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Political Bloggers May Be Forced to Register
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jan 17, 2007 04:44 PM
from the papers-please dept.
from the papers-please dept.
Thebes writes "Under Senate Bill S.1, political bloggers with a readership of over 500 who comment on policy matters or hope to incite 'grassroots' action amongst their readers would be forced to register with the Federal Government as lobbyists."
Related Stories
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Technology: Bill to Treat Bloggers as Lobbyists Defeated 537 comments
Lawrence Person writes "The attempt to require political bloggers to register as lobbyists previously reported by Slashdot has been stripped out of the lobbying reform bill. The vote was 55 to 43 to defeat the provision. All 48 Republicans, as well as 7 Democrats, voted against requiring bloggers to register; all 43 votes in favor of keeping the registration provision were by Democrats."
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The Grassroots Blogging Provision's Real Purpose 227 comments
ICantFindADecentNick writes "The Register carries a report on the defeat of Section 220 of the reform bill (the grassroots provision). In an all-too-familiar scene, bloggers, Slashdot readers and several news outlets were taken in by the hype surrounding a provision in the Senate ethics reform bill that would have required grassroots lobbying firms to register with the US Congress. To be fair, some commenters did see through the deception but the campaign, organized by Richard Viguerie, still succeeded. From the article: 'Viguerie, for those not familiar with the tarnished panoply of backroom players in American politics, pioneered the use of direct mail techniques for conservative causes, and has been called the "funding father" of the modern conservative movement. His ad agency currently handles direct mail campaigns for non-profits seeking to stimulate grassroots activity or raise funds from the general public.'" This is, of course, The Register. Still interesting to look back at the news from another point of view.
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We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh. I thought it was only the Republicans who were after our 1st Amendment rights. But here are the Democrats [loc.gov] assaulting our freedoms again [slashdot.org] by trying to control who says what [cbn.com].
<sarcasm>Oh, never mind, they just want to make sure we have "our papers in order" before we can criticize them.</sarcasm> And we thought that they would be for our rights. But it looks like they are just interested in using the power to stay in power.
It's time to lose the naivte and realize that politicians (whether Republicans or Democrats) are only interested in one thing--getting re-elected.
Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I use ads and merchandise to support my site and try to make something of a living off of my writing I have to register as a lobbyist? Then why shouldn't news anchors/columnists have to do the same? One of the things that (supposedly) led to the American Revolution was the stamp tax. Any attempt to restrict the free press is bad, no matter the consequences. And nothing is more "free press" than a private citizen deciding to write down their thoughts and distribute them to people, for profit or otherwise.
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:4, Insightful)
Just imagine that first article written in the New York Times that mentions a blogger with a small letter note beside the name saying Registered Lobbyist #958970. Good-bye reputation...
Or the first unregistered blogger who says something the government really doesn't like...fines, jail time, mandatory censorship? After all, they broke laws that lobbyists must conform to. This is a simple and systematic way to quiet down the people that aren't under control.
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same as re-branding people against the invasion of Iraq as unpatriotic.
Not to pick nits, but if you don't support your nation during time of war, then, yes, you are unpatriotic.
It's the utmost of patriotism to protest the policies of the government.
FalconParent
Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Informative)
No, if you get paid by a political campaign to influence a large number of people, you have to register as a lobbyist. However, the people writing the article see this as a bad thing. To me, it smells like they don't want *their* employeers revealed.
Grassroots organizations that are paid for by the GOP / Dems just look pathetic. On the other hand, a witty anonymous blogger paid for by the GOP / Dems can present themselves as credible and balanced; in the scheme of campaigns, this is not legal.
And yes, courts have held up campaign laws as reasonable limits on free speech over and over again. Are you really saying "being paid to write and distributing a pamphlet" is so fundamentally different from "being paid to write and distribute a pamp^H^H^H^H BLOG! ON THE INTERNET!" that it should abide by a second set of laws?
To put things in perspective, Slashdoters often complain there's fundamentally no difference in "doing X" and "doing X ON THE INTERNET!" so they shouldn't be patentable. Why did we suddenly decide "being a lobbyist" and "being a lobbyist ON THE INTERNET!" are so fundamentally different?
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:4, Interesting)
To put things in perspective, Slashdoters often complain there's fundamentally no difference in "doing X" and "doing X ON THE INTERNET!" so they shouldn't be patentable. Why did we suddenly decide "being a lobbyist" and "being a lobbyist ON THE INTERNET!" are so fundamentally different?
