Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
So I say in Politico today. Highlights: During his first two years in office, the president generated a lot of heat in the transparency area — but little sunlight. House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate. It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available [...]
. . . you’d think that you would follow the “Speeches” link from the home page on Whitehouse.gov. If you do, today you see just four speeches. I went looking for the text of his national security speech at the National Archives today. The New York Times has it but Whitehouse.gov doesn’t? What’s going on [...]
Google recently experienced failures of its core services — a phenomenon that quickly spawned the hashtag “googlefail” on the popular social networking platform Twitter. These failures show that a company once thought of as the odds-on favorite for dominating the global market in all things web — the monolith of Mountain View — is looking [...]
This morning, Cato put out a TechKnowledge of mine called “The Promise that Keeps on Breaking.” It deals with the policy issues surrounding President Obama’s yet unfulfilled promise to post bills sent to him by Congress online for five days before he signs them. A Cato@Liberty post last week went through the President’s progress so [...]
. . . or does he? Friday afternoon, the White House blog announced that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was posted online for public comment. This is good evidence that the President intends to honor his campaign promise to post legislation online and take public comment for five days before signing it. [...]
I’ve been following President Obama’s early moves on government transparency here on Tech Liberation and on the Cato@Liberty blog. Last week, Obama’s first broken campaign promise was the pledge to post legislation online for five days before signing it. Well, the White House is working to address that, but it appears to be doing so [...]
On the first full day of the new Obama administration, I wrote here, and later followed up, expressing regret that the Obama White House hadn’t ported the “Seat at the Table” program over from the transition. Change.gov published documents submitted to the transition on its Web site for public review and comment. Whitehouse.gov does not. [...]
I can’t believe we’re actually asking whether Obama—the candidate who promised to bring the Federal government (and perhaps everyone else) into the Web 2.0 era whether they like it or not—will have a “personal computer.” The “webiness” of Obama’s predecessors is just embarrassing: Clinton famously sent only two e-mails while he was president, one to test [...]
The new Whitehouse.gov went live shortly after Barack Obama became president yesterday. It has much of the look and feel of his transition Web site, Change.gov. Among the featured items on the homepage today (they will change regularly, of course) is the site itself and the new administration’s commitment to transparency. However, the actual terms [...]
Is $1,200,000,000,000.00. That’s the expected 2009 Federal budget deficit. Since the current Federal debt is estimated at a “mere” $10.6 trillion, this means that we’re expected to add nearly 9% in a single year to a debt accumulated over 233 years (since 1774). This number also amounts to more than 8% of the U.S. economy. [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
