Happy 4th. Thinking about the us gov tonight, and how it would be nice to have a map that just gives you contact info for any congressional district, including senators, with your mouse. Bostock already did most of the hard work, including helpful information about how to update this information with each change of congress, which happens every 2 years.
A few things are missing, of course, first is a contact database for congress, which is at least partially attainable on the Elected Officials Site - it's not clear if there's a downloadable, low-entropy representation but it looks like the data is pretty regular, and not hard to scrape, and it's not even too large to scrape by hand every 2 years!
Another thing that is missing is zoomability: there is an enormous range of sizes in US congressional districts, where states like Montana have just one for the whole state, and more populated states can have upwards of 50, and they can be hard to see. So you need some zoomin'.
Last but not least, it would be great to give people a way to volunteer to a) write a letter, and b) send a letter for someone else. Too often I think people are stymied in their actions by a lack of resources - you need a printer, stamps, envelopes, and a correct address to send a letter, and people, especially young and poor people, don't have those resources handy. So it would make sense to have older, wealthier people lend a hand if they wanted to. And it would also help if they could vet the letters, not for censorship purposes but rather to see if anything fishy is going on (see the next section). I imagine someone might volunteer to print and send, oh, 10 letters a month or something.
But all this got me thinking - how do Congresspeople stay in touch with constituents? How can they even trust the phone calls and letters they get, let alone emails and other kinds of messaging they might get (e.g. DMs or mentions on Twitter, Facebook posts, etc.)? I mean, if you wanted to warp the American Congress, I would argue that the low hanging fruit is actually Congress, especially the Senate, who's members and staff might not have the tools to differentiate between legitimate constituent messaging and, say, a Russian operative, fluent in English, having the ability to send a paper letter from within the target state or district (which isn't a difficult capability!)
This would seem to be a tough problem. It's like the voter ID, but writ large. I would argue that the danger is, if anything, even greater if you don't protect Congress from PsyOps, and not just nation states, but suffciently motivated people on the ground. (This also puts Trumps prediliction for in-person rallies in a new light: perhaps he senses that the only way to prove his popularity is the turnout at these rallies, and indeed, from an InfoSec perspective he may actually have a point. Of course, from a political perspective it's distorting since he chooses only areas where he is popular to hold his rallies, so we don't really get a sense of his nationwide popularity from rally turnout.)