I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, and deeply embedded towards the end, Gore mentions how he would like to require full transparency of donors to nonprofits. I think his intentions are good... he believes that corporations (the energy industry in particular) hides behind front nonprofits, funding ballot measure campaigns with practical anonymity. Unfortunately, I think the mechanism he would choose to solve this problem ignores decades of precedent protecting donor privacy. It wasn't that long ago that civil rights groups were targeted by those opposed to their cause for donor lists... it was an intimidation game, and it almost worked until the Supreme Court declared that these lists are private.
Would philanthropic giving drop if people knew that their names would be public? Would people who ordinarily give to controversial groups back off and start giving only to "safe" charities? I wonder if Gore has considered these questions?
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