Slashdot Mirror
Congress Still Figuring Out E-Mail
Jett writes " Vote.com has an interesting article in their Webmag Fifth Estate about how congressmen have responded to the popularity of e-mail in their daily operations. Quote:
'Of the 440 voting and non-voting House of
Representatives members, 22 have no e-mail
at all. Even House Speaker Dennis Hastert is
wired only halfway -- his office receives e-mail,
but does not respond to it. And while all U.S.
senators have e-mail, they, like their House
counterparts, routinely shun non-constituent
mail -- even though they chair committees
whose decisions affect the entire country.'"
Before you mark this down as offtopic as whatever, stop and think HONESTLY for a moment. If you can HONESTLY say that YOU DON'T THINK that THIS COUNTRY would be BETTER OFF if all of the members of Congress were transformed into nude marble statues, then go ahead, moderate this down! But if you're HONEST, and will admit that a petrified Congress would be better for the country than what we have no, do the right thing. Don't moderate this down. Write to your Congressional representatives and make sure he/she knows that you want him/her turned to stone. Set up non-profit organizations dedicated to getting your members of Congress turned to stone. And most important of all, JOIN THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY! Peace, Liberty, and Justice for all, amen.
Problem: constituents feel that the politicians don't care about their problems, are not accountable to them, are influenced by lobbies too much.
Solution: make reighning politicians and running candidates public companies. Their shareholders will be their constituents with a clearly defined voice (number of shares). SEC will oversee large stock transactions and insiders, selling shares will be the only way to finance election campaigns. Instead of meaningless "town hall meetings" politicians will have to answer to "shareholder meetings". Small shareholders will be able to pool their power via shareholder proxies.
Downside: Those who can't afford politico-shares will not be cared for at all. But this is exactly what's going on now. So, no real downside!
On the contrary, it understates the case. For instance, if you recall the House Bank scandal about ten years back you'll realize that the number of bad-check writers is in the triple rather than double digits.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Robert Underwood (D - Guam)
Carlos A. Romero-Barcelo (D - Puerto Rico)
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D - District of Columbia)
Eni F. H. Faleomavaega (D - American Samoa)
Donna M. C. Christensen (D - US Virgin Islands)
Chris
The U.S. territories that have represenation in Congress are:
District of Columbia
Puerto Rico
U.S. Virgin Islands
Guam
American Samoa
And has been noted, they do not have voting privliges, only voice.
Pat
I have always assumed congressional Email works like this. The congressman or Senator has a bunch of interns who don't necessarily have a lot to do all the time, they set one of the interns to read the incoming Email. If it is something important to the politician ("Bill gates wants to donate to your campaign") or something the intern cares about, they'll tell the politician. If not, they'll just delete it and move on. It's sort of like that episode of the Simpsons where Burns builds the sun-blocker. To paraphrase Mayor Quimby, "I have composed a polite but strongly worded letter which I will pass to Mr. Burn's underlings. Hopefully, with some cajoling, they will pass it along to him, or at least give him the gist of it."
A big pile of paper mail, however, will have the politician come into his office and say, "Wow, look at all that mail!" The politician is bound to take notice if it is mostly against something he or she is doing, though it might not change his or her mind. (Stuff they don't really care about, which I believe includes a lot of tech related issues, is not something they are going to risk votes over.)
Politicians, of course, care most about constituents. However, there are other groups they care about:
1. Big contributors.
2. Members of their parties. The more powerful, the better. If you are the head of your local Republican or Democratic organization, you have more power than a rank and file member. So, being involved in local politics gives you more of a voice on the national level.
A recent article in Salon, pointed out that there is one congressman who gets more campaign contributions from the Florida Cuban community than he does from people in his own state. This guy is also what the Romans considered an honest politician, he stays bought and can be counted on to support the legislation of these campaign contributions. (And the current battle over Elian Gonzales.)
