<story><title>How does SOPA threaten Stack Overflow?</title><url>http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/114005/133693</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alttag</author><text>I participated in the recent EFF push for contacting elected representatives regarding SOPA. I customized their pre-packaged letter greatly, adding both my experience and qualifications and expounding on the distrust from the tech industry to SOPA.&lt;p&gt;The response from my (Republican) Congressman was a form letter telling me I was wrong, and regurgitating  a the pro-SOPA talking points.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven&apos;t gotten to it as I don&apos;t believe anything I can say to him will be effective.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digikata</author><text>I was listening to an interview of Jack Abramoff plugging his new book. Don&apos;t know if the book is any good, but one comment that struck me was that, bluntly, campaign donations, all the various perks given to politicians and their staff were bribes. My opinion matches. They&apos;re indirect bribes, (mostly) following legal boundaries, but basically bribes for attention if not for outright votes.&lt;p&gt;What gets a politicians attention is money, and less directly votes - but money can move votes... and people have  a poor long-term memory at the voting booth.&lt;p&gt;I wonder what a open &quot;real-time democracy&quot; Political Action Committee website might look like. Suppose there were tracked tallies of voting intentions, donations, donator &quot;votes&quot; to apply money to issues to be spent on specific campaigns at election time. I imagine you&apos;d want to distribute election targeting data to the PAC voters so they can individually make their resource decisions, maybe to shift their donation to politicians who were most vulnerable in a given district.   Sending a politician updates of that summarized data with time series growth might get their attention better than letters.  It sucks that we need to bribe your own representatives though...</text></comment>
<story><title>How does SOPA threaten Stack Overflow?</title><url>http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/114005/133693</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alttag</author><text>I participated in the recent EFF push for contacting elected representatives regarding SOPA. I customized their pre-packaged letter greatly, adding both my experience and qualifications and expounding on the distrust from the tech industry to SOPA.&lt;p&gt;The response from my (Republican) Congressman was a form letter telling me I was wrong, and regurgitating  a the pro-SOPA talking points.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven&apos;t gotten to it as I don&apos;t believe anything I can say to him will be effective.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hesitz</author><text>&quot;I&apos;ve been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven&apos;t gotten to it as I don&apos;t believe anything I can say to him will be effective.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I doubt whether anything you say to _him_ would be effective.  But why not write a response and then post the three letters (your first, his reply, your response) to a blog or website?  If you publicly reveal the weakness of his position it could have some effect.</text></comment>