Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This seems like a logical follow-up to Berin Szoka’s previous post about technology, social activism, and government power. ReasonTV has produced this important short clip on “Cops Vs. Cameras: The Killing of Kelly Thomas & The Power of New Media.” It documents how the combined power of citizen journalism, social media, and surveillance video can [...]
Meet the Data Transparency Coalition. The Washington Post‘s Capitol Business blog reports this morning: A small but growing collection of companies has formed a coalition that will push the federal government to establish a standard system by which agencies categorize their data. … “Our members understand that if the government identified its data elements in [...]
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my new white paper, “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities.” [PDF] I first presented a draft of this paper last November at a Michigan State University conference on “The Governance of Social Media.” [Video of my panel here.] In this paper, [...]
Paying close attention to language can reveal what’s going on in the world around you. Note the simple but important differences between the phrases “open government” and “open government data.” In the former, the adjective “open” modifies the noun “government.” Hearing the phrase, one would rightly expect a government that’s more open. In the latter, [...]
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 [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
