Google has tapped into the power of Cause Caller and its underlying Asterisk technology to lobby Congress.

Cause Caller is one of a couple of services floating around mixing IP telephony with political activism. For Google's campaign, Cause Caller allows a user to enter a phone number and then uses the information to setup a VoIP call to a randomized list of Congressional representatives focusing on telecom issues. GigaOm says as of Friday afternoon, a whole 11 calls had been made on behalf of Google's White Spaces lobbying push.

Cost per call is "less than 3 cents per minute" and the infrastructure is a combination of Amazon's EC2 server service and Asterisk handling the PBX functionality.  

While Cause Caller is a "hobby" for the operator, there are other folks out there combining Asterisk and politics for profit.  Popvox, run by David Troy, has been working with various Democratic political causes since 2005. During the 2006 election cycle, Popvox logged over a million voter-to-voter phone calls for 25 Democratic campaigns. Volunteers would use a website to make calls to potential voters, preserving privacy by not displaying a volunteer's phone number, while at the same time providing call monitoring information to the campaign.

For more:
- GigaOm reports on Google's use of VoIP service Cause Caller. Article

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