Politics and Law

The tweet that shall live in infamy.

(Credit: Twitter)

You can't make this stuff up: Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, set off a political-blog firestorm when he posted to his Twitter account on Wednesday that "Iranian twitter activity (is) similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."

Presumably he was talking about rallying in the face of adversity. But, um, really? The U.S. congressional elections might be rife with mildly nefarious characters on both sides of the party line, but the current upheaval in Iran deals with a totalitarian regime, media blackouts, and mass protests with casualties. Talk about a gaffe. Rep. Hoekstra has said he will not seek re-election and is reportedly considering a run for governor; I'm sure his potential opponents are taking note here.

Anyway, somebody brilliant (I learned this is, unsurprisingly, Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger fame) seized the opportunity and created a hilarious blog called "Pete Hoekstra is a Meme," devoted to photo captions much like the perennial "lolcats" craze. "To Hoekstra is to whine using grandiose exaggerations and comparisons," the site explains. Each "Hoekstra is a Meme" caption illustrates a similar, though generally more offensive claim.

(Credit: hoekstraisameme.com)

It gets better. This is the same Rep. Peter Hoekstra who, you might recall, Twittered his secret trip to Iraq back in February. This guy is just comedy gold. I'm sure he's a fine public servant to the good people of Michigan (Is he? Michiganders, please weigh in!), but when it comes to Twitter, you'd almost think he had been planted by the writers for The Daily Show.

And while some might say Rep. Hoekstra's staffers ought to gently prevent him from Twittering, in the future, I say keep 'em coming. It's been a while: Politicians have been getting awfully digital-savvy for the past few years. Back in 2006, we were guaranteed loads of hilarity whenever Ted Stevens tried to explain the Internet, Robert Wexler wasn't aware that his Colbert Report joke about being a cocaine fiend would be mixed and remixed all over the Web, or George Allen mouthed off in the presence of YouTube-ready cameras.

These days, however, we're stuck with far too many Beltway types who are woefully adept at Twittering, like former Bush strategist Karl Rove.

And honestly, that's just no fun.

This post was updated at 11:33 p.m. PT.

Facebook's targeted advertising program is "materially different from behavioral targeting as it is usually discussed," Chris Kelly, the social network's chief privacy officer, said in remarks prepared for a Thursday morning hearing before two House subcommittees.

"In offering its free service to users, Facebook is dedicated to developing advertising that is relevant and personal without invading users' privacy, and to giving users more control over how their personal information is used in the online advertising environment," read the remarks for two subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The hearing, titled "Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers' Expectations," was also slated to include testimonies from Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy; Scott Cleland, president of Precursor; Charles Curran, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative; Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University; Anne Toth, vice president of policy and head of privacy at Yahoo; and Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google.

Chris Kelly

(Credit: Kelly2010.com)

Kelly, a White House staffer under President Clinton, has announced an exploratory bid to run for attorney general in California.

Social-media sites like Facebook, where members fill out extensive personal profiles that can detail everything from their music tastes to travel plans to political leanings, are at the forefront of new developments in behavioral ad targeting. The Facebook Ads program lets advertisers fine-tune their campaigns to reach specific demographics and audiences. Kelly insisted that this does not constitute an invasion of user privacy, an Internet-wide concern that the Federal Trade Commission has been exploring at the request of privacy advocates.

"The FTC's behavioral advertising principles recognize the important distinctions made by Facebook in its ad targeting between the use of aggregate, non-personally identifiable information that is not shared or sold to third parties," Kelly's remarks read, "versus other sites' and companies surreptitious harvesting, sharing and sale of personally identifiable information to third party companies."

Privacy concerns are nothing new to Facebook. The social network went through a user backlash over the introduction of its News Feed in 2006, and a bigger one over the controversial Beacon advertising program. More recently, a revision to Facebook's terms of use prompted consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist to highlight language that it said meant that Facebook claimed ownership of user profile data and photos.

"In February of this year, we looked to revise our Terms of Use, simplifying them to cut out as much legalese as possible and explain them in plain language," Kelly's remarks explained. "When we released a first version of our new terms, a blog misinterpreted our simplification of our copyright license, claiming that it meant we were seeking to own user content. The user reaction was predictably swift and severe, and we needed to choose among weathering the storm, revising the language, and introducing an entirely new process that would directly involve users in the governance of the site."

