Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
President Obama’s third full year in office came to an end last week, and I’ve reviewed how well he’s doing with one particular campaign promise on the Cato@LIberty blog. “Sunlight Before Signing” is the moniker for the president’s campaign promise to post online the bills Congress sends him for five days before signing them. As [...]
Remember when you had to wait until the end of the month to see your bank statement? Last week, on the cusp of failing to pass any annual appropriations bills ahead of the October 1 start of the new fiscal year, congressional leaders came up with a short-term government funding bill (or “continuing resolution”) that [...]
The Cato Institute is doing a live-streamed Capitol Hill briefing this morning—start-time 9:00 a.m. Eastern—on congressional transparency. You can see and download all the materials being released to Hill staff on a Cato@Liberty blog post summarizing where congressional transparency stands: “needs improvement.” You can watch the event live (or later on tape) and join the [...]
The White House’s release of its “Open Government Action Plan” today is timely. I’ll be rolling out the product of several months’ work on government transparency Friday at a Cato Institute event called “Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress.” The paper we’ll release commences as follows: Government transparency is a widely agreed upon [...]
Data-transparent government is still a ways off, but some small steps forward are underway. To wit, my project WashingtonWatch.com, which is adding new data going to the costs of bills in Congress. As detailed in an announcement that went up this morning, many more bills on the site will have cost estimates associated with them, [...]
If you haven’t seen it already, be sure to give a read to Friedman Prize winner Hernando de Soto‘s recent piece in Business Week, “The Destruction of Economic Facts.” It’s a fascinating perspective on the economic and financial turmoil that is wracking the United States and the world. As de Soto perceives more easily from [...]
Late last week, the Project on Government Oversight‘s Danielle Brian took a little umbrage at a Huffington Post piece by former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck, who had been implementing the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative until she recently returned to New York Law School. Brian’s piece suggests a slight schism in the [...]
On this week’s John Stossel show on Fox Business Network, I debated Internet privacy, advertising, and data collection issues with Michael Fertik of Reputation.com. In the few minutes we had for the segment, I tried to reiterate a couple of keep points that we’ve hammered repeatedly here in the past: There’s no free lunch. All [...]
Last year I was asked by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to author a study on models for local online hubs or community web portals. This paper was one of several commissioned by the Knight Foundation to implement the 15 recommendations found in the [...]
A headline in the USA Today earlier this week screamed, “Hello, Big Brother: Digital Sensors Are Watching Us.” It opens with an all too typical techno-panic tone, replete with tales of impending doom: Odds are you will be monitored today — many times over. Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
