Lessig Advocates Technology Tools For Campaign Finance ReformLessig Advocates Technology Tools For Campaign Finance Reform

Government-reform advocates plan in two weeks to launch a system for members of Congress to pledge to reduce the role of money in government, Lawrence Lessig said. The Change Congress project will ask members of Congress to make three commitments: To reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees (PACs), work to ban earmarks, and support public funding for elections.

Officials who take the pledge will be allowed to wear a badge -- like a Creative Commons badge -- indicating which of the three reforms they support, Lessig said Wednesday night at a presentation at the O'Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Lessig, a Stanford University law professor, author, founder of the Center for Internet and Society, and proponent of Creative Commons, said Change Congress will ask citizens to donate $5 to $10 per month for several months to politicians who agree to take the reform pledge. And the group also will look for "citizen candidates" -- not professional politicians -- to run against politicians who fail to take the pledge. Even if the citizen candidates don't win, they'll force incumbents to address reform.

The movement won't reform government immediately, Lessig said. It will require at least two to four election cycles to achieve critical mass -- which can be a relatively small segment of the population, far short of a majority. But small numbers of people can make big changes. Wikipedia has about 2,000 authors, and 50,000 people nationwide working at their desks, or sitting on their couches with laptop computers, can revolutionize government, he said.

"If you can actually make members of Congress imagine a world where they don't have to spend all their time raising money, they would like that world," Lessig said. Members of Congress now spend two to six hours every day working the phones for campaign contributions. They're prohibited by law from making the calls from their Congressional offices, so they typically rent small, dingy offices near Capitol Hill and rush to those offices between votes to work like boiler-room telemarketers raising money. Most members of Congress would welcome the opportunity to do what they ran for office to do: Govern based on their judgment, Lessig said,

Lessig compared the pervasive influence of money, in the form of campaign contributions, on Congress to a person's slow descent in alcoholism. "The alcoholic might be losing his family and job and liver, but you have to get the alcoholic to focus on the fact that he has to fix his alcoholism first," Lessig said. Similarly, the United States needs to fix its addiction to campaign contributions before it solves the other serious problems it faces.

Lessig provided a one-hour overview of the role of money in government. Government has become so dysfunctional that it can't even make simple decisions properly, he said. Touching on a subject that's a favorite of his, Lessig said many studies have shown that copyright should never be extended for existing works -- it should only be extended for new works. "No matter what we do, George Gershwin will never create anything more," Lessig said. Nonetheless, the U.S. government frequently extends copyright for existing work.

In a second example, a World Health Organization study showed that people should eat less sugar. But the sugar lobby convinced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to soften the recommendation, with Idaho Senator Larry Craig taking a role in the campaign, Lessig said.

And energy companies have influenced U.S. public debate about global warming, Lessig said. A study looked at 1,000 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the course of several years, and found that none of them disputed that human activity contributed to global warming and humans need to take action to mitigate climate change. In the same period, of 600 newspaper articles, 53% questioned those premises, Lessig said.

"These are easy cases where we get it wrong, and the question I want to ask here is why," Lessig said. The answer, he said: Congressional representatives are dependent on big contributions to get re-elected, which makes them beholden to lobbies.

Lessig recommended other tools that citizens can use to inform themselves on the role of government and money. The Sunlight Foundation works to promote financial accountability in government. And Maplight charts campaign contributions and how they match elected officials' voting records. Lessig said he advises both organizations.

During the Q&A, Micah Sifry, a tech adviser for the Sunlight Foundation, recommended OpenCongress.org, an online tool for tracking any bill, issue, or member of Congress.

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of conference hosts O'Reilly Media, asked how information like that compiled by Sunlight and Maplight can become more well-known. He compared the relative obscurity of information on campaign contributions with the ubiquity of stock market information, and the way public companies have their stock symbols published in the business press.

Lessig responded that technologists can get the word out by broadening information available, and engaging journalists and bloggers to routinely look up the information whenever they do stories.

Lessig also explained why he decided not to run for Congress this year, despite a movement to draft him. He said he would have been running against Jackie Speier, the most popular politician in Silicon Valley, and would almost certainly have lost, which would have discredited the credibility of government reform.