Politics and extortion share a similar logic: Give to the one who can hurt you the most.
Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
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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 ideas in a lot of people’s minds. Here’s a chance to see what substantive policies are important to a large cross-section of this political movement.
In my recent testimony before the House Commerce Committee on a proposal to require event data recorders in all new cars sold in the United States, I pointed out that the mandate would go far beyond what is needed to ensure safety. Indeed, the cost of EDRs raises the prices of new cars, marginally reducing the pool of used cars and keeping lower income drivers in older used cars which are less safe.
The demand for EDRs in all cars, collecting and transmitting data about all crashes, suggests that something more than statistically relevant safety data is what advocates of this mandate want. I put a finer point on these issues today in answers to questions propounded to me after the hearing.
The proposed EDR mandate includes controls on the use of EDR information, a nominal protection for privacy, but the EDR mandate “sets the stage for migration away from consumer privacy toward serving the goals of government and industry related not only to safety but also to general law enforcement, taxation, and surveillance.”
The bill is H.R. 5381, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010. Other bills with EDR mandates include H.R. 5169, H.R. 5345, and S. 3271.
I’ll present a short paper and lead some discussion on federal spending transparency tomorrow at an OMB Watch conference entitled “Strengthening Federal Spending Transparency: A Working Conference to Develop a Plan of Action.”
My paper is called “Federal Spending Transparency: Unlocking the Power of Abstraction.” It builds on lessons I learned from developing the Earmarkdata.org model aimed at getting earmark information out of Congress.
Information scientists will find the paper amateurish and riddled with imperfections. Policy people will find it obscure and dense. That’s what you get when you translate between two languages and cultures.
The goal:
Each piece of the policy making process—the budgets, bills, votes, etc.—should originate as structured data, feeding directly into the information infrastructure that the transparency community creates. A budget should come out not just in paper and PDF versions, but as a data set containing all the meaning that exists in the physical documents.
Make sense? If not, you’ll want to get yourself to where it does.
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 of the Union speech, though we haven’t heard much more from him about it since then.
The bill was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), and is currently cosponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO). Its House counterpart is H.R. 5258 (Cassidy R-LA), which also has bipartisan support.
Importantly the bill is not just about a web site. The bill would enable the public to “programmatically search and access all data in a serialized machine readable format via a web-services application programming interface.” That gobbledegook means that people could access the data for themselves, slicing and dicing it to learn whatever they want or to display it however they want.
I’ve noted here before the efforts of my government transparency web site WashingtonWatch.com to capture earmark data and the related effort to get earmark data directly from Congress at Earmarkdata.org.
Support for these bills across parties and ideologies suggests good things may be in store for earmark transparency.
In their 2006 Cato Policy Analysis, Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture, Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter wrote about how the functions that make up the creative cycle—creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content—are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation.
The only thing professional in the clip below was the writing of the song. It deserves its credit, but the performance itself, production of the video, its selection, dissemination, and promotion (Twitter users, YouTube) are all amateur or amateur supported by a professionally managed, ad-supported platform.
Watch it a second time to take in the reactions of the girl sitting in front of the map. If you like, compare it with the tacky, overproduced, and flat “professional” video.
This is amateur entertainment that rivals any professional production, in part because it’s amateur. Assuming this performer dedicates himself further to his craft, he can rival or surpass anything put out by yesterday’s professionals.
(And, yes, I’m waiting to learn that I’ve been duped by some clever marketing scheme, but I hope this is real.)
The Smoking Gun and Miami Herald report that a Miami International Airport TSA worker has been arrested for beating up a co-worker who joked about his endowment after observing the assailant walk through a whole-body imager or “strip-search machine.”
I have a blog post up at Cato@Liberty today about Senate Democrats’ national ID plans. The thing is nine printed pages long. It doesn’t get my recommendation that you read the whole thing—unless you really jones for identity-systems talk. Here’s a summary:
The plan is confusing, disorganized, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. Summarizing it is a little like trying to piece together the egg when all you have is the omelet, but three themes emerge: First, this summary backs away from an earlier claim that there would not be a biometric national identity database. There will be a national biometric database. Second, repeating the word “fraud-proof” does not make this national ID system fraud proof. Third, this national ID system definitely paves the way for uses beyond work authorization. This is the comprehensive national identity system that people across the ideological and political spectrum oppose.
I pity the Hill staffer who had to write the national ID parts of the plan. He or she almost certainly doesn’t know enough to write sensibly about the design of identity systems, and the demands of politics require the plan to talk about impossible things as if they’re possible, and even easy.
No, I’m not here to tell you more about the “supersized” FTC. Berin has done yeoman’s work to highlight that issue, among other things with the PFF event you can review here. On TechDirt, Mike Masnick wrote this morning about how the feds are itching to regulate the Internet.
This is about the direct government invasions of privacy likely to occur if S. 3217 passes. On the Cato@Liberty blog I write about the detailed financial market research that new regulatory agencies would do—research aimed at you.
Example:
Section 1071(b) requires any deposit-taking financial institution to geo-code customer addresses and maintain records of deposits for at least three years. Think of the government having its own Google map of where you and your neighbors do your banking. The Bureau [of Consumer Financial Protection] may “use the data for any other purpose as permitted by law,” such as handing it off to other bureaus, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Washington, D.C. has determined that Washington, D.C. should manage the financial services industry. Your personal and private financial affairs will be managed there too.”
What would I say about my own writing but read the whole thing?
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