"Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year."
"Hagel and Snowe joined Democrats Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels into the classified program."
What makes these legal distinctions more critical is the growing volume of e-mail - and with it rising privacy issues. Free e-mail accounts - some with storage capacities up to 250 MB - allow people to pile up digital photos, documents, and volumes of correspondence without a second's thought. Few people are thinking through the ramifications, says Alan Chappell, a privacy and data-collection consultant."
(Available via Lexis-Nexis or by paying the New York Times
*
LANDMARK GLOBAL WARMING BILL PASSES CALIFORNIA ASSEMBLY
Environmentalists scored a major victory over automobile and oil interests as Assembly Bill 1058 (Pavley) narrowly won approval in the state Assembly on January 31, 2002.
The bill, which will enact the first-in-the-nation regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, inspired a frenzy of last minute lobbying from business interests led by the auto and oil industries intent on killing the bill.
AB 1058 is sponsored by Bluewater Network and the Coalition for Clean Air and supported by a broad coalition which includes the Union of Concerned Scientists, NRDC, the California State Firefighters, the American Lung Association, the California League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense and the California Council of Churches.
Coalition member Bob Epstein, a member of a Silicon Valley business group Environmental Entrepreneurs, said the bill "is a precedent setting proposal that puts California in the lead on reducing the economic and environmental threats posed by global climate change."
** Email Activists Score Major Victory. California Passes Landmark Global Warming Bill *** Letters to the California State Assembly from Environmental Defense Action Network activists helped win approval of a bill limiting CO2 pollution from motor vehicles sold in the state. Heat trapping CO2 emissions from the millions of cars and trucks is a major source of greenhouse gas pollution in California. It's now onto the State Senate and the Governor. Stay tuned! For more information, click here: http://actionnetwork.org/ct/.1aLAPK1jcJl/ca_victory
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Mr. Larry Neal, deputy chief of staff for Senator Phil Gramm (Republican-Texas), in response to a New York Times reporter on the impact of e-mail lobby campaigns stated:
"The communication that Sen. Gramm values most certainly does not arrive by wire. It is the one where someone sat down at a kitchen table, got a sheet of lined paper and a No. 2 pencil, and poured their heart into a letter." [69]
It is axiomatic in the lobbying game that a hand-written letter by a concerned constituent has by far the strongest impact on an elected representative.
As well, the more personal and relevant to the voter’s life the communication is, the more likely the letter will elicit a genuinely interested response from the representative's office.
When a family without health insurance and mounting medical bills writes to their elected representative about Health Care Legislation, they will most surely get a personalized response.
Other personalized contacts from the home district[70] like impassioned telephone calls and even hand written postcards also carry some weight.
Mass snail-mail-letters and postcards, where people just sign at the bottom of a form are weighed much less by elected officials. E-mails as we shall see are practically "mass-less", carrying almost no political weight. ~~ Technopolitical
Notes:
[69] Raney, New York Times . E-Mail Gets the Cold Shoulder in Congress, December 13, 200I
Accessed on date of publication @ http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/technology/circuits/13CONG.html
~~~ This is the earliest academic electronic posting I have found reviewing the lack effectiveness of Email - Cyber -Lobbying. Cyber-Lobbying will never match the power of hand-written letters and grassroots voter action. ~
~~ `Technopolitical ~~ `
by Phil Agre April 1996
"This type of chain-letter petition can also counterproductively annoy the legislative staffers and other lowly individuals who are supposed to open the petitions when they arrive in the mail. The problem lies in the mathematics of Internet chain letters."
"Most of them, for one thing, have been very badly designed. They usually have no cut-off date, source of background information, signature from the organization or individual who is sponsoring the alert, or instruction to post the alert only where appropriate. As a result, these alerts have caused a lot of disruption and annoyance all around the net, and it would not surprise me if the negative sentiment they cause outweighs the positive benefit of the actions they encourage."
http://www.oneworld.net/anydoc_mc.cgi?url=http://www.netaction.org/training/
by Phil Agre April 1996
"Feel free to circulate this article for any noncommercial purpose.
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA"
pagre@ucla.edu
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