Of course, people (myself included) hate the fact that support for an issue really comes down to money as well as votes, but that's the way the government works. So, I suggest to any millionaires in the OpenSource, Internet or Game industries that they put some money into campaigns. Money makes politicians care about the issue, if it all comes from the pro-filter/pro-censorship/anti-OpenSource side, well, you can guess what kind of laws will be passed.
Personally I'd love to see major reform of the political system and that really means politicians from outside the two party system getting elected. (Such as Libertarians, for example.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
This here is proof that Congress should not be in control of regulation of technology and should not be making laws if they cannot understand it. Simply having speakers come in and try to explain what's going on isn't going to help either, because many of them won't undertand it, and there's this stupid thing called LOBBYISM.
The same goes for economics. There are a bunch of idiots in Congress who don't understand simple laws of supply and demand, and love to throw things out of equilibrium. If they maybe understood a bit, we'd be in better shape.
All in all,there need to be better technology and economics sectors because they just don't get what's going on, and they're really hurting it for those who DO.
- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
The biggest problem I've had with my local reps is that they ignore email anyway. It's not as easy to dismiss a handwritter letter, which I've had success with every single time. It's just too easy to delete 100+ emails a day, and pretend you never got them. I think that's what they do.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
You can't teach and old dog new tricks.
:) went into parliament to make a speech his use of a laptop actually caused an objection from the floor. ( Denied by the Speaker of the House ).
:)
Congressmen are on average a whole lot older than your typical email slinging geak. The apparent backwardness of congress is in reality only a reflection of the age of it's members. How many 50+ year olds do you know who want to use this new technology ?
In contrast every University tries it's damnedest to by wired. After all it's made up mostly of late teen and early twenties students. This is the generation that remembers growing up as abandoning Atari for Nintendo then drooping Mario for DOOM.
Around these parts ( Jamaica ) when the Minister of Technology and Commerce (If ever there was an EComerce ministry this is it
BTW : Since the majority of these elderly congressmen ( most would have been forced into retirement in other professions ) are using the tech you americans should count yourselves lucky. Around here the leader of the opposition doesn't admit in public that he repairs the PCs in his office himself. It would make him look weird to the rest of Parliament
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The article meantions non-voting members of the house of reps. What are these? Are there two types of reps or are these non-voting members 'special provisions'?
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
Of course, some members of Congress just don't give a flip. Several hundred members are in safe seats, where they really have to screw up to risk losing. It's the others who have the best constituent services, not surprisingly.
Also, keep in mind that Congress attracts lawyers, activists, and a few businessmen. Most are not really tech-savvy (though most are curious). I'd like to make an Al Gore joke here, but you can do that for yourself. For those of you sick of the Al Gore/Internet gaffe, he recently claimed to have discovered and publicized the Love Canal problem in the 80's (he didn't, and it was in the news for a year before he saw it) and he claimed to have written the original Earned Income Tax Credit legislation, which was actually written before he entered Congress. Clinton also credited the growth of the WWW from "50-60 pages to millions of pages", to Al Gore this week.
Reliance on email and internet communication will eventually happen all over Capitol Hill. Just allow for a ten-year lag or so between them and the non-governmental world. They just got used to fax machines in the early 90's.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Now consider how easy it is to email your Representative. It'd probably take you about thirty seconds to send off a paragraph to all 538 of them. Multiply that by a zillion people emailing, and you'll see why it's simply impossible for them to respond. Ideally they'd at least have autoreplies, but that's up to the individual office, and that means that it really depends on how technically savvy each office is. Simply the cost of the staff to do anything beyond that would run to at least $50,000 per year per office, though...so is the value of being able to email your Representative worth another $25 million or so per year in funding? It depends, but I think that'd have a tough time getting approved.
When I was helping fight a mini DOMA here in MA, my group set up a page on our web site to enable people to email or fax their state reps (along with the governer and the heads of both houses) on the issue. There was a very short subject statement (mostly to make sure that our opposition didn't use the setup to write things in favor of the bill) and then people wrote personal additions. These personal statements were great. People talked about their lives, about how this legislation would effect them, how their crrent legal status effected them, real information, not just a "please vote no". As a result of the volume of email, but also in response to the content of it, we had legislaters who normally would have ignored the issue testifying with us at the committee hearing, and one committee member who we had previously had no contact with cutting through the vauge "family values" talk and asking witnesses in favor of the bill hard questions about the real people involved.
