by Anne Broache
March 20, 2008 2:26 PM PDT

WASHINGTON--Iconic Internet law professor Larry Lessig may have cast off plans for a congressional bid of his own, but he still wants to turn the political process as we know it upside down. No more money from corporate political action committees and lobbyists. No more earmarks to fund pet projects in federal spending bills. Public financing for all congressional campaigns. And throughout it all, transparency.

Those are the four pillars of Lessig's "Change Congress" movement, which he unveiled, along with a beta Web site, which he describes as a "mash-up applied to politics," at an event here Thursday afternoon. For the project, he has teamed up with Joe Trippi, best known as the national campaign manager for Democrat Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and its pioneering use of online organizing.

None of his ideas, of course, are particularly new, which Lessig himself readily acknowledged. A number of organizations--including Ralph Nader's Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation, which sponsored his talk on Thursday--dedicate themselves exclusively to promoting government transparency. Projects like Open Secrets offer more readily searchable databases of political campaign contributions, while groups like Citizens Against Government Waste have made it a mission to expose congressional pork-barrel spending.

And even some politicians are already displaying interest in those topics. A number of congressional Republicans have been rallying for an earmark freeze. On the Democratic side, Senators Barack Obama (and, when he was in the race, former Sen. John Edwards) pledged not to accept presidential campaign contributions from registered lobbyists and PACs.