Facebook ultimately underwent a "notice and comment period modeled in part on the federal government's rulemaking procedure...(with) a user vote at the end of the process."

The points he tried to drive home the most: that Facebook members have extensive control over their personal information and that Facebook does not allow advertisers access to "personally identifiable" data in the Facebook Ads program.

Kelly also included a general mea culpa of sorts: "Perhaps because our site has developed so quickly, Facebook may have sometimes been inartful in communicating with our users and the general public about our advertising products," he stated. "We learned many lessons about the importance of user education and extensive control from the imperfect introduction of our Beacon product in 2007. As a result, Facebook continues to be dedicated to empowering consumers to control their information in both the noncommercial and the commercial context because we believe that should be the future of advertising."

A few other interesting tidbits from Kelly's remarks: out of Facebook's 200-million-plus active users, about 65 million are in the U.S.; more than 10,000 sites are using the Facebook Connect universal log-in product; and Facebook plans to continue the discussion-and-feedback-period strategy on any future changes to its "critical site documents."

A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.

"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."

CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."

His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."

Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."

Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.

Editors' note: This is a guest post. See Michael Songer's bio below.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, we have seen a number of well-known legal disputes: legality of peer-to-peer services such as Napster and Grokster, cybersquatting, laws (trying) to regulate porn, even "veejay" Adam Curry trying to use the MTV domain name.

As we head into 2010 and beyond, here are some legal issues that are likely to careen through cyberspace in the next few years.

1. Lawsuits related to stupid/silly conduct shown on the Internet.
The assimilation of broadband brought with it those "viral videos": Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa Dance, Aleksey "Impossible is Nothing" Vayner, and the like. The latest fad seems to be taking videos of crude behavior and posting it for all to see--think of the two girls bathing in the Kentucky Fried Chicken kitchen, or the Domino's employees creating a "special" meal for a customer.

Someone will be offended, someone will sue. In some cases, the lawsuits make sense (violating health codes for the KFC and Domino's videos); in other cases, they don't (Star Wars Kid sued, and Aleksey Varner threatened a suit, though the legal basis for these is shaky).

Expect to see a rise in these types of lawsuits related to conduct shown on the Internet and calls for Congress to do something. What, exactly, can be done is less clear; it's hard for the legal system to regulate conduct that, while not breaking the law, is merely stupid. But that won't stop people from trying and lawyers from garnering headlines.

2. Lawsuits related to social media.
The last few years have seen a number of lawsuits brought against Facebook and MySpace for conduct occurring on those sites--think of the Megan Meier case (Megan Meier was the teenager who committed suicide after a woman pretended to be her friend, and then turned on her).

The government prosecuted the offender in that case, though the legal basis for the prosecution is less than clear, and an appeal is under way. And there have been calls for regulating what you can and cannot do (no sock puppets!) on these sites.

These are likely to continue for the simple reason that more and more people are using these new technologies. With that increased use comes the increase in libelous statements, crude conduct, even illegal activity (think prostitutes using Craigslist to advertise their services).

I'm sure--if it hasn't already happened--that someone will sue over some "tweet" in the next year. Expect more of these lawsuits.

3. The next battle in the copyright wars.
The $1 billion battle between Google's YouTube and Viacom is churning away, with no end in sight. At issue is the liability of sites like YouTube for hosting content posted by others.

Like the earlier Napster decision, this case has major ramifications for content on the Internet. However, just as Napster begat legal file sharing (iTunes), consumer demand might work out a solution faster than the courts.

YouTube recently announced a deal with Sony to stream movies, with television shows on the horizon. But whatever the final outcome of the YouTube lawsuit, nagging copyright issues associated with liability and fair use of content uploaded into social sites will not go away.

Recently, the Associated Press threatened to sue aggregators and clamp down on the use of their articles, and others are sure to follow this path. Expect more content owners to use copyright lawsuits to shape what we view and read on the Internet.

4. Blogger liability for the comment section.
Currently, bloggers cannot be sued for libelous statements posted in the comment section of their blogs. Something called "section 230" (after the particular legal code) immunizes bloggers from legal harm caused by another's comments (bloggers, however, can be sued for libelous statements that they post).

