Is this Possible (and True)?

Sounds blatantly un-Constitutional to me.

Sadly, that doesn't mean that it might not actually pass, in which case it could take several years to wind its way through the courts.

I would say it's a less direct route than criticize Congress->go to jail. Any failure to register or report to Congress by those who "communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters." (from PRNewswire.)

This is definitely an enormously broad brush -- it is not inconceivable that 500 people read the comments section of this entry, thus requiring me to register & report. I'm with Orac -- the wording is unconstitutionally broad.

BTW, you can find the text of legislation via http://thomas.loc.gov/ and searching for S1 by bill number. Raeding the actual text of the legislation, I'm not sure that the characterization in the PRNewswire realease is accurate. The relevent section (220(a)(18)(B)) says "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." In the context of the rest of the section, I don't think that you can infer that those who are not paid to communicate to more than 500 members of the public do so (NB I do suspect that 'paid' does include anyone who spends $25,000/quarter of their own money act.)

Somebody is trying to play us here, and it's not Congress. I'll have a post up very shortly - working on it now.

I'm pretty sure the article is due to a standard logic mistake (implication is not equivalence). The relevent portion of section 220 of S.1 is:

(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.

...which I read as, if you are paid to influence less than 500 members of the general public, then you are not attempting to influence a large enough segment of the general public to be covered by the bill.

It's not a logic mistake.

As I understand it, "Paid" is the keyword here - you can write what you like to an audience of any size with no implications under the law as proposed - unless you're being paid to do so.

Isn't being paid to write something political in order to influence opinion called "lobbying", by the way?

Even though it seems to apply to organizations that are paid, this still sounds like a pretty big infringement on political expression. It sounds like that if you do mass communications, blogging or otherwise, as part of paid political work, you're now under the same disclosure requirements as someone who lobbies congresspeople directly

The point of restricting direct lobbying of congress is to prevent quid-pro-quos being worked out between lobbyist and congresspeople. I don't see how attempts to influence the views of individuals independent of direct lobbying of congress would raise the same possibilities of corruption by officials. It seems like an effort to increase the relative importance of direct lobbying, and hence the opportunities to solicit campaign contributions that congress has. If some group is going to spend money trying to get policy changed, I'd rather they did it via a PR campaign to convince people to write letters to the editor than by buying expensive lunches (and maybe some under the table extras) for congresscritters.

My response to Matt got a little long, so I put it over at my blog.

I'm jumping on something in MattXIV's post with both feet and a backpack holding a ton of past comments in it.

If some group is going to spend money trying to get policy changed, I'd rather they did it via a PR campaign to convince people to write letters to the editor than by buying expensive lunches (and maybe some under the table extras) for congresscritters.

I've subjected sciblogs to a year of around 450 comments trying to demonstrate this is a highly naive understanding. To base opinion on such is simply irrational. For numerous very logical reasons, and because of numerous developments in numerous fields, the persuasion industry is one of the most unobvious obvious elements of contemporary life. Anyone who thinks otherwise, who thinks they can identify, or who believes our gatekeeping social institutions are capable of identifying, a significant number of designed persuasion campaigns influencing public decision-making needs to go back to school for a couple years.

It's a 100% fantasy of how humans make decisions and how our political system works.

I just posted two [yes, ungodly long] multiple comment streams at Ed's about this. In, one I go into much detail about how these campaigns are designed, provide a checklist of signs for recognizing covert negative-PR campaigns [a neonatal one is involved here, see the Questionable Authority], and some details of my interactions with a clueless newspaper and clueless TV show regarding their false presentation of an astroturf group.

In my case, someone explain how a reader/viewer could have known group's true identity. And then identify organized, functional institutional gatekeepers with professional knowledge and experience in the persuasion industry. Our society-wide cliche of letter-writing as influential is simply evidence of what I'm speaking to. Several ways of showing this meme is non-functional come to mind quickly.

On [[http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/01/charles_fried_on_stimson.php]] I provide a simple analysis of how the recent Stimson Fatwa calling for blacklisting law firms representing Gitmo prisoners has been left in place, despite his apology. I include suggestions for watching as the left/bar get distracted away from something so obvious. To illustrate this widely used yet invisible technique, I do a comparison chart between Stimson's Fatwa, the global warming skeptics campaign, and the Intelligent Design campaign showing how each specifies the general distraction technique. The latter two campaigns are built around it. The Stimson Fatwa is an unfolding example anyone can watch, as we speak.

[Warning: The second thread, squeezed in returning to work, is ill organized and verbose beyond my normal issues with such. The cross-examination needs collection and ID and the FedEx-subliminal-arrow ending should have stayed out. The Fedex link is a quick peek at the staggering resources expended in the field, even on seemingly minor issues.]

Over 12 months, I've made a good case which implies that problematic elements like bribery and lobbying are secondary, because enough people understand them to ride herd on them. Of primary concern is this enormous industry, using data with a skill-of-craft similar to science, that's fundamentally invisible to those not involved in it.

