When we think of lobbyists, most of us would think of the lawyers and other influence peddlers of K Street and Downtown Washington. It’s easy to forget that 50 K Streets exist across the county, with hundreds if not thousands of lobbyists applying their trade in each state capital. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, as of two years ago, 42,390 lobbyists were registered in the 50 states.

The Institute has developed Lobbyist Link, a 50-state database where you can look up all state-registered lobbyists, and their clients. Citizens can now see how much money each lobbyists have given to state lawmakers and candidates. It’s a very valuable new tool. As the site says, “Lobbyists in the halls of your statehouse can access and influence those who make the laws that affect your life. But they aren’t working for you; they’re working for corporations, unions and special interests who have their own agenda to pursue.”

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Ed Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a Sunlight grantee, emailed me about a neat new function they’ve developed on their Web site just in time for Election Day. The function, Find My District, gives users a complete list of state candidates, from state house/assembly races up through all statewide contests, running in their district. The user inputs their physical address, and the site provides the list of candidates for that district, and it also provides a Google Map showing the user’s location. The function doesn’t seem to work for us forlorn and disenfranchised District of Columbia voters. (But of course, the District’s not a state, just a colony. I digress, however.)

The site also provides information from each state on candidate fundraising, who’s giving, ballot measures (if applicable), party committees, and data sources.

Greg Elin, one of our senior Labs gurus checked it out and thinks it’s fabulous. He said he was muchly impressed by all the information the site provides. He also gave it kudos for ease of navigation.

Congratulations to Ed and his team for creating this very useful and timely Find My District tool.

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A large contingent of Sunlighters are heading to Austin this week for Netroots Nation, the 3rd annual gathering of Kos bloggers and others in the progressive blogosphere (that used to be called Yearly Kos). (Get ready for all of the #nn08 hashtag tweets!)

Try to connect with us if you are there. You can find us in the exhibit hall (along with folks from the Center for Responsive Politics,  National Institute on Money in State Politics and OpenCongress.org. We’ll be right up front, across from MAPLight.org’s booth, so you can’t miss us.

Sunlight colleagues are on a number of panels. Start your Friday morning off with one that is chaired by Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry, as he and his panelists discuss how the next administration can leverage the Web and the participatory transparent culture that goes along with it, to make our government work better.

That panel should inspire you to help improve our government. Join Sunlight’s John Wonderlich to find out how. He and OpenLeft blogger Matt Stoller will give you the scoop on the future of advocacy and what political influence should look like in a networked social environment. Their panel, “Lobbying Congress: Advocacy and Digital Empowerment” will be held on Saturday@ 1:30 p.m.

Right after that panel, come learn more about how to use the sites created by our ‘transparency posse’ during our workshop, “Insanely Useful Tools You Can Use to Keep Track of Congress and State Lawmakers” on Saturday @ 3pm. This will be moderated by Sunlighter, Paul Blumenthal.

While you’re in Austin, you might want to test how your political trivia smarts compare to Paul’s during a “Pub Quiz” organized by Dkos front pager AdamB to be held during Happy Hour on Friday at the local Champions Sports Bar. (Stop by our booth for more details.) Make sure to “study” beforehand by playing our new PoliQuiz game. We’ll release all of our answers in API format so they can be mashed up with relevant data. What else would you expect?!

See you in Austin!

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It’s Sunshine Week here in DC and, well, the sun is shining which is an auspicious beginning. This is a hugely important national initiative launched six years ago about the importance of open government and freedom of information. How important? According to a Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University survey released today just 4% of the surveyed Americans believe the federal government is very open — and 44% believe it is very secretive.

Participants in Sunshine Week activities which are held throughout the country include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know. Here in D.C. there are two panels on Wednesday at the National Press Club plus a lecture by Professor Lawrence Lessig that Sunlight and Omidyar Network are sponsoring on Thursday. More details tomorrow on both of these.

In honor of Sunshine Week one of our grantees, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, has launched its Legislative Committee Analysis Tool, or CAT, which organizes campaign-finance data by the major legislative committees in each state. Here’s an example of what you can find. This new tool uses Project Vote Smart’s APIs for committee assignments. (The Institute’s own APIs are here.) You’ll NIMSP also links to candidate biographies. Look for links to candidate scorecards and bills shortly.

Next up for these folks who focus on money in state politics: zip code lookups paired with Legislative District Boundary Maps and analyses; a 50-state Lobbyist Link tool that will show where lobbyists are focusing their giving.

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Telecommunication industry giants AT&T, Microsoft and Verizon are lobbying hard to kill a data-breach notification bill in the Indiana statehouse, according to Chris Soghoian at CNET.com’s Surveillance State blog. Many state legislatures are passing security breach notification laws as a response to the increasing number of governmental and corporate databases divulging personal identification information either by mistake or by criminal enterprise. The Indiana bill would set the state attorney general as the single point of contact for data breaches, who would then post a report on the breach on a Web site, setting a single place for citizens to go to find out about data breaches.

Soghoian reports that at a state Senate Committee meeting earlier this week, 10 lobbyists, most from the telecommunications industry, criticized the bill as setting up a system that would be vulnerable to online fraudsters. The bill’s sponsors were the only people speaking in favor of the legislation. He said he expects the lobbyists will succeed at killing the Web site notification requirement in the bill. If money talks, and we know it does, then he is almost assuredly correct. By searching National Institute on Money in State Politics‘ database Followthemoney.org, you will see that during the last election cycle AT&T made over $172,000 in contributions to Indiana state office holders or candidates running for state office. Verizon made over $48,000 in contributions, while Microsoft gave $2,000. No matter the merits of the bill, the moneyed lobbyists have little fear of their voices not being heard load and clear.

By the way, on the substance of this legislation, Soghoian writes that the state of New Hampshire already posts copies online of all breaches reported to its Department of Justice, with no evidence of fraud being committed. And he lists two other Web sites, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Attrition.org that post data breach reports online, with no instances of fraud to report.

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