This immunity was enacted in the mid-'90s and was designed to protect the "publishers" on the Internet at that time: the AOLs, CompuServes, and ISPs that enabled Internet access. The law never contemplated the explosion of bloggers, MySpace authors, and other "social publishers." And the law never contemplated the accompanying (usually anonymous) comments to those posts, as well as the ill will associated with the all-too-common flame wars.

Several courts have expressed dissatisfaction with the blogger immunity--particularly when the blogger knows that the comments are defamatory or wrong. Expect more challenges to this immunity, and perhaps calls for Congress to roll back section 230.

5. The taxman cometh.
Anyone who has read a phone bill has seen a dizzying array of taxes, assessments, and special charges. Your Internet access is free from such taxes until at least 2014, due to Congress and the Internet Tax Freedom Act. The law, passed in 1998 and extended by the Bush administration, prohibits federal, state, and local governments from taxing access to the Internet, and it bans "Internet-only" taxes such as bandwidth or e-mail taxes.

States remain free to tax sales on the Internet.) Of course, that was before the current economic crisis, and the general rise in taxes on everything from mobile phones to cigarettes. A bill has been introduced to make the tax ban permanent, but nothing is "forever" with Congress. Expect to see calls for Congress to tax these areas before 2014.

Of course, given a steady pace of new Internet technologies that allow different ways for humans to interact with one another, more unique, complex, and downright strange events will occur that give rise to legal disputes. (Think "upskirt" cams.)

The legal system is flexible and has dealt with much over the last 10 years, in many instances driving Internet growth in ways both good and bad. The next 10 years promise much of the same.

(Credit: Twitter)

Now live, from the team behind Twitter: a site for tracking "tweets" pertaining to the fast-approaching U.S. presidential elections. Enter an election-related post on the page and it will appear in the continually-updating feed, which also aggregates other Twitter posts that contain election-related terms like the candidates' names.

In July, Twitter announced that it had acquired Summize, a popular search tool based on the Twitter application program interface (API). Now called Twitter Search, the Summize technology appears to be behind the filters on the election site.

If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene (just ask former Virginia senator George Allen), it's looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web. The campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain have created Twitter accounts for up-to-the-minute news and updates--the most recent updates are featured at the top of the Twitter election site--and the micro-blogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits.

But Twitter is still small enough so that it's possible to generate a simple "election feed" without encountering too much noise or irrelevant banter.

Twitter has also partnered with experimental news network Current TV on its election coverage, and selected live "tweets" will be displayed on-screen during its coverage of the presidential debates. Those are slated to start on Friday night, but Republican candidate John McCain's participation is still up in the air due to his announcement that he would suspend his campaign to focus on the ongoing Wall Street calamity.

Will he debate or not? Check that nifty new election page on Twitter. They're talking about it.

Mel King is a Boston-area community organizer locally famous for a housing sit-in, an almost-successful mayoral campaign, and the South End Technology Center, which provides low-cost computer training.

King, born in 1928, has long been a critic of telecommunications companies and an advocate of strict Net neutrality laws. He participated in an activists' "technology convening" in 2006 that fretted "companies who own the 'pipes' will control who gets on and what they can say." He joined a pro-Net neutrality coalition that opposed federal legislation backed by broadband providers.

Excerpt from a pro-Comcast, anti-Net neutrality op-ed in the Harvard Crimson newspaper supposedly written by Boston activist Mel King. To see the full article, click on the image.

Yet King placed his name on an opinion article in the Harvard Crimson in March that took the opposite position. It stated, "Most experts agree that broadband providers should be allowed to reasonably manage their networks," and it poked fun at the "idea that broadband networks should blindly treat each bit of information on the Internet equally."

King's article appeared eight days after the Federal Communications Commission held a hearing at Harvard University's law school in February where commissioners slammed Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent and promised penalties that were formally approved this month. In the op-ed, King dubbed the event a "dog and pony show" and an "obsequious effort to reassure Silicon Valley special interests--like Google."

There's one problem with this chronology. King may not have been the actual author. Instead, a secretive lobbying organization in Washington, D.C. called the LawMedia Group--hired by Comcast--did some or all of the writing. Comcast acknowledges that it "has a relationship" with LMG.