Political speech is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment is meant to protect. If a regulation usurps the freedom to publish political speech anonymously or pseudonymously, then that's not reform, it's a cancer.
I guess onion routers aren't just for Chinese dissidents anymore...
(By the way, I don't think bloggers and pundits should really be called "lobbyists." Lobbyists are generally folks who cajole the elected officials themselves into doing things.)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Informative)
You will have to register as a lobbyist if somebody cuts you a check to post, on your blog, a call to the public to write government officials requesting specific official action.
For example, if ExxonMobil pays me $1000 to write a blog post that urges my (over 500) readers to write their Congressional delegation to vote in favor of a bill that opens up ANWR, I would have to register as a lobbyist.
This bill is intended to call fake grassroots astroturfing what it is--lobbying.
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This Post Smells Like FUD (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are being paid to advertise a position, it was never free(libre) speech in the first place. It's commercial speech and has been regulated for centuries. You can't advertise Twinkies as a cure for cancer if you make money selling Twinkies, and society is far better off for having restricted such fraudulent or deceptive speech.
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's time to lose the naivte and realize that politicians (whether Republicans or Democrats) are only interested in one thing--getting re-elected.
Generalizations are rarely a good approach to take. There are a lot of shady, unscrupulous politicians. There are also good ones who try and do the best they can in what are usually difficult jobs.
By dismissing every elected official in the country you basical
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, strictly speaking, he's right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact remains that no matter how many guns you can get your hands on there is always one group who will have more. They are the various law enforcement organisations of the US (or any other country for that matter). You think owning a firearm of any kind will do you any good if the government decided to get rid of you?
Whether you agree with the pro-gun lobby or not the fact remains that if you were a threat to the government and they found out, the special forces they sent in could brush you aside without the slightest amount of trouble. They are better trained than you could hope to be (while trying to hold down a full time job anyway) and better equiped. They also have infintely more experience at killing people.
Now I am sure a great many soldiers would never dream of harming their own citizens. However I bet there are some that would follow any order they were given. The germans circa 1940 were not some alternate race of people bred for evil, they were just human beings like you and me, yet some of them ended up gaurding concentration camps that most of the population never knew existed.
I would also bet that with all the psychological tests soldiers are put through any decent comanding officer will have a pretty good idea who would follow his orders even if they knew them to be dubious.
So with all this in mind how much protection does that gun you keep under your pillow protect you? And even more so if the government force you to keep it locked away on the other side of the room lest your kids get at it. They could just grab you off the street and there are very few states nowadays that allow the carrying of a concealed firearm in public.
The biggest thing protecting us from all these things is not guns, but other people and how they would react to seeing people disappear. How they would tell other people and word would spread. Some may even write about this on the internet letting the whole world know what was going on and it would be very difficult to stop them unless you knew who they were ahead of time and could silence them in the first wave.
The first thing you do when seizing control of a country is quietly sieze control of the media without the populace knowing. But if the media are the people the people that becomes alot more difficult, especially if they can blog with relative anonmity using a few tools. I would hope that a great many readers of slashdot could do a pretty good job of posting to the net while hiding their identity, and not just by posting as AC. But if you can make anonymously blogging about the government a crime in itself then you make things a little easier.
Remember - Knowledge is power.
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Insightful)
We really went wrong when we (or the SCOTUS, really) decided that corporations had "rights" just as if they were real people. Really big, rich, immortal people. Most of our campaign finance problems could be curbed if we overturned that finding. Make the government accountable to natural persons only. Sure, the rich would still have an advantage over the poor, but at least we'd control the inhuman sociopaths that we call corporations.
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Re:We just want to see zee papers (Score:5, Informative)
See SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PAC. R. CO.,118 U.S. 394 (1886).
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well, yeah (Score:4, Funny)
Free speech anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Anyway, this is the attitude that's letting these things pass...
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Web hosts aren't going to do it.
ISP's aren't going to do it.
If the heat gets turn up for the above to police it, this registration will die.
After McCain-Feingold, what could you expect...... (Score:4, Insightful)
The one upside to the US is that the process is documented and public *as* *it* *happens*.
I would encourage all
Readership of 500? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe it's just a common sense judgement because the 500 people figure falls in the valley between having a blog that anyone cares about, and having a blog that you really, really, wished anyone would care about.
Unbelieveably unconstitutional! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unbelieveably unconstitutional! (Score:4, Informative)
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Each of my blogs (Score:4, Insightful)
But if one of my blogs did indeed gain an extra reader, how would they ever know?
FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
The bill just redefines what it means to be a lobbyist, and seeing as this comes from a grassroots lobbyist, I would argue that this exact article is exactly the type of lybbying the Senate wishes to be kept informed of.
Re:FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah? FTFA:
"The bill would require reporting of 'paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying,' but defines 'paid' merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers."
Here is Section 220 of 2007 S.1 [loc.gov]. It says it modifies 2 USC 1602 [cornell.edu]. Section 220 appends certain clauses to 2 USC 1602. You are somewhat correct in that appended to item 7 of that code is the line "Lobbying activities include paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, but do not include grassroots lobbying." It also adds the following item: "GRASSROOTS LOBBYING- The term `grassroots lobbying' means the voluntary efforts of members of the general public to communicate their own views on an issue to Federal officials or to encourage other members of the general public to do the same." This would SEEM to indicate that if you're not getting paid, you're not who they're talking about. But then you have to examine 18 (C) which is also appended to that section of the US Code, because it defines the meaning of registrant. I quote:
Thus if you speak on behalf of, say, a political party of which you are a member, you are a member of a registrant as well (because the party would be required to register.) Also if we look at both 2 USC 1602 and 2007 S.1 Section 220, which deal with definitions, neither one defines "paid"! Kind of a serious oversight there given that now we have to ask the supremes (eventually) whether ad revenues count or not. The closest it gets is the following text:
`(B) PAID ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC OR SEGMENTS THEREOF- The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public.
This is where the number 500 comes from. Incidentally, this particular item (B) is a particularly bad loophole in this law! It says that as long as you are not trying to influence more than 499 people at once, it's not a paid attempt to influence the general public. This is not good, not good at all.
Jump back to 2 USC 1602 for a moment with me and look at the government's definition of Lobbyist prior to any adoption of this bill.
The term "lobbyist" means any individual who is employed or retained by a client for financial or other compensation for services that include more than one lobbying contact, other than an individual whose lobbying activities constitute less than 20 percent of the time engaged in the services provided by such individual to that client over a six month period.
So currently if you receive any compensation for lobbying more than one person you are a lobbyist, unless your lobbying is less than 20% of the time spent working for the individual who hired you to lobby for them. That means they could pay you minimum wage for 101 hours; for 81 of those hours you sit on your ass and read the funny papers, the other 20 hours you
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i'd like to make a comment (Score:4, Funny)
i think that the us government...
wait, what?! why are you still reading!?
OH NOES I'M DOOMED
Dear Senators: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do editorial columnists in Newspapers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Readership over 500?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Terminology is important here (Score:5, Interesting)
intransitive verb : to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation
transitive verb
1 : to promote (as a project) or secure the passage of (as legislation) by influencing public officials
2 : to attempt to influence or sway (as a public official) toward a desired action
Shouldn't this then mean that when a blogger has 500 or more public officials as readers?
If a blogger is being paid by a lobby group, it simply makes them a shill, and has no more influence on lawmakers than actual public opinion might. This is, after all, how public opinion is formed, by listening to our peers, the news, and other sources and making up our own minds.
Should political magazines be required to register as lobbyists? Would a preacher/priest/etc. be required to register as a lobbyist if he mentions politics from the pulpit and the church has more than 500 members? This would cause tons of problems for certain demographic groups in the US.
Read the bill, not the article (Score:5, Informative)
Quick - don't read my blog! (Score:4, Informative)
So, my grassroots lobbying is ok as long as nobody is paying attention? And if I do post something which gathers a political following, suddenly I've got papers to fill out?
Why would anyone bother in the first place? The point of grassroots lobbying is to influence a large number of people. Paid lobbyists, OTOH, are paid instead to influence only a handful of very important people. IOW, this bill would effectively stifle citizens groups fighting for their rights in favor of corporate lobbyists.
So, by all means pass this bill! Then act surprised when DRM becomes a mandatory component of computers. Act outraged when Corporate America(TM) patents everything short of tying your own shoes. Protest the tax breaks given to Big Oil. But don't dare blog about it unless you can be certain that nobody cares about your stupid opinion (they probably don't anyway, but one can hope).
Nothing like stifling democracy by restricting fourth amendment freedoms.
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Re:Quick - don't read my blog! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Read the bill, not the article (Score:5, Insightful)
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The article is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The article is rather misleading. The section in question [cbn.com] applies to astroturf operations, not bloggers:
...so it explicitly does not apply to what we normally think of as bloggers.
