And as for the analyst who was spying on her spouse, she's damn lucky she got a slap on the wrist. She could have gotten much, much worse for that.
That's kind of the problem. She could have and should have gotten much worse. The fact that she didn't indicates a serious dysfunction in the system. And it's the type of dysfunction that sounds a lot like the type of arrogant, "The rules don't apply to us," and, "If you're not police, you're nobody," attitude you get from dangerously corrupt police forces in countries we sneer at. That's not good. Not good at all.
Given that, I have a very hard time buying the idea that these people take their jobs seriously at all. Anybody who took that job seriously would have immediately stomped down on that person, drummed her out of the service, and immediately made changes to make sure it didn't happen again.
Alas, in the USA, we vote for a candidate, NOT A PARTY!
And the best part about it is that once we're finished voting for those individual candidates, they go off to the legislature and join up with their parties and vote in lockstep anyway. Strict party discipline has kind of made the whole "I'm a trustworthy and wise leader with good ideas" schtick kind of irrelevant.
Why should they? Why should anyone? Telecommunications hardware is not free and does not maintain itself. Whichever companies/individuals use it more should be paying more.
That's fine. Charge more for more bandwidth. But don't charge different amounts for different types of content. I don't think "net neutrality" means "unlimited bits for everybody for $0" in the mind of any sensible preson.
Lobbying involves talking and bribery involves illegal money.
Half of the lobbying transaction is talking. The other half is listening because the person doing the talking is a good source of campaign money.
Also, there are more definitions of bribery than the legal definition used to describe the crime.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh