Pro-CISPA forces spend 140 times more lobbying than opponents

Interests supporting a controversial bill aimed at improving cyber security spent 140 times as much lobbying Congress as those on the other side of the debate and have dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders working on their behalf, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation's Reporting Group shows.

Sunlight's review of lobbying disclosures from the last session of Congress in Influence Explorer shows that backers of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act had $605 million in lobbying expenditures from 2011 through the third quarter of last year compared to $4.3 million spent by opponents of the bill. While it's impossible to say how many of those dollars were devoted to trying to influence votes on the CISPA bill (many of those entities have multiple interests before Congress), it provides some measure of the lopsidedness of the resources available to each side. The CISPA backers' advantage in the House comes, at least in part, from support of lobbying behemoths like the Chamber of Commerce, IBM, which sent nearly 200 executives to Capitol Hill Monday to advocate for passage.

Also backing CISPA: major tech, telecom and financial companies, a Who's Who of the biggest spenders on Washington lobbying. The imbalance is also evident in the number of former staffers and members of Congress pushing for CIPSA. Among them: former Reps. Steve Largent, R-OK, who represents the wireless industry, Dave McCurdy, D-Okla., of the American Gas Association, and Cal Dooley, D-Calif., of the American Chemistry Council. McCurdy chaired the House Intelligence Committee in the early 1990s. The panel's current chairman, Mike Rogers, R-Mich., drafted the CISPA bill.