Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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.
While police and prosecutors have encouraged the growth of a surveillance state, they don’t seem so enthusiastic about the growth of a surveillance citizenry. Maryland and other states have recently seen privacy laws invoked to squelch the unauthorized recording of public officers performing public duties in public areas. Until courts put an end to those bogus claims, we should make sure that police officers know that we may monitor traffic stops to protect our rights; I below offer a bumper sticker and magnetic door sign that ought to help on that front.
Radley Balko recently reported on the latest attempt to use privacy laws to punish citizens for recording police misconduct. In this case, Anthony Graber was arrested for posting on YouTube a video he’d captured on an un-uniformed Maryland state trooper, driving an unmarked car, pulling over and rushing at Graber with a drawn handgun. Soon after Graber posted the video, he was charged for violating the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, Md. Code Ann., Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 10-401 et seq. (2010), which basically outlaws secretly recording a private conversation.
Maryland’s police must be feeling a bit testy, these days, about getting recorded on-the-job by uppity citizens. Earlier this spring, an inconvenient video of the beating of Jack McKenna put the lie to the claims of Maryland police that McKenna had provoked the incident by attacking the officers and their horses. State and federal officials have since launched “excessive force” inquiries.
Did that video violate the privacy of the three officers, clad in riot gear and swinging batons, who surrounded and beat the unarmed McKenna? No. Neither did the video that Graber shot of the Maryland trooper strutting towards him with a drawn handgun. Courts have already explained that wrongs under the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act require a showing that someone’s reasonable expectation of privacy has suffered violation (see Fearnow v. C & P Tel. Co., 104 Md. App. 1, 655 A.2d 1 (1995), rev’d on other grounds, 342 Md. 363, 676 A.2d 65 (1996)), and no officer can have a reasonable expectation of privacy while on a public street, performing public duties. Continue reading →
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.
I’ve complained mightily (here and here) about the agonizing technological awfulness that was, at least until recently the website of the FCC (you know, one of the two federal agencies—besides the FTC—that thinks it has the expertise necessary to regulate the Internet). My point wasn’t just that the FCC’s website made it very difficult to find and access data, but that this was a serious problem for transparency in government. I have to give the agency credit for improving many aspects of its site, though much work still remains to be done.
But then there are all the other agencies of our sprawling regulatory Leviathan! And in particular, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which processes—crudely—huge amounts of financial data. A new report from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa released today describes just how severe the SEC’s problems are:
The Commission’s securities disclosure processes are technologically backward. It reviews corporate filings manually, using printouts, pencils, and calculators. It has never developed the ability to perform large-scale quantitative analysis to find fraud. Commission staff use Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, and other commercially-available resources to analyze corporate filings. If the Commission had a robust database of the financial information filed by its registrants, it could automatically prioritize the thousands of tips and complaints it receives. But no such database has ever been constructed.
Hence the biting title of the report: The SEC: Designed for Failure. Ouch! It’s really amazing how, when regulators fail to protect consumers, the default response by most in Congress is to assume that only sweeping new powers will fix the problem (which is what “financial reform” legislation would do) instead of, say, bringing the agency into the 21st century.
Similarly, there’s a move afoot to give the FTC vast new powers across the board or to protect our privacy online (from evil companies that don’t respect the privacy promises they made to consumers) with little thought given to data-driven technological through user empowerment. Continue reading →
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.
The potential of streaming video from the House of Representatives is so great that my first impression of the House’s new video offering, HouseLive.gov, has been disappointment. There is much room to improve HouseLive.gov, and I hope it will improve.
At first, I couldn’t find any video that was actually live. (That would inject a bit of irony into the name, eh?) But there is live video: On the homepage, scroll down to the top of the “Most Recent Sessions” chart. If the top of the list has an item called “In Progress,” the House is in session. Clicking the video link will get you live video from the House floor.
(Don’t be fooled by the “Subscribe to Live Feeds” box. Those are RSS feeds, which are “live”—as in regularly updated. They’re not live video or audio.)
Most people will probably access this from the House clerk’s familiar “Floor Summary” page, which has near-real-time updates about House activity. But that page says “Streaming video is not available for this session.” That’s a hiccup that should be easy to fix.
Selecting a past day, one can watch the video of that day, but in my early tests, you had to watch the video from the beginning. I don’t think many people are going to watch 10 hours of video to pick up their representative’s remarks on the bill to congratulate Camp Dudley of Westport, New York, on its 125th anniversary.
