HN sees only the top level of the abstraction and assumes that the system is a lumbering behemoth incapable of change. Pushing the system from the bottom, it's actually quite capable of very abrupt change. Unfortunately, those methods of change require copious amounts of time, and will probably replace or supplant much more enjoyable hobbies you'd rather have.

In previous eras, this was considered the burden of citizenship...

For a simpler answer: Call your congresscritter. They're actually very responsive to phone calls and real letters. It's not hard to do.

I vote in local elections and cheerfully pay taxes--but look only towards the treatment of the online petitions hosted by our current administration to see how much attention is paid.

The difficulty of participating in government isn't something to be cherished--it's something to be fixed.

Treat this like a software development project, except we're coming up with a government instead of a program.

1. Setup a public bugtracker, where people can submit examples of federal government acting incorrectly (attached to bugs, have relevant news articles, studies, and impacts for why it is important).

2. Setup a repo with a "blessed" version of the founding documents of the government. Anyone can read the docs, and suggest changes. Any changes to the laws would have an easy-to-follow path in the changelog, and linked tickets from the bug tracker demonstrating that they were necessary. These docs can be forked, but the blessed branch gets the "official" reference implementation.

We've had the tools to "fix" government for years now--we should start using them.

Things I'd personally like to see:

1. Who controls the "blessed" version? This is a hilariously interesting problem, and likely would end up with some kind of set of "core" developers. That said, we have the tech to make relatively authenticated, secure votes (PGP or somesuch). I'd suggest using that to accept changes to mainline, and if it becomes obvious the core devs aren't paying attention we fork. This might be really slow to get things accomplished (past the initial bootstrap), but that's okay in government--the more conservative your creation of policies, the better.

2. A creation of a structured query language for determining if an action obeys a law. This would be really tricky, but if the core docs can unambiguously be parsed and tested against so many problems in government simply go away. I don't really expect this to get done, but it's an intriguing idea, no?

3. My personal belief is that a good government is like a good operating system: it provides basic infrastructure when you need it, is invisible when you aren't looking for it, and protects you from other things in the environment (and them from you!). So, a lean, simple, easily-verifiable government that protects basic rights and provides basic needs and which only intervenes when processes (groups) come into direct conflict seems like the correct goal--not this bloated ill-defined overreaching contraption we have today.

Also, http://www.opencongress.org/ sounds a bit like the document repo you're looking for. Even the official thomas.loc.gov lets you track versions of a bill (though, admittedly, it's hard to read if you don't know what you're doing).

To be fair, this is a clearcut case where processes have come into direct conflict. After crying wolf dozens of times over the last 100 years, Big Media now realizes that they really are facing an existential threat: loss of control over distribution. At the same time, the Internet, arguably the single most important technological development and economic engine in human history, has thousands of die-hard defenders in its own corner.

Things like the SOPA hearings are exactly what we pay our representatives to handle for us. They have an obligation to do their jobs competently, just like the rest of us, and as these reports show, they are doing exactly the opposite.