Microsoft's Political Lobbying Record

pierreduFwench writes "With the U.S. national elections just around the corner, you may find this interesting: Opensecrets.org, a website focusing on 'Responsive Politics' recently published lobbying and donations info for the 2002 elections (to date). You can see the breakdown of Microsoft's individual dossier here. Also, looking at the 'Top Donations by Industry', you may notice that Microsoft is, conspicuously, the only entry under 'Computers/Internet.'" Very interesting graphs.

Comments

The FEC Database has errors: Quality of Disclosure

[stefanlasiewski]

Notice how the site posts the following disclosure at the bottom of many of the Congressional query pages:

Quality of Disclosure:

Quality of disclosure data has been removed from the site because of errors in the Federal Election Commission's database. The FEC has informed us that it will not supply updated disclosure data until mid-October. We will post new figures on disclosure quality as soon as possible.

Convenient timing, eh? Elections are November 5th, and the FEC won't supply the updated information until "mid-October". That's probably not enough time for opensecrets to input the data before the elctions.

If the FEC supplied that information on a timely basis, I might be able to make a more educated decision on November 5th.

Suspicious timing, if you ask me.

Re:The Open Source community needs a PAC

[Fnkmaster]

This is a fabulous idea. We are pretty good at organizing, very politically opinionated on certain issues that may not be of interest to the general population but affect all of our lives, and we have a rather high mean income, so we could all afford to give a bit of money.

Wait a second, isn't the EFF supposed to do this already? I guess the EFF spreads their efforts out a bit, and perhaps fails to focus strongly enough on the legislative branch, and lobbying Congress to pass bills more friendly to the technology community. The EFF seems to get stuck in the judicial process, relying on the admittedly somewhat more rights-friendly judiciary to save our asses. Frankly, I don't think the Free Software Foundation, which you mention, is the kind of organization I would want representing my point of view in the political arena, though I think they have done a lot of great work to promote Free Software. I think we could accomplish a lot with an organization that existed to promote legislation friendly to the cause of freedom online, that had a pro-Free Software stance without being radically dogmatic.

In the meantime, why not donate to EFF?