Now this story shows that email advocacy can work, if its implemented well. But it also shows how "improvements" to that technology can make the political process worse. We won new people over to us because we gave them information they didn't have before, and showed them a personal, real life side of the issue that they may not have considered. An auto-response system or content sorter telling them "53 constituent emails opposing H472" would be unlikely to have the same effect.
...will work for Chick tracts...
Umm, how can they tell? I mean, there's no guarantee that, for example, a *.ca address even belongs to a US citizen, let alone a Californian resident.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
A couple of points:
As has already been said, most offices have about 40 people working for them. Many of them are answering phones, doing clerical work, etc (just like any office). With that said, the offices I have had contact with do handle email they receive. They print it out and handle it like normal mail, for reasons given below.
Virtually all the offices respond via snail mail. There are couple of reasons for this. First, there is security-- it is easier to detect forgery on paper mail. Second, it is easier for the Congressman/Senator to look over and approve a paper letter than an email before it is sent. Finally, the software/hardware is very old, and tough to adapt anyway, for reasons below.
Congressional offices operate under ridiculous rules and regulations. You'd think, hey, these guys write the laws, why not just change them? But the reality is that offices lack the resources to do software support on their own, and the rules were originally designed to be tough to change to prevent abuse.
Finally, on the subject of responding to people outside your district, you have to think about it this way. You only represent your district (the better interest of the nation as a whole counts as part of this, but since every issue is painted as a critical 'take one for the team' issue, it wears thin quickly). They are the only people who vote for you. It is therefore a disservice to them to spend resources on others which would have helped them. If they are so concerned about something, they can tell their congressman. Put another way, as Robert A. Heinlein said before basically giving the same advice I just did, "the votes are in the precincts".
Hey, Congress staffers read Slashdot, don't they? Tell us what software you use! Maybe we can improve it. It would be a public service, so RMS would like it. ;)
*.ca=California? Wow, those wacky Canadians are voting in California elections now? This is worse than I thought!
But you are right, they have no real way of knowing where the person is when receiving email.
Your comment about vote.com is right on the money, by the way. :)
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
You know, I was going to write a post here something like this:
/. a few days ago: Rep. Jean McGrath wants to require filtering software on all school computers up to and including University level, restricting the rights of adults. She also wants to prevent persons of the opposite sex from visiting each others dorm rooms. I hope this will fail after I ask my representatives if they are supporting Rep. McGrath's Homosexual Rights and Privacy Bill.
Any congressperson could take the slash tools, most specifically the poll engine, and set it up on their site to get an idea of the pulse on an issue. Granted this method is not perfect, and it would be biased on the side of more technically oriented people, but it does limit to one poll vote per IP so that would keep down the ballot box stuffing, and they wouldn't have to respond to individual email.
But right at that moment, my previous disgust with the American political system (which had already turned to amusement), shifted further into apathy.
I think I'm trailing the pack on this one. Our national voter participation has dropped significantly over time and only the most vocal and obnoxious people are seen pushing issues.
We, The People, have seen over time that the process of our governance has turned from Statesmanship to a pure money-making venture. Even if there are those who might choose to go into politics to try to effect actual change, the 'barrier to entry' is exclusively money and set so high that one has to already *be* independently wealthy or be beholden to those who have contributed the money to make one's election possible.
And now, with this article and affiliated posts and links, we have even further confirmation that our voices do not count a single whit. My voice does not count unless I speak while handing over a large check. I begin to wonder what happens to my actual vote on election day as the information travels from my local polling place to a counting center through the rest of the reporting process. After all, I have a tendency to vote against the moneyed interests.
And I *do* vote. In every election, for every issue, I educate myself about the issues, the candidates and the events surrounding both. And the really depressing part is that I am forced to cast those very important votes for the lesser of the evils I am presented with.