In a telephone conversation with CNET News, King confirmed the LawMedia Group's involvement. "I understand what they're doing," King said. "I don't think there's any mystique about any of this. It's getting the stuff into a place where we can have a kind of dialogue on it." When pressed for details such as whether he was paid for the use of his name, King hung up the phone.

Op-eds of dubious provenance are nothing new in political circles, and fake grassroots "astroturf" campaigns enjoy a long, although hardly distinguished, history. One of the most influential practitioners of this art is the LawMedia Group, which has emerged as a behind-the-scenes Washington advocate for Comcast in its Net neutrality tussle with the FCC. In May, the LMG began representing Microsoft in its attempt to use the political process to sabotage a Google-Yahoo advertising deal.

"LMG is one of several firms we work with in D.C.," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said. "It's no secret that we oppose the Google-Yahoo deal and that there's been a great deal of opposition to it by advertisers, publishers, consumers, and legal experts." Evans points out that Google has hired a constellation of D.C. lobbyists and public relations groups to tell its side of the story.

Microsoft hired LMG in early May for what a source with knowledge of the situation described as a six-figure monthly retainer.

Immediately afterward, anti-Google coalitions of dubious provenance--an LMG specialty--sprouted. The American Corn Growers Association, the League of Rural Voters, and a group called the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA) sent a letter to the Justice Department asking it to investigate Google's "search monopoly." Prior to that time, those groups had no history of aggressive anti-Google advocacy.

On June 9, LISTA complained about the Google-Yahoo deal. The same day, the corn growers asked Congress (PDF) to investigate.

The effort was a media success. Articles with titles like "Google, Yahoo Potential Deal Worries Heartland," and "Civic groups seek antitrust probe of Google, Yahoo talks," and "Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering" appeared, without any mention of LMG or questions about what supposedly raised sudden antitrust alarms on the part of rural voters or corn growers.

A CNET News article published in June reported that the name of an LMG employee, Alexandra Esser, appeared in the metadata of the letter ostensibly written by the corn growers and other grassroots groups. LMG Vice President Gil Meneses told us at the time that Esser "merely PDF'd a copy before distributing it" to reporters.

LMG declined repeated requests during the past few weeks to be interviewed for this article. Meneses said on July 31 that "I am out of pocket and focused on a different matter right now" and has not replied to follow-up queries. An LMG spokesman--who insisted that a condition of the conversation was that he not be identified in this article--refused to answer questions on Wednesday.

A firm that prefers the shadows
Even by Washington standards, the LawMedia Group is highly secretive. Until recently, nearly all pages on its Web site were password-protected. No clients are listed. Perhaps the oddest aspect is that not one employee's name--not even the identity of its founder or principals--is publicly disclosed.

LMG was founded by Julian Epstein, a former high-ranking House Democratic aide and party donor whom The Washington Post once called a "dashing bachelor, a hip-hop aficionado who drives a soft-top Jeep Sahara and lives in an Adams-Morgan loft he designed himself." In an advertisement on the Democratic Party's Web site, LMG describes itself as providing "grassroots lobbying" and "issue/initiative" management. It also has filed disclosure reports with the U.S. Senate for outsourced lobbying. (LMG has told us that it prefers to be called a "public affairs firm.")

For a group that prefers to remain in the shadows, LMG recently has found itself in the uncomfortable glare of the media's klieg lights. In addition to our report from June, the Post published an article on July 29 reporting that LMG may have written an anti-Wal-Mart Stores op-ed supposedly authored by Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The op-ed appeared in publications including the Tuscaloosa News and accused Congress of "subsidizing Wal-Mart, a company that recorded $3 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year."

It happens that Wal-Mart is a donor to Steele's group. And Wal-Mart wasn't happy with the op-ed. Steele's attorney told the Post's Jeff Birnbaum that, "I believe LMG played a role in this scenario; I can't say how big a role. LMG is in that chain somewhere." LMG, which is representing banks and credit card companies that are opposing Wal-Mart, would say only that it was tangentially involved.

Who actually writes these op-eds?
Few seasoned political observers would be surprised that op-eds are ghost-written on behalf of corporations by lobby groups or public relations firms. There are plenty of shops that advertise rates, with one charging $749 per op-ed, and they tend to be staffed by former journalists hoping to better their previous salaries.

