Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps those of use who truly care about intellectual freedom should be writing checks too. I have no problem buying politicians for the right reasons. It appears to be the way business is done in the United States. Anyone interested in starting a lobbying organization that supports real patent reform and a free Internet?

View on HN

I have a problem buying politicians for the right reasons. We are already paying them handsomely to act in the country's best interests. I'd rather start an organization that supports real governing than pass more money to these goofballs.

I searched for "office" in this thread and nothing showed up. Why is the far more effective option of running for office never considered in our circles? We could certainly use a new political party, and we most definitely could use public representatives who actually "represent" us.

Running for office, of course, will not address the critical short-term, but do consider that the intersect between Technology and Governance will become even more critical in the upcoming years. To sum: we shouldn't complain about public servants being servants of moneyed interests, if none of us danes to ever even think of serving our nation as public servants. Run for office.

Running for office doesn't really work if you can't get your message out because the media and political parties refuse to declare anyone but the incumbent "electable." I've worked on a political campaign before, and also know people who are delegates for their respective parties, and the inertia incumbents have is extremely difficult to counteract.

One problem is that people with lots of money can afford to pay others to work full time in their interests, while those of us actually doing stuff with our time can't afford to spend eight hours a day in caucuses, party delegate meetings, city halls, legislators' offices, etc. trying to fight for an issue and/or get elected.

A good point indeed.

Why is the far more effective option of running for office never considered in our circles? We could certainly use a new political party, and we most definitely could use public representatives who actually "represent" us.

Running for office is a good thing, but I'm not sure it's "the far more effective option." For most people, running for office - unless they are already rich, well known, and/or politically connected - isn't going to accomplish much.

Not that I'm saying not to run for office. Hell, I did it myself (Libertarian Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor of NC in 2008), but I'm just being realistic in saying that running for office is no silver bullet. All of "us" could run until we're blue in the face and probably none of us would get elected. OTOH, getting elected isn't the only goal. For example, I did appear in a statewide, televised debate, which gave me a small platform to promote the principles and ideals I believe in, and presumably some number of people were exposed to those ideas (and to the LP) who had not been before. In my own case, I got right about 125,000 votes, which was good for about 3%. So somebody was paying attention, but still a minority by far.

It wasn't a waste of time to run, but I never had a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected and most of the people here probably have about the same chance. So for us to effect change by running for office is going to be a slow, difficult, painstaking process. Now to be fair, I ran as a 3rd party candidate which hurt my chances a lot, but it would have been dishonest to do otherwise. And I'm guessing that out of the crowd of HN people who would hypothetically run, a lot of us would also be 3rd party or independent candidates.

Along with the oldest profession, the oldest wish is for honest rulers. Look. In Afrikaans we have this saying: "Jy gaan agter die berg om a bobejaan te vang." which literally translated means you're going behind the mountain to catch a baboon. The need to save the Internet and our freedoms is now and it's urgent. If you're hoping to change the way US government works and then use your new honest government to keep the Internet free, you're setting yourself up to fail. Just use it like the manual says to. Pay the man.

You could donate to eff :-)

Where were they during this sopa stuff though? They should have gone all out on that.

They had a twilio integrated page that allowed anyone in the US to call their representatives from the page. 300,000 people directed there during the blackout from Mozilla alone did exactly that. I don't have complete numbers, but they were far from silent.

The EFF make it their job to look for issues like this. They were the first place I heard about SOPA and PIPA, and I doubt I'm the only one. I certainly wasn't spending time monitoring congress and reading proposed legislation, and even if I was I'm not sufficiently versed in US law to know what the bills might imply.

Obviously it's difficult to measure, but I would be surprised if the EFF weren't critically instrumental in the earliest stages of awareness about the implications of these bills, which led to people taking action.

How would you propose they could have made a more significant contribution?

You were downvoted, but as a longtime EFF member I have much the same question. I pay them to get out in front of issues like SOPA/PIPA, and I was disappointed to see that it didn't happen. I don't believe I saw a single instance of press coverage, either online or off, where the EFF's name was prominently associated with the anti-SOPA resistance effort.

Given the press is controlled by the same people pushing SOPA, do you really find that surprising? IMO, that (being able to control the distribution/slant of a story to the masses) is what is so dangerous about the entertainment oligarchy.

More to the point, where were they between SOPA/PIPA and the last big internet bill? I only hear things from the EFF when someone is out to destroy our freedoms. Why aren't they using the same process to buy internet-friendly legislation? It would be nice to have a roadblock in front of the the next SOPA.

I regularly donate to the ACLU. I'm not sure if/how they were involved with SOPA/PIPA, but, besides doing good work on many important fronts, they originated the suit in which part of the Communications Decency Act was ruled unconstitutional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com