Despite my best efforts at fulfilling my civic duties, my elected officials here in Arizona are proposing some of the most backward, unenforceable and probably unconstitutional laws I continue to see.
1. As reported on
2. An anti-choice anti-abortion bill to require parental consent for minors, a waiting period for all and force doctors to go into a long-winded spiel about the dangers and show pictures of fetal development. (Ed:"Don't like abortion? Don't have one.")
3. And the capper... A bill to *require* that, in addition to information about evolution, the schools *must* teach the 'scientific facts refuting evolution'!?!? Tough duty for the teacher, there *are no* scientific facts refuting evolution.
So, I do my part, but without money, and my concerns get ignored, my State slips backward toward the Middle Ages, and we all get fsck'd.
And now I have information that anything I try to do to convey my desire to *my employee* regarding my governance is being ignored.
Apathy? Yup.
I guess I'll just do my part next time around and vote against the bastards... if I can get up the energy to go to the polls... after all, what's the point?
Disclaimer: The above is a statement of *my* feeling in this matter, is not intended to speak for others, and is *not* flamebait.
*Constructive* ideas and/or criticism is/are welcomed.
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
I would be surprised if members of US Congress even got all the mail that was sent to them. We can get pretty accurate numbers from the US Postal Service, but unfortunately no such requirement is made of electronic mail. Yes, I know I'm playing down some technology issues but 'necessity is blah blah invention'.
:-/
Necessitate [ooh I invented a verb!] a better standard of email delivery, and Microsoft will have to fix it.
If you want to find out what your congress people are saying - I believe phone bills and actual email contents are public record. Use this to remind them that WE value our privacy too. Nothing motivates people like personal experience.
Anyways, I have an extremely low opinion of Exchange. Due to the fact that it mangles email headers, causing attachments and bodies to be lost, the resulting at my work has been to mandate Outlook as the Company Email Client. That's great, because good employees check their email at home,and now I have to boot Windows to use outlook, and PRAY I don't get nailed with a "You've got an Outlook Virus" email?
Did I manage to turn this into a Microsoft sucks post?
This message posted with Mozilla M13. Woo hoo!
Further, e-mail is still easily forged and many are concerned about the political implications of a forged e-mail circulated to large numbers of their constituents. They feel the best way to repudiate these forgeries before they happen is to have the policy they only respond by postal mail.
The volume problems and the non-constituant problems are perfectly understandable, There's no great solution to the former, and as for the latter, they're required to pay more consideration to the people they actually represent (unless they serve on a committee, in which case, they are in theory expanding their representation to the nation as a whole).
the other issues would probably be solved if they were required (by the voters) to handle e-mail. Digital signatures should have been implemented at a national level by now (but many in the Fed. Gov. seem more interested in holding my secret key than my public key). As for fears of massive spam, join the club!
The brilliant STAND campaign against draconian encryption laws came across the same problem. MPs' email addresses aren't public domain; most of them bounce, and their offices won't give out contact details to non-constituents.
There's a real schism in the Government's attitude to technology here. Tony Blair makes well-publicised speeches about Britain leading the m-commerce revolution (m for mobile), and his ministers have pagers, mobile phones and laptops linked to a central database of stats and policy details, but most MPs have understaffed offices, no desk space, and no direct access via email, in spite of the fact that most of them spend their weeks miles away from their constituencies.
It's about time that politicians woke up to the opportunities of the Net. Of all the parties, only the minority Liberal Democrats have attempted to harness the technology, which is in keeping with their radical approach.
Back in 1995 I sent email to every senator and congressperson I could to let them know how I stood on the CDA proposal. I put a return receipt on it and was quite amazed how fast a lot of them got to it. Some it was a matter of minutes. Others it was the next day. Most had read it within 48 hours, and a few responded back via email.
The most impressive of the bunch were Senators Ashcroft and Kennedy who both emailed back as well as followed up with a postal letter.
However, there was one congressman who did not read my email for over eight (8) months - a full 7 months after the CDA passed - well past the time my letter to him could have had an influence on how he voted. I was not impressed with this yahoo.