LMG is one of those shops. A Web profile of a former LMG staffer boasts that he "drafted op-eds for clients." Art Brodsky, a former journalist who opposes the cable industry's Net neutrality arguments as spokesman for Public Knowledge, says in his bio that he "helped to draft op-eds and releases and participated in issue strategy" at LMG on behalf of the cable providers represented by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

But even in Washington's cynical political circles, it's still considered bad form to be found out.

In the case of King, the Boston-area activist who defended Comcast on Net neutrality grounds in the Crimson, LMG seems to have been deeply involved in the publication of his op-ed. LMG's Esser appears to have sent him e-mail on February 20 saying: "Thank you again for helping with the op-ed. Pasted below, please find the final version. We will keep you posted on the issue."

The op-ed appeared in the Crimson soon after. (Esser was the LMG employee whose electronic fingerprints appeared on the letter that the corn growers claim they wrote.)

King's op-ed describes him as someone who "has taught as an Adjunct Professor at MIT." He is listed on MIT's Web site as "Adjunct Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning" and has a campus phone number and mit.edu e-mail address. MIT's directory calls him a "senior lecturer emeritus."

An MIT spokeswoman says King is "not on the MIT payroll--he hasn't been for some time" and declined to comment on whether ghost-written articles violate MIT's strict rules on academic integrity. (MIT's handbook (PDF) prohibits any student--let alone faculty--from presenting "as his or her own the work of another." Crimson policies say op-eds must be "signed by their authors" and ones representing viewpoints of a corporation must be disclosed as such.)

Malcom Glenn, the president of the Crimson, told us that the op-ed was not solicited by the paper and that it was placed by someone claiming to work for King. "The initial contact was from Amy Kennedy, who said she was the secretary for Mr. King," Glenn said.

A LinkedIn.com profile for an Amy Kennedy says she was a communications assistant and press secretary for LMG from June 2006 through June 2008.

In a telephone conversation, King initially seemed unclear about the content of his op-ed, which defended Comcast in no uncertain terms and warned that the "FCC is dangerously far off track." He asked us if we knew that Comcast had tried to pack the Harvard room with people it hired, saying "this is what is troubling."

When asked about the details of the op-ed, King replied: "You can talk to Kevin Parker, he's at the LawMedia Institute." Parker is listed on the Naymz networking site as a "senior advisor" to LMG.

King added, before hanging up abruptly: "Nobody pays me."

Jesse Jackson disavows his own statement
Another peculiarity of King's op-ed is that portions are identical to a Rainbow Push coalition statement attributed to the Rev. Jesse Jackson and dated three months before. The statement supposedly written by Jackson was a response to an FCC vote related to media ownership.

Both items include this word-for-word identical passage: "People of color make up 33 percent of our population but own just 3 percent of all broadcast TV stations--and research shows that the number of owners is plummeting at alarming levels." Three other passages are extremely similar. (See our PDF for a side-by-side comparison.)

Comparison of what Jesse Jackson supposedly said with what Mel King supposedly wrote, raising the possibility of a third-party ghost-writer such as LMG. See PDF for full side-by-side comparison.

A source with knowledge of the situation said that LMG has a relationship with Jackson that includes ghost-written articles on behalf of corporate clients. The source pointed to a February op-ed in the Washington Times talking about a $40 billion Air Force contract for aerial refueling tankers--supposedly written by Jackson, who's not known for his military expertise or concern with Boeing's profitability.

One explanation is that whoever wrote King's op-ed copied the text of Jackson's press release, without attribution, that appeared three months earlier. Another one is that the same author, perhaps to save time, used the identical anti-FCC language to write both pieces.

Another dispute over the legitimacy of a Jackson statement arose in February, at the same time as the FCC's field hearing at Harvard. A flier distributed by an unnamed public relations firm said there would be an anti-FCC protest organized by the NAACP's Boston and Cambridge branches, according to the Associated Press. (A person with knowledge of the event says that LMG was involved in organizing the protest.)

File photo: Jesse Jackson at so-called digital divide event in the San Francisco Bay Area.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)

The flier quoted Jackson as saying FCC Chairman Kevin Martin supported a "massive new and unjustified welfare for the rich program."