Give a sample of college-educated adults 10 TV commercials to view as needed, and ask them to list all the elements included like voice, message, music, actors, etc. As a guess they'd fail to identify half. Few would see color palettes, even in such a "test" situation. The mountains are blue because they were blue when filmed. Noooo. Every single pixel, figuratively, is thought through and decisions are made based on data.

How many of you have noticed that TV News sets, local to global, universally use the same contrasting-color palette? How many of you can explain why? If you can, note the fields involved in manipulating this or just noticing it.

Consider, for a bit, that this is the very definition of subliminal. Right in front of someone but unperceived.

The ACLU outlines why it opposes this type of in the second part of the letter here http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/24423leg20060307.html.

Let's be absolutely clear about what is being proposed here - this is a registration requirement for engaging in political speech. Even if it only applies to a subset speakers who are paid for their efforts, it's still an encroachment on freedom of speech. As much as you try to make them sound sininster, "negative psychometric marketing techniques" are just speech. Some of the techniques rely on fallacious reasoning, but these are hardly new fallacies - almost everything on your list can be traced back to classical times. If you're going to argue that the public cannot be trusted to judge the issues for themselves without "special training", you're essentially arguing against the very premise of democracy.

And Stimson is an entirely different issue - that's a huge deal because he was using his position as a government lawyer to try to intimidate potential opposition consel. If he were some random idelogue, it would be an non-issue.

MattXIV
Go Read my comments at Questionable Authority & Ed's re: Stimson.

NOT WAS!

IS!

Nothing has been repudiated. It's relevant becauses it's a campaign. No one sees it that way, not the pro's engaging against it, let alone the public.

If this can't be seen as a skilled, professional campaign, how will such covert campaigns in other political arenas be recognized?

I predicted the contents of his apology exactly in my quashed email to Ed. To bad I didn't post simply the prediction that night before it was published.

Also, I'm not addressing the legislative issue in any way. But, even if the groups can be seperated out, deep pockets will simply find the best way around the legislation. It's not practical and I'm a big free speech advocate.

I'm simply using this as further illustration that astroturfing is a sophisticated approach that is often insidious and to speack of it in simplistic terms is to miseducate an audience.

NOT WAS.

Stimson still IS using his position and AG albedo is part of this pre-planned, public campaign. Hidden in plain site.

Read his apology. And since the AG is involved it should be a huger deal. Who's discussing this as a still exisitiing, unrepudiated message to Corporate America?

Everything about this screams negative-PR campaign. The entire country is blind to it.

I meant was as in the sense that during the time when he was verbalizing the statement in question he was doing so to make a thinkly veiled threat (sigh). Sorry, but I'm not going to argue with someone who bends over backwards to misread my words so they can go off on some tangent about how Ed isn't nice to them and everyone else is blind to the truth.

MattXIV
Clearly I screwed up yesterday and owe you an apology. I didn't intentionally misread you, but took the broadest "was" so it matched up with my frustration with a group of other people. An aware person would simply inquire about your meaning. I was as aware as a brick.

I grew up in the law in a multigenerational family of attorneys. Seeing the ethical and foundational threat and damage in Stimson's behavior is so instinctive to me I was more upset than I realized the last two days. I added my ex-journalist's extreme frustration over press and legal commenters' failure to consider Stimson's radio statement was done under orders. If so, he had alternatives, a legal issue worthy of attention even in the shadow of heinous extortion of the bar. That discussion was missing and unmentioned in the 30+ commentaries I read late Wednesday into Thursday morning. In that stream was a fresh Wapo brief, with quote, noting publication of his "apology" within hours. That was the fuse.

So all that, I have no doubt, got read into your past tense. I didn't have proper time to write, edit, nor interact, [nor to review until late today] which in itself is a good sign I shouldn't participate. But I was too pissed off to notice any signs. I shouldn't have even started posting in this thread.

I reread my postings at Ed's this afternoon, and my language does exclude everyone from knowing -- an asinine statement. So I have no excuse. I wrote it. It's not arcane knowledge, it's just some sort of PR-type campaign, and lots of people are familiar with those. I allowed my frustration to drive my technique from dramatic effect to absurdity.

I expect, in truth would prefer, more criticism and debate than I get. I assume I'm making many more errors of all sorts than I find or others point out so I don't take the absence as a sign of my brilliant analysis. More likely readers are thinking along the line of, "Skookum forget the meds today. Again."

Earlier disproportional comments, for example to Hank Fox at PZ's, should have tipped me off and my sciblogs participation window ended prior to my Stimson reading Wednesday night. That was "merely curiosity" about the story I'd first learned of via editorial only hours before. Obviously the only smart thing to have done was go to bed. Missing that it was time to "give it a rest" is one of those errors of all sorts. I eventually figured that out. Making you part of my own mini-lesson was uncalled for.

I'm uninterested in personal comments about other posters and don't even think in those terms. I hope you, and others, can accept Thursday and Friday as an aberration. It was.