Before the telegraph, was writing a letter considered too easy? Would Congress only consider the wishes of their constituants if they came to them in person to express their wishes?
All of these innovations that revolutionized communications also revolutionized politics. News was faster. People could let Congress know how they wanted their representatives to act. People knew faster then ever before the actions of their Congress. But as far as I know (and I may be wrong here), but none of these advancements in communication were ever considered to be "Too Easy", and as such ignored.
It is another change, and as we have all seen, Congress never adopts and adapts to change unless they think it benefits them.
It should be easy to make our views known to Congress. We should not have to spend 33 cents for a stamp plus paper and envelope, when we can send an e-mail for no additional cost then the internet access we already have. We also should not be required to call the Congressional Switchboard long distance.
But it comes to no suprise that Congress wishes to dismiss the on-line community. After all, the Internet allows for the free flow of information, and Congress has been trying to limit that for a number of years. Remember the Telecommunications Decency Act? Attempts to tax the internet? (Yea, some were fakes, Urban Legends and people who didn't know when to stop forwarding e-mail, but a few were real.) How about the Post Office wanting to enact a fee for sending an e-mail? There's also the attempts to limit encryption for privacy purposes, attempts to enact encryption standards that they had backdoor keys for, and of course all the bad press the on-line community gets when someone commits a horrible crime and it's discovered that the perpetrator had a homepage or used the net.
&Deity forbid that congress respond to the people and actually do what we want them to. That would totally subvert our system of government!
--
Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
yes, yes i know this is unrelated to the story, but i got this in my email and felt like sharing it:
Can you imagine working at the following Company? It has a little over
500 employees with the following statistics:
*29 have been accused of spousal abuse
*7 have been arrested for fraud
*19 have been accused of writing bad checks
*117 have bankrupted at least two businesses
*3 have been arrested for assault
*71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
*14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
*8 have been arrested for shoplifting
*21 are current defendants in lawsuits
*In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving
Can you guess which organization this is? Give up?
It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group
that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed
to keep the rest of us in line.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
these numbers are accurate. i've seen them published in mainstream popular magazines.
it is incredible what you can learn from the mainstream media. why just the other day, i saw on tv where some guy recovered the mars polar lander after downloading software from zdnet. slashdot has totally ignored the story. go figger.
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I don't think that a congressman has any obligation to respond to e-mails from people outside his district. He or she does not represent those people.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
One thing I've noticed about the Internet in general is that people REALLY like their anonimity. I've seen things typed in e-Mail and newsgroup messages that people would a) never say to someones face, and b) probably not even write in a email with their REAL name behind it.
/. there are a LARGE number of people that post anonomiously, or have a tendancy to really 'hack' away at someones response, rather than just offering a "counter view-point..."
Even here at
If I was them, I wouldn't be too quick to responde to an email from 'cherrypicker@hotmail.com', at lease not when I have a phone calls from "Agnes Miller, (734-555-1515)" and snail-mail letters from "Richard Bronner, 123 Main St, somecity, mystate..."
It's really a shame too, because I'm a HUGE email fan...!
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
He's not my favored Democratic candidate, so I don't know why I'm doing this; maybe just to combat the analysis of the teeny-brained.
... We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved.'"
* Internet quote: "In an interview shown on CNN on Tuesday, Gore was asked about his vision and his experience and he mentioned that while he served in Congress, 'I took the initiative in creating the Internet.'" [AP story] Obviously the word used is not "invented" though it is commonly reported that way; and "created" is probably too strong, especially since as we all know the history of the internet goes back to the 1960s ARPANET. But he did have a hand in legislation during that period when nobody else was paying attention.
* Love Canal: "'I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue,' Gore said. That was the one that started it all.
Now, one can quibble over the phrase "started it all" -- did he mean that was the start of cleaning up Love Canal, or the start of Congressional attention to the toxic waste problem? The latter is NOT in question:
"In August of 1978, Gore did chair hearings on the matter by the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations - two months after the Love Canal homes were evacuated and President Carter declared the neighborhood a disaster area."
