the vaccination scare: they always had both sides represented, even though one side was rational science and the other was misguided if not openly fraudulant. I saw a lot of complaining on the Internet about journalists giving equal footing to "crazy" viewpoints. Of course we don't want that, either in journalists or legislators. The question is how to determine what is the "rational" view and what is the "crazy" view. If we can address that in some way, we may be closer to a solution. In government, it seems like following the money is a good start. The deeper the pockets of the original source of the money, the more crazy the source seems to be. If an idea is coming in being funded by a lot of individuals, it is probably more rational (where rationality is defined as the true will of the people). I agree with TFA that you have to work inside the system to change it (short of open revolt). It reminds me of a friend who wanted to get rid of highway billboards. His idea was simple: Raise money to buy a handful. Sell ads and use the profits to buy other billboards. Once they control all the billboards, take them all down.

jderick 15y ago

rootstrikers.org is trying to get money out of politics. I think that would go a long way.

curveship 15y ago

"Let's lobby for a rules change that allows our members to use the software they want to use." What could possibly go wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...

mdemare 15y ago

Hear hear! Finally an article placing the blame where it belongs - on our shoulders. It is naive to expect Congress to figure out what laws are best for the nation. Instead we should be forcing the laws we want down their throats. All that the MPAA/RIAA can offer to congress is money, but we have something they want much more: votes. When the NRA or the AARP cough, congressmen sit up and listen. The reason? They have millions of members. Now what about the organization representing our interests? Pro startup, pro contractors, pro net neutrality, anti censorship, anti patent? Why isn't there such an organization with a million members? We hackers are smart, we're prosperous, there's no excuse for being so damn unorganized. https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/

jimmyjazz14 15y ago
I was about to pipe up and say the EFF until I saw the link at the end of your comment. Seriously though everyone who works with or cares about tech should donate (or better yet join) the EFF.

beefman 15y ago

No no no, a thousand times no. It is the job of the Congress to understand the things it regulates! They employ thousands of "expert" staffers and are supposed to be drawn from among the best and brightest of the citizenry. It may be hard to believe, but details actually matter when you're screwing around with a $15T/yr socioeconomic machine.

rickmb 15y ago

Been there, done that, and guess what: they really don't want to hear from their constituents. Period. (And this was on a local level in the Netherlands, which I'm pretty confident is considerable more accessible and less corrupt than US Congress.) This is about power, holding on to it and increasing it. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else matters these people, no matter how nice, intelligent and understanding they sometimes seem appear to be. Being a politician has become a career path with no goal that has anything to do with representing the will of the people. "Ill will or spite" doesn't come into it: it's just business. And the people have nothing to offer them in that respect except votes and obedience. As long as they get both despite everything, no strategy will give us any more access because there is simply no need for them to give it to us. The only way this will change is if it no longer pays to ignore the people.

charlieok 15y ago

To the extent that power over the internet is in the hands of a controlling few, we engineers haven't done a good enough job of engineering. Sure, educating congress is a good idea. But there is a lot of room for improvement on the engineering too. The more decentralized our creations, the less opportunity for congress to get their grubby hands on them.

lucian303 15y ago

Congress doesn't work. That's what the Internet doesn't know.

praptak 15y ago

This is how congress works: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back TLDR: They do not want to be educated, their goal is to obtain money.

atsaloli 15y ago

http://www.DownsizeDC.org/ http://www.DownsizeDC.org/ Mission: We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states. Technology: Our proprietary “Educate the Powerful System”SM (EPS) is not sending an email on your behalf. Usually, our system fills out the web forms located at the Congressperson's website. Our system gives your letter a more personalized feel — even increases the odds that it will be read. (I copied the above from their website.) So - you fill out a simple web form, personalize with your comments if you like, and DownsizeDC will deliver it to all your Senate and House representatives using their own Congressional web sites and web forms. All you have to provide is your address and DownsizeDC will figure out who your reps are. It makes it much easier for public to communicate with their representatives, which allows for the communication to occur more frequently and in greater volume. This is a cool hack and I use it several times a week every week to express my disapproval of the erosion of civil liberties in the USA attendant to the War on Terror.

aquanext 15y ago

giant technology union. that's the only way we're ever going to have the type of cash necessary to lobby congress to do anything.

SnowShadow 15y ago

This article made me think of the cool startup https://www.popvox.com/ https://www.popvox.com/ They are working to provide a two way bridge between Congress and Constituents. They won the Social Media Tech award in the SXSW Accelerator this year and Tim O'Reilly is a founding advisor. I think they're the kind of company that would love help from open sourcing l33t haxxors such as yourselves.

secretwhistle 15y ago

I was going to upvote this but it was at 666 points. So I just took a screenshot and forwarded it to the more religious of our representatives as proof that SOPA is indeed evil.