I’ve been testing in Firefox. In Internet Explorer, I got some links that do things. It appears you will be able to navigate around a day’s video based on the activity of the House. That is, you can jump to where the House began debate on the Camp Dudley bill.
Hopefully, the system will work in standards-compliant browsers, not only Microsoft’s. I note that the video currently plays only in Windows Media Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight. I’ll leave it to friends better versed in video to critique the selection of formats, but I have doubts about these two as being the best, and most open, available.
Beyond junctures in House debate, there should be more tagging to make the video useful. Not only should you be able to navigate via House activity, you should be able to navigate by bill number, and by member of Congress.
When you do navigate around, I don’t see that the “share” link changes. This needs fixing so that people can direct friends and colleagues to key portions of debates. In fact, you should be able to link to any point in the video. Ideally, there should be an embed function that allows defined segments of video to go into blog posts and such. That latter one is a big ask, but Congress is a big, important institution.
It’s early yet. Maybe these things are in the works or on the drawing board. Rolling HouseLive.go out in “beta,” getting feedback, and fixing it is A-OK. But sometimes government agencies set a course and have a hard time changing after that. The Thomas legislative system, brilliant as it was for 1995, still isn’t publishing bill data in good formats, and a private provider has had to take up the slack.
HouseLive.gov is better than nothing. It can be much, much better than it is.
Google has just launched a new tool that lets users view the total number of requests received “from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products.” As the FAQ explains, the tool overlays the requests received over the last six months, except for countries like China that prohibit the release of such numbers, on a map with totals for both data requests if over 30 (criminal-related but not civil) and removal requests if over 10 (not including requests from private parties, like DMCA copyright take-down notices). Google makes a few important observations about the data—especially that Brazil and India’s numbers are skewed way off because of the popularity of Orkut, Google’s answer to Facebook, there.
This tool represents the beginning of a new era in transparency into how governments censor the Internet and violate users’ privacy. I very much look forward to seeing Google improve this tool to provide greater granularity of disclosure, and to seeing other companies improve upon what Google has started. Over time, this transparency could do wonders to advance Internet freedom for users by promoting positive competition among countries.
To illustrate the kinds of things one could do with this data with a more robust interface, I put together the following spreadsheet (by scraping Google’s request numbers and mashing them up with total Internet users numbers I found here (which are mostly from late 2009):
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' First Amendment Handbook, twelve states forbid the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. Maryland is one of them.
And now a guy who was recording his own antics on a motorcycle is facing a felony charge because he continued recording during a traffic stop. David Rittgers has more on the Cato@Liberty blog.
Laws that ban all surreptitious recording to get at wrongful recording are overbroad and damaging. Laws that prevent the recording of police officers are particularly wrongheaded. Maryland needs some technology liberation.
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same.
So, great. You can go line-by-line and figure out what requests your member of Congress has put in. But what’s the total number of your members’ requests? What’s the total amount of his or her requests? Who requested the most earmarks, in dollars or in number? Where in your district is the money supposed to go?
HTML pages and PDF documents are very hard to work with and don’t allow us to answer these questions. The Earmarkdata.org project is asking Congress to produce information about what it’s doing in formats sites like WashingtonWatch.com can use.
If you haven’t already, please sign the petition at Earmarkdata.org And please tell a friend about this effort too.
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 transparency oriented processes that President Obama and leaders like Speaker Pelosi promised the public? Recall that the Speaker promised to post the health care bill online for 72 hours before a vote back in September.
There was debate about whether she stuck to her promise then. And it was probably a one-time promise. It’s almost certain that she will not do so now. If she lines up the votes to pass the bill, the vote will happen. Right. Then.
What about President Obama’s promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN? The daylong roundtable debate on health care was an engaging illustration of what happens when you do transparent legislating. Voters got a clearer picture of where each side stands—and perhaps saw that there actually is some competence on both sides of the aisle. Some competence.
The health care negotiations going on right now are the ones that matter. This is when the most important details are being hammered out. This is when the bargaining that draws the public’s ire is happening. But I’m not seeing it on C-SPAN.
President Obama’s promise may have been naive, but that doesn’t excuse it. The inside negotiations going on this week represent an ongoing violation of the president’s C-SPAN promise.
And there’s good reason to anticipate that the president will violate his Sunlight Before Signing promise as well. This was his promise to post bills online for five days after he receives them from Congress before signing them into law. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
