Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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, [...]
This morning, a database of FY 2011 earmark requests was released by Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and my own WashingtonWatch.com. With House Republicans generally eschewing earmarks this year, members of Congress and senators still sought over 39,000 earmarks, valued at over $130 billion dollars. Learn more on the relevant pages at Taxpayers [...]
If you’re in the D.C. area, come join the fun next Monday, November 15th, as the Advisory Committee on Transparency kicks off with its first event: The Future of Earmark Transparency (2:00 p.m., 2203 Rayburn House Office Building). The Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman moderates a discussion that includes Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense [...]
Taxpayers Against Earmarks is a new effort to rid the federal legislative process of some of its most acute horse-trading: earmarks. Find it at the cleverly named URL, EndingSpending.com. My project WashingtonWatch.com has worked to generate earmark transparency. Here’s the earmarks main page, and you should expect to see FY 2011 earmarks there soon. There’s [...]
The Contract From America is a very interesting political document, seeking to rally people around a set of policies that—unlike the Contract With America from years ago—was generated from the bottom up. On the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve been assessing the ten items in the Contract From America. The Tea Party movement stands for a lot of [...]
A bill introduced in the Senate yesterday would require Congress to bring earmarks out of the shadows, producing earmark data in a format that the public can easily use. S. 3335 calls for a “unified and searchable database on a public website for congressional earmarks.” This is something President Obama called for in his 2010 State [...]
Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve laid out in the simplest terms I could what’s going on in terms of procedure with health care overhaul legislation. The post, called “What is Deeming, Anyway?“, comes in at a mere 900 words… If you’re a real public policy junkie, you might like it. But what about the [...]
This morning, a small group of us open government collaborators (joined by others) rolled out a transparency campaign called “Just Give Us the Earmark Data!“ Visitors to EarmarkData.org are encouraged there to sign a petition asking Congress to publish data about earmarks in formats that are useful for public oversight. Developers can also participate in [...]
It’s not the highest-toned debate the world of public policy has ever seen, but the WashingtonWatch.com discussion on Public Law 111-92, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, has now reached over 100,000 comments. I’ve discussed the astounding level of commentary—and all the efforts to keep it civil—in a post on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
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.
McCotter’s Plan to Expand DMCA-Style Take-Downs
by Jim Harper on April 25, 2010 · 10 comments
The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t! Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting [...]