Michelle Quinn of Politico was kind enough to call me a few days ago and ask for comment for her story about “California Driving Internet Privacy Policy.” Quinn’s article offers an excellent overview of how the Golden State is gradually taking on a greater regulatory role for the Net, at least as it pertains to matters of online privacy. She opens by noting that:

With the federal government and technology policy shut down in Washington, California is steaming ahead with a series of online privacy laws that will have broad implications for Internet companies and consumers.In recent weeks, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a litany of privacy-related legislation, including measures to create an “eraser button” for teens, outlaw online “revenge porn” and make Internet companies explain how they respond to consumer Do Not Track requests. The burst of activity is another sign that the Golden State — home to Google, Facebook and many of the world’s largest tech companies — is setting the agenda for Internet regulation at a time when the White House and Congress are moving at a much more glacial pace.

When she asked me how I felt about this, I noted that: “California seems like it is willing to declare the Internet its own private fiefdom and rule it with its own privacy fist.”  And, no matter how well intentioned any of these new California policies may be, the ends most certainly do not justify the means.

As I noted in a January essay here on “The Perils of Parochial Privacy Policies,” such state-based meddling with the Internet and globally-interconnected networks and platforms raises profound constitutional issues. It threatens the free flow of commerce and speech. Even if it is the case that some of us may, at times, want some forms of commerce and speech limited by state action, I would very much hope that we could agree that having 50 states creating their own State Privacy Offices or State Data Protection Bureaus would probably not be a wise move. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Commerce Clause was put in place to protect against when interstate commerce is on the line. And it is also the sort of thing that might even be preemptable under the First Amendment since some speech issues are in play here. And I’m not even getting into the wisdom of some of the individual policies that California is pursing, many of which are highly impractical and likely extremely costly.

I hope that all those folks who say they really care about “Internet freedom” will make a stand against what California is doing here. But something leads me to believe that, once again, selective morality will enter the picture simply because of the sensitive and highly emotional nature of all online privacy and child safety issues. But, again, the ends do not justify the means. The Internet does not belong to California and they should not be allowed to make it their own regulatory fiefdom.

Timothy B. Lee, founder of The Washington Post’s blog The Switch discusses his approach to reporting at the intersection of technology and policy. He covers how to make tech concepts more accessible; the difference between blogs and the news; the importance of investigative journalism in the tech space; whether paywalls are here to stay; Jeff Bezos’ recent purchase of The Washington Post; and the future of print news.

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Jack Shafer brought to my attention this terrific new Politico column by Michael Kinsley entitled, “How Microsoft Learned ABCs of D.C.”  In the editorial, Kinsley touches on some of the same themes I addressed in my recent piece here “On Facebook ‘Normalizing Relations’ with Washington” as well as in my Cato Institute essay from last year on”The Sad State of Cyber-Politics.”  Kinsley notes how Microsoft was originally bashed by many for not getting into the D.C. lobbying game early enough:

there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists and so on. So get with the program.

So that’s what Microsoft did. It moved its “government affairs” office out of distant Chevy Chase and into the downtown K Street corridor. It bulked up on lawyers and hired the best-connected lobbyists. Soon, Microsoft was coming under criticism for being heavy-handed in its attempts to buy influence.

So I say in Politico today. Highlights:

During his first two years in office, the president generated a lot of heat in the transparency area — but little sunlight. House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate. It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available in electronic form.” . . . The House can reach the gold standard for transparency if its new practices make introducing a bill and publishing the bill online the same thing. Moving a bill out of committee and posting the committee-passed version as online data must also be the same thing. Voting on a bill and publishing all data about the vote online must be standard procedure. . . . The transparency community owes it to Congress to say how it wants to get the data.

Of course, I’ve fooled you just a little bit. The whole thing is a highlight! (ahem) Read it.

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:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

Politico notes that the Obama team has failed to make financial disclosure information available in electronic form, detailing the cumbersome process of getting access to these public documents from the Office of Government Ethics. It starts with already potentially long delays for legal review and “certification”:

Even then, in order to actually obtain the disclosures, requestors have to print and fill out a form posted on the office’s website. It asks which disclosures are being requested and the requestor’s name, address, phone number, occupation and signature – information the form says can be passed along to law enforcement, congressional offices or private contractors working for the federal government. Completed forms then have to be faxed to the office. They can’t be e-mailed. And requests for disclosures of officials whose last names begin with “A” through “L” go to one employee, while requests for disclosures of officials whose last names begin with “M” through “Z” go to another. . . . They’re not scanned or recorded electronically, though, so requestors have to make arrangements to have the forms mailed or picked up at the agency’s office, where a receptionist dispenses the disclosures after yet another signature – this one on a carbon-paper copy of the original form. And, to get other technically public disclosure documents such as appointees’ ethics agreements and waivers, requestors have to use different forms and may have to deal with other agencies and their request procedures.

At least the Office of Government Ethics lists the administration officials about whom copies of documents can be ordered on its Web site. That’s a start!

These are run-of-the-mill bureaucratic impediments to transparency, so I don’t count them as Obama administration “steps away from transparency.” But these impediments exist in part because they maintain the obscurity of government bureaucracies and officials, and the freedom of action of these agencies and people vis à vis voters.

The Obama administration will have to root them out and fight them aggressively, or else the early talk of transparency will be mere words.