[CapitalWatch, last December]
This local Love Canal chronology makes clear that while the emergency was dealt with thanks to the local representative and the EPA, Gore was indeed the first subcommittee chairman (3/21/79) to begin looking into the matter.
* Now, finally, the Earned Income Credit issue: I can't find the original quote, but the discussion/question was about EXPANDING the Earned Income Tax Credit, a bill which he most certainly did sponsor while in Congress.
So, are these gaffes, or are they just journalists and opponents looking for any opportunity to try to turn a remark of his into a gaffe? There certainly was truth in everything he said. Go ahead, sputter, say "it was an exaggeration", but what he said was factual. Self-serving; but factual.
And show me one other politician who has said nothing that is self-serving.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It's interesting that they should publish this article, since their entire business model depends on e-mailing at least four people (Representative, both Senators, President) every time somebody votes in one of their (non-scientific) online polls.
Vote.com "about us" page
Sure, it makes it easy for the "average citizen" to "speak out", but how much attention are they going to really pay to form e-mails -- in effect, political spam -- from an online poll site? (We all should know to be skeptical of any online poll; I've seen many of them spammed by somebody going to a particular political forum and posting a link.) The respondents to these polls are self-selected; the polls are not scientific in any way. They don't even have any way to verify whether the respondent is represented by the people they say that they claim. They don't even have a way of verifying that people are citizens, let alone US residents or voters!
I've heard the following rule of thumb for getting a Congressman to listen to you:
* a personal visit is worth ten phone calls
* a phone call is worth ten letters
* a letter is worth ten faxes
* a fax is worth ten e-mails
Keeping in mind that no matter what, very few of these communications besides the top one actually involve directly reaching the office-holder. For the most part, the staff merely files the communication and marks the opinion on a chart somewhere; if you get a reply (and most personal letters are eventually replied to), it will be a polite form reply, barely indicating that the original letter was actually read (especially if the opinion isn't shared by the representative); something like "Your views are very important to us; the N budget is very important to every American; etc.".
None of this is anything like the idea some may have of e-mailing "Sen. Joe Smith" and getting back a nice note, "liked what you said about the budget, thanks, Joe". Why the e-mail model should be more directly responsive than the snail mail model is an assertion that eludes me. Today, each person in Congress represents about 570,000 people, of whom perhaps 225,000 are voters.
I'm not sure what an electronic Congress would really look like, but I'm quite sure that it isn't the model that the business of Vote.com has. It might be an interactive web page; it might involve secure clients or digital signatures. It certainly shouldn't be based on spam.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I don't think that computer law schools are especially nessecary. The current college students desire for a double major will take care of that problem. In fact I know many who are trying right now to combine computers with law. In a few years, this should start to take care of itself. Like always, the law will always drag behind developements in tech, hence all the lawsuits and attempted bandwith restrictions.
However, for this reason, there need to be schools that have equally good tech and law departments. Normally you get the good tech education at places that down play the humanities and vice versa. There aren't many schools that are able to successfully mix the two fields because they are so different. For instance, I don't know many tech people who care for any sort of humanities education. Most, think of it as a hinderance towards their personal goals of being a better hacker. So it's not just a problem of there not being appropriate schools, but their being a problem of tech people not wanting to take part in this legal stuff.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
I see this as further evidence that our lawmakers are incompetent when it comes to creating legislation that affects the computer and Internet world. How can we expect them to make sensible laws when they don't even have the most BASIC understanding of what they are regulating?
I'll say again what I've said in a previous posting on /., that we need to have schools that specificially train people in computer law, and that these people need to advise and lobby our lawmakers, they need to educate them in the technology and the subtleties of it so they can be effective at their jobs.
I've always been scared when I hear of ANY new computer-related law coming out, because I know that 80% of them don't make any sense from the technology perspective that the geeks have. There needs to be a balance between the geek view and the corporate view and the political view. Right now it is too heavily weighted towards the political and corporate views, because they don't know any better.
