Fwd.Us Raises Uproar With Advocacy Tactics

Fwd.Us, the new nonprofit advocacy group created by Mr. Zuckerberg and several technology executives and investors to push for an overhaul of immigration law, has bankrolled television ads endorsing the conservative stands taken by three lawmakers, prompting an outcry from liberal groups and a call to withhold advertisements from Facebook.

The uproar, some say, will be a lesson for Silicon Valley companies as they try to influence emotional political issues like immigration. But the group’s supporters brashly say they were ready for the reaction.

“Our advertising decisions are being made by a very smart team of political operatives who know that passing major reform will require some different and innovative tactics,” Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners and a contributor to the cause, said in an e-mailed statement. “I’m proud to support Fwd.Us as they work to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

The group has faced the most vocal criticism for television advertisements sponsored by its two subsidiaries, which are known as Americans for Conservative Action and Council for American Job Growth. One of those spots takes swipes at President Obama’s health policies. Another lauds the Keystone XL pipeline, fiercely opposed by many environmental groups.

Those TV spots, which ran in several states for a week, prompted strong reaction from a coalition of liberal organizations that includes the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org. They announced earlier this week that they would suspend buying advertisements on Facebook, which they acknowledged was meant to send a message and would have little economic impact on the company.

Cathy Duvall, director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club, said her group was especially disappointed to see the technology industry adopt a strategy that was more typical of old-fashioned, brass-knuckled Washington lobbying.

“When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another,” Ms. Duvall said. “We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics.”

Fwd.Us, like other industry-backed interest groups, has said very little about how much money it has raised and from whom, except to name contributors on its Web site. It would say only that it spent in the “seven figures” on the television spots.

The ads are particularly surprising considering some of the other backers. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, is known for his investments in clean technology companies, and his wife, Ann, has been a major donor to environmental causes.

Reid Hoffman has described himself as “progressive” in an essay posted recently on LinkedIn, a company that he founded.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, in 2010 backed an effort not to roll back California’s global warming law. None of them returned calls and e-mails requesting comment for this article, referring instead to Fwd.Us operatives in Washington.

“We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy,” said Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for Fwd.Us. “Fwd.Us remains totally committed to support a bipartisan policy agenda that will boot the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”

For his part, Mr. Zuckerberg has covered his political bases. He recently held a fund-raiser for Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., and Facebook has hired several former White House and Congressional aides to work in its Washington office.

Mr. Zuckerberg has declined requests to be interviewed about Fwd.Us.

Jim Manley, a former chief spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said that the ads may have achieved their goal, but that Mr. Zuckerberg should learn from the negative reaction.

“He is finding out it can be very, very problematic to get your company involved in hot-button social issues,” said Mr. Manley, who now directs the communications practice at the Washington lobbying and public relations firm Quinn Gillespie. “There is going to be blowback. You are going to pay a price for it.”

Fwd.Us has been openly criticized by others in Silicon Valley. Josh Miller, founder of a start-up called Branch, denounced what he called the group’s “questionable lobbying practices” and said he was disappointed that the group had not been transparent about its intentions.

“More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world,” he wrote in a BuzzFeed opinion piece. “They should be doing the same in Washington.”

Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who finances some of the same clean energy companies as Mr. Doerr’s firm and who was once a major partner at Mr. Doerr’s investment firm, said on Twitter over the weekend: “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?”

One advocacy group called CredoAction, based in San Francisco, tried to use Facebook ads to draw attention to the Keystone XL pipeline TV spot sponsored by Fwd.Us. The ads were prohibited by Facebook officials, because the company’s terms of service prohibit using Mr. Zuckerberg’s image in another organization’s ad. A coalition of organizations has also created a Facebook group to agitate against Fwd.Us.

Still, others say the ads signal a calculated pragmatism. Fwd.Us is led by experienced political operatives, including Joe Lockhart, a former Clinton Administration official, and Rob Jesmer, a former Republican Senate political adviser. One executive involved in the effort said the advertisements were vetted with executives backing it — and that the executives realized before they were shown that they might alienate certain liberal audiences. But the group made a decision to back both Democrats and Republicans who support the immigration bill in order to get it passed.

“We did not just fall off the turnip truck,” the executive said. “There are a lot of people involved in these organizations that have been involved in politics for a really long time.”

The group e-mailed statements from prominent backers, including a former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, who argued that Fwd.Us needs to be “disruptive” in politics, as in commerce.

“In order to push Washington to do something different and pass major legislation like comprehensive immigration reform, groups like Fwd.Us can’t just do the same thing and expect different results,” he said. “As part of our work, we’re using a wide variety of tactics, some of which may ruffle some feathers, but we believe the passage of the bill will be worth it.”

New Minter Ellison Adelaide Hire Causes Political Uproar

Flag of Australia/clipart.com 2012

An Australian politician has come under attack for moonlighting at Minter Ellison.

