Read Part II here
In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that… they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining:
Continue reading →
Libertarian folk-hero Rep. Ron Paul has apparently convinced (WSJ) House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank to implement his proposal (HR 1207) for an audit of the Federal Reserve by the end of 2010. Paul’s Bill would expand existing audits considerably because, under current law, the Government Accountability Office,
can’t review most of the Fed’s monetary policy actions or decisions, including discount window lending (direct loans to financial institutions), open-market operations and any other transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee. It also can’t look into the Fed’s transactions with foreign governments, foreign central banks and other international financing organizations…
While the bill only seeks a one-time audit, [Paul] said he wants the Fed to be audited at least annually with the report — and details of its transactions — disclosed publicly.
I’d like to up the ante: Let’s make sure that any data disclosures are made in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), as Mark Cuban and our own Jim Harper have previously suggested. Such machine-readable disclosures would be much more useful, because the data could be analyzed or “mashed-up” with other data sets to answer questions we might not even be able to formulate today.
Gordon Crovitz has a fascinating piece in the WSJ today entitled, Diplomacy in the Age of No Secrets, discussing the Internet’s role in increasing public scrutiny of the deal negotiated by Scottish officials, British diplomats and the Libyan government over the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.
Diplomacy was once satirically defined as the patriotic art of lying for one’s country. This approach is hard to sustain in a world that demands transparency. For diplomats, there’s no negotiating around the fact that confidential deals today could be headlines tomorrow.
I can’t wait to see how the State Department to this new reality!
By Michael Palage & Berin Szoka, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Over the next month, the ICANN Board will consider its options for ensuring that some framework is in place to ensure ICANN’s accountability to the global Internet community after the approaching expiration of its Memorandum of Understanding and Joint Project Agreement (MOU/JPA) with the U.S. Department of Commerce. We analyze these options in our new paper, “Choosing the Right Path to a Permanent Accountability Framework for ICANN.”
We urge the ICANN Board to allow the time necessary for the development of a permanent accountability framework in consultation with the global Internet community, as required by ICANN’s Bylaws. The authors caution the ICANN Board against rubber-stamping a recent proposal to essentially make the MoU/JPA a permanent instrument as inadequate to ensure ICANN’s long-term accountability. The alternative, simply ending ICANN’s relationship with the U.S. Government, would raise serious legal questions concerning ICANN’s ability to collect fees from registrars and registries and the transfer of property rights underlying the domain name system.
We conclude by calling on ICANN’s new CEO Rod Beckstrom to exercise the kind of leadership he advocated in his 2005 book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, which explains the advantages of decentralized managerial “nervous systems” (“starfish”) over top-down hierarchies (“spiders”):
Instead of focusing on ‘spider’-esque permanent instruments with a single government, Beckstrom and the ICANN Board should focus on more ‘starfish’-like solutions that both continue the USG’s stewardship role and involve more governments that want to participate in the unique private-public partnership known as ICANN—without compromising ICANN’s guiding principles and commitment to private sector leadership. Only this outcome will ensure the long-term viability of ICANN as a global trustee of the Internet’s unique identifiers.
Continue reading →
The WashingtonWatch.com project to collect congressional earmark data continues to make great strides. Over 35,000 earmark requests are in the database, and fewer than 50 representatives remain on the “wanted” list.
(I illustrated the WashingtonWatch.com post with the picture at right. Wanted to capture the all-American, do-it-yourself, shoot-for-the-moon spirit. Does that work for your inner art critic? . . .)
Also, take a look at the transparency “Hall of Shame” post published this morning. Even some appropriations committee members published their earmark disclosures as scanned PDFs. That’s transparency in name, but not in spirit.
Regarding San Francisco’s open data portal, DataSF, @cordblomquist astutely notes that open data is becoming a political virtue.
If you’re a lawyer, and you use the crazy-outmoded PACER system to access federal court documents, check out the new RECAP system launched today by Tim Lee, Harlan Yu, and Steve Schultze with the help of Princeton’s CITP. If you use PACER, you know it’s difficult to use. It also charges citizens to access what are nominally public documents, something that makes little sense online. This combination has resulted in a multi-million dollar surplus for the judiciary’s IT department, and lousy access to data that would be useful not just to lawyers and litigants, but to bloggers, librarians, reporters, and scholars.
Schultze, Lee, and Yu’s scheme to free the documents on PACER is an ingenious one. They have built a Firefox plugin called RECAP that attorneys and other regular users of PACER can install on their computers. When a user downloads a document from PACER, the plugin sends a copy to RECAP’s server, where it is made publicly available. If enough PACER users install RECAP, it will only be a matter of time before the entire database is liberated. Why would lawyers participate? When they search for a document, the plugin first checks the RECAP database to see if a copy has already been liberated. If it has, then the lawyer can retreive it without paying PACER. Like I said: ingenious.
I’m happy to see so many folks take up Carl Malamud’s mantle and not only liberate government data, but also provide competition to government. It’s the impetus behind my own OpenRegs.com. By demonstrating what’s possible, how the world won’t end when data is made freely available, we create demand for change in government. Three cheers for RECAP! Continue reading →
In a couple of blog posts on Cato@Liberty recently, I’ve used graphics to illustrate my very good points.
To sass the PR-ey use of Whitehouse.gov to advocate for health care regulation, and make a point or two about transparency, I modified the “Reality Check” image the White House created for their campaign. That was a good time.
But the tour de force is the link that I embedded with a TSA graphic meant to illustrate what they’re doing with Secure Flight. For that one, you have to go look at the post. Read the graphic, enjoy its meaning, then do what it tells you to do.
I was very pleased to read in Federal Computer Week this morning that the Office of Management and Budget will begin tracking earmark requests next year for the fiscal 2011 budget cycle.
OMB makes available some years’ approved earmarks, but not the earmark requests put forward by members of Congress. Tracking and publishing requests will shed light on the whole ecosystem of congressional earmarks—the favor factory, if you will.
OMB’s move follows a project WashingtonWatch.com has conducted this summer: asking the public to plug earmark disclosures into a database. The site now maps over 20,000 earmarks. (Well, technically, that much data breaks the mapping tool, but you can see state-by-state earmark maps.)
Earlier this year, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees required their members to disclose earmark requests. These disclosures—published as Web pages and PDF documents—were not useful, but public interest in this area is strong, and the public made them useful by entering them into WashingtonWatch.com’s database.
The project isn’t over, by the way, and the current focus is collecting earmarks requested by Appropriations Committee members.
It’s great news that next year the Obama Administration will track and disclose earmarks, from request all the way through to enactment. Given his struggle in the area lately, this is a chance to score some transparency points. President Obama campaigned against earmarks, promising reform, and this is an important step toward delivering on that promise.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.