If the laws keep getting worse, I'm gonna move to the Falkland Islands to raise sheep, and give up computers entirely! =)
We need properly trained lawmakers! Help us!
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
Congress has always been behind the times. They never protect consumers' technology rights (think DMCA) and they think that giving monopoly rights to big business will keep our economy growing. I personally think that the politicians are pretty much a lost cause. One more reason why there should be no government influence online. The government can regulate the internet as efficiently and wisely as a pack of wild baboons can run a city government.
It has nothing to do with age or a slowness to accept technology.
Members of Congress simply do not have the staff to answer non-constituent e-mail. As they are in many cases unable to discern what comes from constituents and what doesn't, they will only reply to e-mail if the sender provides a postal address inside their constituency.
You try responding to thousands of e-mails a week about an equally diverse number of topics. A U.S. Senator has a staff of about 40, a U.S. Representative has a much much smaller staff on average. This staff not only has to answer all the mail but track all the legislation, keep the member's schedule, etc.
Even though these e-mails are not responded to they are read.
Further, e-mail is still easily forged and many are concerned about the political implications of a forged e-mail circulated to large numbers of their constituents. They feel the best way to repudiate these forgeries before they happen is to have the policy they only respond by postal mail.
There has been talking of implementing digital signatures, but most officies are not ready to do this yet.
There's a difference between knowing how to assemble or use a piece of technology and knowing how such technology can affect the society it is used in.
The tech entry exam was meant as a sort of half jest (but only half).
I don't expect them to know all about how technology works either, that's why they get instructions. If they cannot adequatly read and interpret the assembly instructions, it is unlikely that they will be able (or willing) to consult with knowledgable people to gain enough basic understanding to legislate effectivly. Mostly it would keep them from passing unimplementable legislation and hopefully they would know enough to detect when industry insiders are snowing them.
For example, if clueless legislators (at all levels of government) actually surfed the web more, they would understand that ISPs cannot be responsable for it's content. They might also understand that net filters CANNOT adequatly seperate adult oriented content from the rest. If they had ever tried to make fair use of copy protected content, the DMCA might be a bit more reasonable.
Finally, with step by step instructions, it is quite possable to assemble and configure a computer without knowing how it all works. Many (certainly not all) 'technicions' and 'help desk specialists' do exactly that every day.
Several have noted that email is a distant third, to phone calls and postal mail. I disagree.
Mail, calls, and email ALL run a distant second to personal visits by those who contribute cash to a senator's/representative's campaign. This worrying about email would maybe have a point if it weren't for the fact that the typical constituent doesn't really have the ear of their elected representatives. Unless, of course, they are carrying a check for K$.
in my opinion is that Congressmen disregard their supporters more and more. Part of their job, and they know this when they run for election, is to represent the people and try to do what's best for the country by way of what the people say. Obviously it's difficult to answer 100+ emails a day, but it would probably be easier if they spent less time campaigning for their re-election. Representatives, for example, are elected every 2 years. What good can they accomplish in 2 years, when at least half the time they're running for re-election? Senators aren't as bad, but it's the same thing. Our Congressmen are more worried about re-election than actually doing their jobs. Perhaps if everyone got term limits, we'd see e-mail usage pick up a bit more.
If there is a vote coming up soon, and I want to communicate with my congressman on it, it makes sense to use a instantaneous message rather than getting it in the mail the next day (because all my local pickups are at 1pm), having it take 1 to 2 days to get to the statehouse, another day to be sorted, etc. If I have points to make, rather than a "please vote yes, please vote no" mentality (which, if I was in congress, I would give less weight to) then a phone call will get across only what the person listening chooses to write down and understands. Email is the best way to respond, and not always the easiest, in those circumstances.
PS, who you calling lazy? If I write (for example) a letter to the editor by email, I type and edit it extensively in a word proccessing program. Its just that then instead of hitting print, I cut and paste into an email program. Do you really think that 33 cents and dropping it in a box on the way to work makes me a better person? Get real.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...