--MarkusQ
Re:Google/banner ads (Score:5, Insightful)
You bet. I also realize that many of them like doughnuts, have siblings, and read books. Further, I concede that they often have heartfelt opinions about matters of punctuation and some (but not all) of them did well in algebra.
But most importantly, I can recognize a straw man from a kilometer away. Bloggers taking advertising doesn't mean that their advertisers are paying them to influence public opinion, anymore than the lawyer whose face is plastered all over the city buses around here is paying people to use public transportation.
Nice try though.
--MarkusQ
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Re:The article is misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not terribly happy about defending the free speech rights of astroturfers, but this may be one of those situations that arise with free speech, where it's meaningless if you don't grant it even to people who are saying things you dislike. "Lying about who you are" is not illegal in most circumstances, with some exceptions e.g. lying to the government, or cases where monetary fraud is involved; but none of those seem to apply here.
My question is, what is it about the activity of these astroturfers that raises a requirement that they should register with the government, when other kinds of people don't have to? The only answer, afaict, is that the laws related to campaign finance and lobbying do in fact put restrictions on free speech. Those laws in themselves are a tangle of fairly arbitrary definitions and limits, so it's difficult to make snap judgements here. But I'm just not comfortable saying that just because someone is being paid, that they can't write whatever they want to without having to register with the goverment.
Besides, who is being protected from what here? If the electorate is so clueless that they'll just follow the advice of some slick-looking blog and go lobby their congressperson for whatever that blog told them to, then I'm afraid the problem is with the electorate, not with the blog or the laws. Do you blame the pusher, or the user? Passing laws to try to prevent the electorate from being manipulated is just treating the symptom. Everyone's always trying to manipulate the electorate, but most of them aren't subject to regulation.
I'd have less of a problem with a law which required disclosure *on the blog* about who is funding the message, if it's a political one - similar to the case with campaign ads. But requiring registration with the government sounds like overreach to me.
I also agree with people who have suggested that classifying many people as lobbyists could be detrimental. For example, is Al Gore a lobbyist? Let's say he's taken money from environmental groups for his movie etc., and he has a blog where occasionally he encourages people to lobby their congresspeople. This law seems to require him to register as a lobbyist, so now he can be smeared and dismissed by his opponents as a registered lobbyist. And that's the problem: afaict, this law won't just apply to the astroturfers you'd like to see brought to heel.
Finally, as I mentioned in another comment, what happens when someone posts on a blog hosted outside the U.S.? Are we going to institute a Great Firewall, just like China? That's the road that restricting free speech leads you down.
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With half a million readership (Score:3, Interesting)
500 what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Free speech is one of the most important rights we have; why is the government so keen on regulating it? You can't regulate a right, it is a right. I can understand regulating the lobbyists for organizations, corporations, and interest groups--groups are not citizens. But individuals who ARE citizens have inalienable rights. A hearty "Fuck Off!" to those who seek to "regulate" individual rights.
Better links please! (Score:5, Informative)
Next time you want to bitch about a law LINK THE LAW not what some idiots have on a website.
Finally would someone explain why idiots who want to do grassroots style work doesn't want to be labeled as a lobbyst. HINT THEY ARNT JAILING THEM! THEY ARE TELLING THEM TO BE LISTED AS A LOBBYST IF THEY ARE PAID FOR THEIR BLOGGING WORK AND HAVE MORE THEN 500 READERS! IF THEY DONT AND KNOW THEY SHOULD BE LISTED THEN THEY ARE JAILED.
Being a lobbyst doesn't mean you're guilty of a crime, except maybe lying to your public. At least it'll prove who is being paid and who is actually doing the work they actually support, which is perhaps the only reason this is being met by so much resistance because they are afraid they'll be found out to not be so alturistic as they claim to be.
Breakdown of Bill and Opinion (Score:4, Informative)
After reading the entire legislation [loc.gov], including section 220, several things become apparent to me:
It seems to me that in the spirit of lobbying transparency, this bill is a step in the right direction. However, due to the vagueness of Section 220, with respect to several terms, and the fact that there does not appear to be an explicit exclusion for paid bloggers who maintain "official" blogs that are open to public viewing for organizations, I would recommend that anyone who is concerned about the freedom to engage in grassroots lobbying, to oppose section 220 until it addresses these concerns.
You can do this by contacting your senators and telling them to support the Bennett amendment to remove section 220 from S. 1..
If I have misread anything, please correct me.
Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Viguerie [wikipedia.org]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americ
Read the bill. Pretty much everything in the press release is a lie. Shame on you, Slashdot.