Jackson told the AP he never made that statement, which is an odd claim as the phrase appeared in a letter Jackson supposedly wrote to the FCC in October 2007. It took Comcast's side in the dispute over a la carte cable channel regulations, calling them Martin's own personal "obsession."

This raises the obvious questions: if Jackson didn't write that letter and send it to the FCC last year, who did? Could the NAACP's common cause with Comcast have anything to do with a $5 million "voter education" partnership? And what, exactly, was LMG's involvement?

Neither Jackson nor the Rainbow Push coalition responded to repeated inquiries.

Disclosure: Declan McCullagh is married to a Google employee

A secretive Washington, D.C., group linked to an anti-Google letter signed by corn farmers says cable providers, which have retained it as a client, have nothing to do with its attempts to convince Congress to hold hearings critical of the search company.

Guillermo Meneses, previously a press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, is now a senior vice president at the LawMedia Group. He said that he was "unaware" of any communications between the American Corn Growers Association--which has no history of being interested in the antitrust implications of online advertising--and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

We reported on Wednesday that the anti-Google letter to Congress, signed by a number of farmers' groups who insisted they were the only ones to write it, included the name of a LMG staffer in the PDF metadata. Meneses said that the staffer, Alexandra Esser, "merely PDF'd a copy before distributing it."

Meneses, who refused to disclose the identities of other LMG clients, added that: "LMG is a public relations firm, not a lobbying firm. I want to make that very clear...We're simply a public relations firm like any other PR firm that you've dealt with in the past."

An advertisement for LMG on Democrats.org lists Meneses by name and shows "grassroots lobbying" as a service that both he and the firm provide. The ad lists "government relations" as another LMG specialty. An old version of LMG's Web site saved by Archive.org--the current site is password-protected--boasts of being able to come up with "robust coalitions" to influence "lawmakers."

LMG filed disclosure forms with the U.S. Senate for outsourced lobbying work in 2008. A Washington Post article from 2005 talking about LMG said it was "expected to stop lobbying for non-Bell companies" after the AT&T-SBC merger.

When asked about LMG's advertisement offering to provide "lobbying" services, and how to square it with his claim that LMG does not do lobbying, Meneses said he was not able to answer the question on the record.

Disclosure: Declan McCullagh is married to a Google employee.

If you think there's something a little odd about a bunch of corn farmers lobbying Congress to hold hearings on the details of a Google-Yahoo advertising deal, you may be right.

A letter (PDF) that the American Corn Growers Association and other farmers' groups sent to the U.S. Congress on Monday appears to be linked to a Washington, D.C., lobby group that does work for cable providers, some of Google's most potent political adversaries.

The letter warned Senate and House committee chairmen that any such deal would "create a monopolistic concentration of power in the market for online search and related advertising."

Excerpt from PDF of anti-Google letter signed by a corn farmers' group. The author's name is the same as a staffer for a secretive D.C. lobby shop used by Google's adversaries.

An examination of the metadata in the PDF version of the letter shows that the author was Alexandra Esser. That's the name of a staffer at a secretive Washington, D.C., lobby organization called the LawMedia Group, which currently counts the National Cable and Telecommunications Association as a client and counted AT&T as one in the past.

The LawMedia Group was founded by Julian Epstein, a former high-ranking House Democratic aide who The Washington Post once called a "dashing bachelor, a hip-hop aficionado who drives a soft-top Jeep Sahara and lives in an Adams-Morgan loft he designed himself." LMG once described itself as providing "grassroots lobbying" and "issue/initiative" management; among its hires is Jason Oxman, a former vice president at Comptel, which counts Sprint and Time Warner Telecom as members.

In the technology-meets-politics world, Net neutrality has been the hottest political conflict pitting businesses against each other in the last few years (the conflagration really started with the 2005 Madison River case). After Google emerged as a leader of the pro-Net neutrality forces, it was inevitable that its adversaries would employ the political process to trip it up in unrelated business dealings (c.f. Rep. Joe Barton).

Washington types seem to want to distance themselves from LMG. AT&T acknowledged through a representative that it once retained LMG but adds "the new AT&T is not a client." A Comcast representative said "it isn't being done on our behalf." A National Cable and Telecommunications Association representative said that "LMG is one of the many consultants that we work with, and I'm sure they work with many others, but we are not involved in this issue at all." LMG's Esser did not reply to phone or e-mail messages on Tuesday. Google declined to comment.