Patrick Conlon, a Labor Party member of the South Australian Parliament since 1997 and a cabinet minister for many of those years, on Monday joined the Adelaide office of Minter Ellison as a part-time solicitor working three days a week. According to press reports, the firm is paying him roughly $152,000 a year, almost exactly the same as his salary from parliament.

The news has unleashed a firestorm of criticism from opposition politicians and the press, which have variously dubbed Conlon, who represents a suburban Adelaide district called Elder, "Part-time Pat" and the "Member for Minter Ellison."

In a statement, Vickie Chapman, deputy leader of the opposition Liberal Party, called on Conlon to resign immediately from the parliament. "Mr. Conlon should be working for his constituents in Elder, not for a law firm," she said.

The Advertiser of Adelaide said in an editorial that, as long as he is on the public payroll, Conlon "should be focused on one thing only -- his job as the Member for Elder. The decision to take on the Minter Ellison role will be condemned by many voters."

Conlon, who is not planning to seek re-election next year, has pointed out that other members of parliament have also worked on the side.

"What I am doing is no more than people in here have been doing for years," Conlon told The Australian, "and I can think of current Liberal examples who spend time on family farms and businesses."

He also said he believes that, even with his new role, he will be more available to his constituents now than he has been previously.

Minter Ellison said in a statement Conlon's work for the firm would absolutely not interfere with his duties to parliament and his constituents.

"We are pleased that Patrick has joined our talented team and look forward to the benefits this exciting new relationship will bring to Minter Ellison SA/NT," said Adam Bannister, managing partner of Minter Ellison's associated South Australia and New Territories offices.

As Microsoft Shifts Its Privacy Rules, an Uproar Is Absent

Microsoft instituted a policy on Friday that gives the company broad leeway over how it gathers and uses personal information from consumers of its free, Web-based products like e-mail, search and instant messaging.

Almost no one noticed, however, even though Microsoft’s policy changes are much the same as those that Google made to its privacy rules this year.

Google’s expanded powers drew scathing criticism from privacy advocates, probing inquiries from regulators and broadside attacks from rivals. Those included Microsoft, which bought full-page newspaper ads telling Google users that Google did not care about their privacy, an accusation it quickly denied.

The difference in the two events illustrates the confusion surrounding Internet consumer privacy. No single authority oversees the collection of personal information from Web users by Internet companies. Though most companies have written privacy policies, they are often stated in such broad, ambiguous language that they seem to allow virtually any use of customers’ personal information.

Web companies like Microsoft and Google have been moving aggressively to expand their abilities to gather and sort information about individuals’ habits and interests — even as Congress, federal regulators and the Obama administration have been seeking ways to protect Internet users against unwanted privacy incursions.

Microsoft’s policy, which it calls its Services Agreement, allows it to analyze customer content from one its free products and use it to improve another service — for example, taking information from messages a consumer sends on Windows Live Messenger and using it to improve messaging services on Xbox. Previously, that kind of sharing of information between products would not have been allowed under Microsoft policies, which limited the use of data collected under one of its products to that product alone.

Microsoft has promised, however, that it will not use the personal information and content it collects to sell targeted advertising. It will not, for example, scan a consumer’s e-mails to generate ads that might interest the user. Google does that, and expanding its ability to draw on that content was part of the reason Google changed its privacy policy this year.

But the new Microsoft policy does allow for such targeted advertising. Microsoft promised not to do so in blog posts and e-mails informing its customers about the change, but not in the formal policy. That has some privacy advocates nervous.

“What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” said John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policy for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit group. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn’t reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.”

Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, says the company’s plans are benign. He differentiates between the Services Agreement, also known as the terms of use, that was changed on Friday and the company’s Privacy Policy, which was last updated in April.

“Over the years, we have consistently informed users that we may use their content to improve the services they receive,” Mr. Evans said in a written statement. “For instance, we analyze content to improve our spam and malware filters in order to keep customers safe. We also do it to develop new product features such as e-mail categorization to organize similar items like shipping receipts in a common folder, or to automatically add calendar invitations.

“However,” he added, “one thing we don’t do is use the content of our customers’ private communications and documents to create targeted advertising. If that ever changes, we’ll be the first to let our customers know.”

Microsoft’s new services agreement affects only its free, Web-based products, not the software programs that individuals and companies buy off the shelf for home or business use. It covers Hotmail, and its related e-mail service, Outlook.com, but not the Outlook e-mail and calendar program that is individually loaded onto computer hard drives and widely used by corporations. Bing, its search engine, is covered, but Internet Explorer, its browser, is not.

Microsoft’s pledge not to use the data from its Web services to target advertising has some credibility, given the company’s broader privacy initiatives. The company has said it will include a “do not track” feature in its new Internet Explorer 10 Web browser that prevents online advertising companies from monitoring the browsing habits of users so they can target promotions. Microsoft has made “do not track” the default setting on the new version of Explorer, a move that has caused a firestorm among online advertising companies.