What struck me most about the executive summary of the FCC’s “National Broadband Plan” is that they published it in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document.
This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says:
Increase civic engagement by making government more open and transparent, creating a robust public media ecosystem and modernizing the democratic process.
This and other observations/snark in my recent Cato@Liberty post join Adam’s early comment on the FCC’s incredible cost claims. Undoubtedly, there will be more here at TLF.
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve written a piece grading the “high-value data sets” agencies released a few weeks ago on Data.gov. (Agencies are supposed to have “/open” sites up by tomorrow.)
The results? Four As, four Bs, seven Cs, eighteen Ds, and eight Fs. Take a look!
As I’ve detailed in a WashingtonWatch.com blog post, the president called for earmark transparency in his state-of-the-union speech tonight. A fact sheet put out by the White House goes beyond the president’s words to call for “a comprehensive, bipartisan, state-of-the-art disclosure database that allows Americans to examine the details of every proposed earmark before a vote is taken—one that is fully searchable and otherwise user-friendly.”
This is very good news for transparency coming out of the state-of-the-union speech. And I’ll be working to make sure that the good practices that take root in the earmark area branch out to other areas as well.
Testifying in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing today, Trey Hodgkins of technology trade association “TechAmerica” offered some pretty bogus excuses for resisting transparency in government contracts.
[I]f disclosure included posting to a public website the unredacted contract, a number of critical elements would be exposed. Something as simple as identifying the location where work is to be performed could reveal the geographic location of crucial components of our National and Homeland Security apparatuses, thereby exposing them to attack, disruption or destruction. Similarly, if data about program capabilities were to be disclosed as part of the public disclosure of contracting actions, adversaries could evaluate the supply chain, identify critical production components and, by attacking that component, disrupt our security. Data aggregated from published contracting actions also would allow adversaries to discern and reverse-engineer our capabilities and identify our weaknesses.
From a corporate perspective, disclosure of data from a contracting action—particularly the publication of an unredacted contract—would expose intellectual property, corporate sensitive and technical data to industrial espionage and allow corporate competitors to aggregate data, such as pricing methods, and weaken the competitive posture of a company in the government and commercial markets.
There is a remote possibility of risk to domestic security in some contracts, but the public benefits of disclosure vastly outstrip those risks. Hodgkins’ veiled pants-wetting about terrorism is a crock.
The corporate interests Hodgkins cites are balderdash. If you want to do government contracting, you are going to be involved in a public contracting process. Get over it or get out of the business.
I have not been impressed with “TechAmerica” since it was formed by the merger of several smaller trade associations. Hodgkins and TechAmerica should get on the other side of this issue, figure out how to protect what needs protecting, and disclose the rest.
I look forward to seeing something from “TechAmerica” that is actually innovative and not just slavish pursuit of government contracts, good public policies be damned.
Regarding San Francisco’s open data portal, DataSF, @cordblomquist astutely notes that open data is becoming a political virtue.
This morning, Cato put out a TechKnowledge of mine called “The Promise that Keeps on Breaking.” It deals with the policy issues surrounding President Obama’s yet unfulfilled promise to post bills sent to him by Congress online for five days before he signs them.
A Cato@Liberty post last week went through the President’s progress so far on the five-day promise.
. . . or does he?
Friday afternoon, the White House blog announced that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was posted online for public comment. This is good evidence that the President intends to honor his campaign promise to post legislation online and take public comment for five days before signing it.
But it’s not great evidence of that.
The Whitehouse.gov post went up at 2:05 pm, but the House didn’t vote until 2:24 pm and the Senate voted at 05:29 pm. (Click on the “votes” to see how your representatives did.) As of Saturday afternoon, the Thomas legislative tracking system doesn’t indicate that the bill has been presented to the President yet. And news reports indicate that the President will sign the bill on Monday, three days after it was “pre-“posted.
Regular order, Mr. President. When a bill is presented to you, post it online (at a consistent place on your Web site, not just at ad hoc URLs as you’ve done up to now). Then wait five days, reviewing the comments of the public as you promised to do when you asked the public to elect you.
The steps the White House has taken toward implementing the President’s promise are good steps. (In this Cato daily podcast, I characterized the President’s record on transparency so far as “mixed.”) But the promise is not fulfilled until bills receive five days online airing after they have been presented.
Presentment is a distinct, constitutional step in the legislative process. Until every non-emergency bill is posted online for five days after presentment and before signing, President Obama will look like he’s being driven by events and maneuvered by his elders in Congress.
I’ve been following President Obama’s early moves on government transparency here on Tech Liberation and on the Cato@Liberty blog.
Last week, Obama’s first broken campaign promise was the pledge to post legislation online for five days before signing it.
Well, the White House is working to address that, but it appears to be doing so with a half-measure that comes up short. On Sunday, the White House blog announced that the SCHIP legislation pending in the Senate was up for public comment. And it is, of course, but it hasn’t passed the Senate yet.
It was implicit in the promise to post bills online for five days prior to signing that the bill posted would be the one passed by the House and Senate and presented to the President.
If the White House were to implement the promised practice of leaving bills sitting out there, unsigned, after they pass Congress, that would have significant effects. The practice would threaten to reveal excesses in parochial amendments and earmarks which could bring down otherwise good bills. President Obama’s promised five-day cooling off period would force the House and Senate to act with more circumspection.
Taking comments on a bill as it makes its way through the House and Senate does not have the same salutary effect. If the White House is trying to start the five-day clock on the SCHIP bill with the posting of a comment page on Sunday, that is not consistent with President Obama’s promise.
In at least two recent stories, the mainstream press are highlighting Obama administration slow-walking on transparency.
Bloomberg recently filed suit against the Fed under the Freedom of Information Act to force disclosure of securities the central bank is taking as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks.
“The American taxpayer is entitled to know the risks, costs and methodology associated with the unprecedented government bailout of the U.S. financial industry,” said Matthew Winkler, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP . . . .
And here’s what President Obama said in his day-one memorandum on FOIA:
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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.