Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
What struck me most about the executive summary of the FCC’s “National Broadband Plan” is that they published it in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document. This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says: Increase civic engagement by making government more open [...]
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve written a piece grading the “high-value data sets” agencies released a few weeks ago on Data.gov. (Agencies are supposed to have “/open” sites up by tomorrow.) The results? Four As, four Bs, seven Cs, eighteen Ds, and eight Fs. Take a look!
As I’ve detailed in a WashingtonWatch.com blog post, the president called for earmark transparency in his state-of-the-union speech tonight. A fact sheet put out by the White House goes beyond the president’s words to call for “a comprehensive, bipartisan, state-of-the-art disclosure database that allows Americans to examine the details of every proposed earmark before a [...]
Testifying in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing today, Trey Hodgkins of technology trade association “TechAmerica” offered some pretty bogus excuses for resisting transparency in government contracts. [I]f disclosure included posting to a public website the unredacted contract, a number of critical elements would be exposed. Something as simple as identifying the [...]
Economics has been called the dismal science, and recognizing that politicians are economic actors leads to the conclusion in this good article: Would You Ask Turkeys to Mandate Thanksgiving? The Dismal Politics of Legislative Transparency
Regarding San Francisco’s open data portal, DataSF, @cordblomquist astutely notes that open data is becoming a political virtue.
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 [...]
In at least two recent stories, the mainstream press are highlighting Obama administration slow-walking on transparency. Bloomberg recently filed suit against the Fed under the Freedom of Information Act to force disclosure of securities the central bank is taking as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks. “The American taxpayer is entitled to know [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
