Where the lobbying power lies

...53 percent of the CDT's income in 2004, discounting a one-time reimbursement for legal fees. Charitable foundations make up the rest of its $3m annual budget.

The centre adopts positions that tend to benefit those who fund it. It sued Utah and Pennsylvania to overturn pornography laws opposed by the most of the Internet industry. The group has also backed concepts like P3P, a self-regulatory approach that the Internet industry used to avoid new privacy laws but was opposed by non-profit privacy organisations that do not rely on corporate funding.

The Justice Department once argued in court documents that technology corporations "funnelled money through" CDT to fund litigation. In another sign of close ties with the industry, Alan Davidson, the centre's former associate director, was hired by Google last year as a staff lobbyist.

Berman, CDT's president, with a 2004 salary of $223,111, acknowledges that his group's positions benefit those who fund him but says his organisation does not modify its positions after receiving a check. "Can they try to buy you?" Berman asked. "Maybe they'd love to. But we try to resist that, in terms of a diversity of funding, and we make it quite clear."

Microsoft initially opposed some forms of Internet privacy legislation that the centre did support, he says. "Now they're in favour of privacy legislation — who influenced whom?"

Berman previously was the policy director for the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation when it moved from its original home of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Washington office in the downtown corridor known for its preponderance of corporate lobbyists. His work there illustrated the importance of non-profit groups in influencing policy decisions.

When the FBI was pressing for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994, most privacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, remained steadfastly opposed to the measure. CALEA requires telecommunications companies to design their networks to be explicitly wiretap-friendly.

Berman, a long-time Washington hand, eventually let EFF endorse what he described as a compromise proposal that was more privacy-sensitive. A number of procedural safeguards were added that seek to minimise the threats to privacy, security and innovation, Berman told a House panel in September 1994.

EFF's position--which supported reimbursing companies for wiretapping compliance--also happened to coincide with the interests of some of the telecommunications giants that provided it with cash. AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Apple Computer and Microsoft gave EFF a combined $235,000 in 1993, according to CyberWire Dispatch.

With EFF's cautious endorsement, CALEA easily cleared both houses of Congress, and President Clinton signed it in October 2004. After a worried EFF board ousted Berman soon afterwards, he created what became CDT and brought with him money from Nynex and a penchant for compromise and deal making. Today, CALEA is being applied to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and broadband connections, and it has become the subject of a federal lawsuit.

Newt Gingrich's favorite think tank
Despite their influence, non-profit groups can easily fall victim to the vagaries of Washington politics — a precarious position underscored by the fate of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, one of Washington's most influential think tanks in the vanguard of the Republican revolution in the mid-1990s. Mostly conservative, and in some ways libertarian, the...

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