Serious question. We're all problem solvers here. There has got to be a better way to get our elected leaders to pay more immediate attention to blatantly immoral and unconstitutional stuff like this.
As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,
There's your problem. Why are you electing people? That's completely backwards. Electing people is allocating labor and incurring production costs without evaluating demand signals. It is ideas that must be debated and voted on, and have people fill in to execute them. Only by having information on what policy is desired will you able to properly apportion the production costs and allocate the representative labor in fulfilling said policy. Otherwise you suffer from principal-agent problems in having to trust proxies to execute their ideas, with the proxies you are capable of electing being highly limited in their ideological diversity by result of optimizing for the wrong information.
So direct democracy then? That presents it's own problems like the majority being in favor of something horrible, like the internment of muslim citizens after a terrorist attack.
That's a misrepresentation of what direct democracy is. You're still bound by a framework of statutory and common law, along with oversight from the various branches of government. It's not mob rule.
Not to mention unjust internment already occurred despite representative democracy (in fact directly emanating from elected executive power), that of Italians, Germans and Japanese during WWII. Let's also not discount land law acts and a host of other attacks on civil liberties.
The essence of a representative republic is that these horrible leaders would still be checked by the minority of non-horrible leaders.
In a direct democracy, the mob only needs 51% of the referendum. In representative government, a minority of representatives can prevent disastrous legislation from happening, through the threat of filibuster or by holding a more valuable (to the opposition) bill hostage.
In 2009 when Democrats held a Congressional majority, they didn't get everything they wanted. Now in 2015, Republicans hold a Congressional majority, they still don't get everything they wanted. Whichever side you're on, you must admit that these checks prevented the "bad guys" from prevailing.
In the US, there are two major political parties. Those who oppose this kind of garbage need to join both of them (one side per person). Also, you need to be active at a local and state level, not just a national one.
Twitter's influence in politics is not really the result of the programmers' efforts. It's the result of the politically active people using it.
The Twitter platform is at best necessary but not sufficient for its effects. But lots of things are in the same boat. All basic utilities are required for twitter to work, but you wouldn't credit food, waste, and electric companies for such things. And at worst, Twitter isn't even necessary.
As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,