Today Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech at Google where he laid out his tech policy platform. (Platform here in PDF; speech soon available here and here.) There’s much not to like, including a net neutrality regulatory agenda and support for media ownership restrictions, but I’d like to focus on the positive aspect of his speech. In the arena of technology-aided government transparency, Obama laid out a terrific set of ideas that every candidate, Republican or Democrat, should be able to adopt. From his speech:
To seize this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy. It’s no coincidence that one of the most secretive Administrations in history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to sunlight. As President, I’ll change that. I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions in real time, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I’ll appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. (Emphasis mine.)
I hope whoever becomes president can carry out these technically simple but socially powerful reforms. Mr. Obama himself doesn’t even have to wait to be president to do something about this. He successfully teamed up with Sen. Tom Coburn to bring us the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t try for an encore with a “government data online in universally accessible formats” bill. Heck, adding one sentence to the E-Governemt Act reauthorization bill I wrote about yesterday might just do the trick.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.