H.R. 2341, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, would prohibit securities and commodities trading based on nonpublic information relating to Congress, and it would require additional reporting by Members and employees of Congress on their securities transaction.
The motivations behind it are utterly pure. It’s would be unfair for Members of Congress and staff to use inside knowledge of Congress for pecuniary gain.
But how a law like this would be effectively enforced is beyond me. A bar on congressional-insider trading would most likely cause one of the following results:
- It would be honored in the breach;
- It would lead to endless (perhaps politically motivated) investigations of our representatives and their staffs; or
- It would force many or most congressional employees to withdraw from investing as a prophylactic against 2.
None of these would be easy and fair, and compliance would deprive congressional staff of normal sources of income and of participation in investment that keeps their experience and thinking in line with other Americans. The law would not provide investors comfort.
The better solution is to lower the amount and value of congressional-insider information. How? Sunlight. Stuff like I do with WashingtonWatch.com, like Jerry does with OpenRegulations.org, and plenty of others do with similar projects.
I’ve started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling. Well, yesterday, after UPS delivered Clay Shirky’s new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” I decided to subscribe to Shirky’s tweets. Lo and behold, a few hours later I get this tweet from Shirky: “Getting ready for a talk tomorrow at New America Foundation in DC.” I had no idea he would be in town. Twitter is actually useful.
So, I attended the talk at the New America Foundation. It was based on his book, which looks at the how new online tools of conversation and collaboration (like Twitter) are affecting society. I took notes and thought I’d share them here. Be warned they’re more or less chicken scratch, but they should give you a flavor for his ideas. They’re after the jump.
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The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, part of the Graduate School of Political Management of The George Washington University, is hosting the Politics Online Conference 2008 on March 4th and 5th at the Renaissance Washington DC Hotel.
Because of my work on WashingtonWatch.com, and because I live a) online b) in Washington, D.C., this looks like an interesting conference.
Among other things, TLFers might enjoy the first day’s keynote, entitled: Building a Broadband Strategy for America. I like America, and I like Broadband, so it’s got to be good – right?!
And here’s an exclusive for TLF readers – $50 off your admission! When you go to register, in the discount code (optional) field, enter “MINUS50” and you’ll get the savings. Convince 20 of your friends to come and you’ll save $1,000! Hard to pass up.
I’ve had an itch for a while now, and this week I finally scratched it.
See, like lots of tech geeks, I depend heavily on RSS feeds for my data intake–whether it’s news, blogs, package tracking, following forum discussions, or keeping up with friends on Facebook or Flickr, I love feeds. One thing was sorely missing, though. I wanted to subscribe to a feed of the FCC’s docket and be alerted each time the Commission issued a new proposed rulemaking or other notice.
The FCC’s website certainly doesn’t offer such a thing, as I’ve previously lamented. Recently, I praised Regulations.gov for finally adding an RSS feed to the site. Unfortunately, it was only one feed, containing every notice from every agency. Not very useful to an individual.
The cool thing about structured data, as I explain in my recent paper on e-transparency, is that independent third parties can take a feed and manipulate it to make it more interesting and useful. So, I took my own advice and threw together a new site, OpenRegulations.org.
Basically it’s an alternative interface to the Regulations.gov database. Stripped down, simple, and (I’d argue) elegant. More importantly, though, it offers RSS feeds for each regulatory agency on an agency-by-agency basis. Here are notices from just the FCC, for example. Check it out and please spread the word.
Hillary Clinton is my friend. On MySpace, that is. If I were going to vote for the first candidate that responded to my social networking “friend” request, it would be her. Of course, that’s a silly idea, but with all the hoopla over politicians using new technologies, one might ask: How has Web 2.0 changed the political process?
Web 2.0 generally refers to the explosion of services like social networking sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and so on. These are the technologies that have helped make the Internet even more interactive and content-rich than it was in the first place and, in this election cycle, these technologies are key.
Social news site, Digg, just announced a partnership with CBS for political coverage and also hosts its own candidates pages. MySpace held its own presidential primary the day before the Iowa caucuses (Barack Obama and Ron Paul won). Facebook cosponsored the Republican and Democratic debates with ABC and also publishes its own polling data. The candidates are embracing these technologies as well.
Sen. Barack Obama used professional networking site LinkedIn to ask “How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” and at a recent speech, Hillary Clinton suggested that America “have a government blogging team.” On the Republican side, Ron Paul has raised millions by harnessing the open nature of the Net, and Rudy Giuliani’s strange behavior when he interrupted his NRA speech to answer a cell phone call from his wife was viewed more than 20,000 times on YouTube.
Clearly, American citizens no longer need to rely on mainstream media for their political data. They can now get it from numerous services all over the Web and respond just as quickly so others can see their opinion. Interactive politics is here, but is more data making things better?
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.