LMG appears to be unusually tight-lipped about itself and what it does: its Web site requires a password even to click on the "contact LMG" link. A non-password protected version of the site saved by Archive.org offers to sell the ability to form "robust coalitions (that) can change minds--in the media, among lawmakers." Another page says "it is our longstanding policy not to disclose our client list."

Larry Mitchell, director of legislative affairs for the American Corn Growers Association, said in a telephone interview on Monday that farmers genuinely are interested in Congress holding hearings about the antitrust implications of a potential Google-Yahoo ad partnership.

"It's not unusual for farmers to look at technology," Mitchell said. Markets today "are very very concentrated. In fact all of us, in our day-to-day lives, are dealing with fewer companies and less and less competition, and we feel that's detrimental to a free enterprise system."

Mitchell said in response to a question that no outside groups were involved in the preparation of the letter to Congress.

One person who has been involved with creating fake coalitions said it was trivial to organize letters to politicians. "You go down the Latino people, the deaf people, the farmers, and choose them," said the person, who requested anonymity. "You say, 'I can't use this one--I already used them last time...' We had their letterhead. We'd just write the letter. We'd fax it to them and tell them, 'You're in favor of this.'"

Anti-Google politicking: First farmers, then Latino groups
In what could be a coincidence, three hours after the corn growers forwarded their anti-Google letter to journalists on Monday, the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA) followed up by circulating its own.

LISTA is a political ally of cable operators. LISTA supported them last year before the Federal Communications Commission; it supported them in a tussle over set-top boxes; it supported them in a digital TV coalition.

In March, LISTA sided with Comcast in opposing Net neutrality laws. LISTA President Jose Marquez has warned that for "Latinos working in the information and telecommunications sector, the chill (of) new burdensome regulations placed on investment will kill jobs and opportunity."

The letter that LISTA sent on Monday posed five questions to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. An excerpt: "Google has in the past been accused of using its search algorithms to favor certain search results over others. Such accusations are of particular concern to Hispanic-owned small businesses that rely on Internet search for a competitive equalizer in a marketplace dominated by large corporations."

That's not all. The American Corn Growers Association (along with the American Agriculture Movement, a "farmer-created, farmer-built organization") signed another anti-Google letter (PDF) on May 9. It was sent to the U.S. Department of Justice and alleged that "Google's Gmail service has already repeatedly violated basic tenets of consumer privacy by scanning the actual text of individual customer e-mails in order to extract information for its advertising."

Another explanation is that the corn growers group, which is not the same as the National Corn Growers Association, simply believes in aggressive antitrust enforcement. It filed a private antitrust suit against Monsanto, for instance, last year. It has been involved in other policy debates before the FCC, and not always on the side of the cable companies.

Normally trade associations and nonprofit groups that engage in Washington politicking are eager to post their correspondence on their Web sites. (It makes them look busy, or at least like they're accomplishing something.) That's what groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Competitive Enterprise Institute do.

But the corn growers do not; the only press releases listed discuss renewable energy and corn prices. Likewise, LISTA's letter from Monday does not appear on the group's Web site.

Similarly, there appears to be no mention of the Google-Yahoo letter on the Web sites of the National Association of Farmer Elected Committees, the American Agriculture Movement, the League of Rural Voters, the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association, or the National Family Farm Coalition. All of those groups (plus the corn farmers) signed Monday's letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.).

Surreptitious attempts by companies to influence the political process through front groups have a long, if not especially distinguished, history.

Astroturf campaigns in Washington have involved a Working Families for Wal-Mart (funded by Wal-Mart Stores) and the Save Our Species Alliance (funded by the timber industry). Comcast's hiring of people who showed up at a Net neutrality hearing and apparently applauded on cue may fit into that category too.

If there indeed is a broadband provider behind this flurry of farming-and-ranching outrage, an acute irony exists. The cable companies and the telecoms have the better of the Net neutrality arguments; technologists are now realizing that Google and its brethren backed legislation that would give far too much power to the FCC and do more harm than good. But hoping that proposals in Congress can be debated on their merits might be too much to ask.

[Update: 6/12 9:20 a.m.: We've posted a followup with LMG's response.]

Disclosure: Declan McCullagh is married to a Google employee.