Heard of the American Tradition Partnership? With a name like that, it's gotta be good, right? Well, perhaps not: ATP, nominally devoted to "fighting the radical environmentalist agenda," helped kill Montana's hundred-year-old ban on corporate spending in elections in 2011, because, you know, ATP IZ PEPULL!!!!!! Turns out ATP also filed with the IRS as a 501(c)4 non-profit social welfare organization in 2008, yet mailed out fliers weighing in on candidates in that year's Montana Republican primaries right beforehand. 501(c)4 organizations can "participate" in elections, as long as they focus solely on voter education, but if the mailers actually endorsed candidates, ATP could be in trouble with the law. So Free Speech for People helps you tell the Justice Department to investigate ATP. Maybe ATP was clever enough to skirt the spirit of the law without breaking its letter. But the road to hell is paved with the skulls of the similarly clever.
Meanwhile, if you haven't left comments with the FTC supporting better privacy protections for children online, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood still helps you do that. Congress passed the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998, but the law mandates the FTC to produce rules implementing and enforcing the law, and the FTC hasn't updated those rules since 1998. Can you think of anything that might have happened since 1998? Maybe the ubiquity of cell phones? Or the explosion in social networking? Some things haven't changed, though -- today's corporations still target children more fiercely than they target their parents, as even the Wall Street Journal found 30% more cookies and tracking devices on kids' websites than on those more frequented by adults. Going after the parents' pocketbook through their children is an old trick, and today parents need more tools to fight it. And we need to help them get those tools.
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