[mark_l_watson]

Well, the ACLU and EFF are my personal special interests, but I think you probably know that I am talking about corporate lobyists buying the votes of democrats and republicans in congress, of corporate news media that sways public opinion.

[shadowgovt]

Right, but the ACLU and EFF are part of that story; funding SIGs that have the human expertise to interface to politicians efficiently is one of the mechanisms corporations "buy votes." Not all corporate lobbying is by people with the corporation's name in their title; corporations outsource by supporting SIGs aligned with them.

The EFF has received millions in funding from both Google as a corporate entity and one of Google's co-founders as direct donation.

This is one of the reasons campaign finance reform is such a wicked problem; if the real goal is to diminish the corporate voice relative to the voice of the common citizen, one has to account for the fact that money can buy basically every mechanism by which voices are amplified. It can even, subtly applied, buy the opinion of the common citizen.