[alistairSH]

Should we, as software developers and IT professionals, be able to lobby about information security? Net neutrality?

If we can't, and Verizon/Cox also can't (they also have a conflict), who is left? People who either don't care or lack enough knowledge of the issue to make reasonable policy recommendations?

[downandout]

Will you directly profit if someone goes to jail as a result of the laws you're lobbying for? That is the only scenario I am talking about here.

[danso]

As a developer not in the Windows ecosystem, I would have definitely benefited from lobbying on behalf of an anti-trust action against Microsoft.

[downandout]

Did Microsoft go to jail?

[danso]

Being incarcerated is not the only nor the worst affliction that a government can bring down upon you.

[downandout]

Ask someone that has been in prison for a while what their opinion on this is. I think they'd disagree.

[danso]

Ask someone whose loved ones have been fatally poisoned due to government negligence in rubber-stamping an environmental impact report and I think they'd offer a feisty debate.

(Or anyone at the receiving end of military action, for that matter)

The point is that drawing a line between lobbying that affects prisons (nevermind a distinction between federal, local, and other institutions of incarceration) and lobbying that affects anything else can be a largely arbitrary affair.