It’s not the culmination–that will come soon–but a major step in work I direct at the Cato Institute to improve government transparency has been achieved. I’ll be announcing and extolling it Wednesday at the House Administration Committee’s Legislative Data and Transparency conference. Here’s a quick survey of what we’ve been doing and the results we see on the near horizon.

After president Obama’s election in 2008, we recognized transparency as a bipartisan and pan-ideological goal at an event entitled: “Just Give Us the Data.” Widespread agreement and cooperation on transparency has held. But by the mid-point of the president’s first term, the deep-running change most people expected was not materializing, and it still has not. So I began working more assiduously on what transparency is and what delivers it.

In “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” (Sept. 2011), I articulated ways the government should deliver information so that it can be absorbed by the public through the intermediary of web sites, apps, information services, and so on. We graded the quality of government data publication in the aptly named November 2012 paper: “Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices.”

But there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for things to improve. Given the incentives, transparency is something that we will have to force on government. We won’t receive it like a gift.

So with software we acquired and modified for the purpose, we’ve been adding data to the bills in Congress, making it possible to learn automatically more of what they do. The bills published by the Government Printing Office have data about who introduced them and the committees to which they were referred. We are adding data that reflects:

• What agencies and bureaus the bills in Congress affect;

• What laws the bills in Congress effect: by popular name, U.S. Code section, Statutes at Large citation, and more;

• What budget authorities bills include, the amount of this proposed spending, its purpose, and the fiscal year(s).

We are capturing proposed new bureaus and programs, proposed new sections of existing law, and other subtleties in legislation. Our “Deepbills” project is documented at cato.org/resources/data.

This data can tell a more complete story of what is happening in Congress. Given the right Web site, app, or information service, you will be able to tell who proposed to spend your taxpayer dollars and in what amounts. You’ll be able to tell how your member of Congress and senators voted on each one. You might even find out about votes you care about before they happen!

Having introduced ourselves to the community in March, we’re beginning to help disseminate legislative information and data on Wikipedia.

The uses of the data are limited only by the imagination of the people building things with it. The data will make it easier to draw links between campaign contributions and legislative activity, for example. People will be able to automatically monitor ALL the bills that affect laws or agencies they are interested in. The behavior of legislators will be more clear to more people. Knowing what happens in Washington will be less the province of an exclusive club of lobbyists and congressional staff.

In no sense will this work make the government entirely transparent, but by adding data sets to what’s available about government deliberations, management and results, we’re multiplying the stories that the data can tell and beginning to lift the fog that allows Washington, D.C. to work the way it does–or, more accurately, to fail the way it does.

At this point, data curator Molly Bohmer and Cato interns Michelle Newby and Ryan Mosely have marked up 75% of the bills introduced in Congress so far. As we fine-tune our processes, we expect essentially to stay current with Congress, making timely public oversight of government easier.

This is not the culmination of the work. We now require people to build things with the data–the Web sites, apps, and information services that can deliver transparency to your door. I’ll be promoting our work at Wednesday’s conference and in various forums over the coming weeks and months. Watch for government transparency to improve when coders get a hold of the data and build the tools and toys that deliver this information to the public in accessible ways.

This morning, I’m gearing up for Thursday’s noon-time Cato book forum on the Mercatus/Jerry Brito book, Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess.

With the recent release and withdrawal of a Republican Study Committee memo on copyright policy, there is even greater tension around the issues than usual. So here’s a line from the planning email I sent to panelists Jerry Brito, Tom W. Bell, and Mitch Glazier.

Given how hot the issues we’ll discuss tend to be, I’ll emphasize that we’re all friends through the transitive property of friendship. I’ll be policing against ad hominem and stuff like that coming from any side. In other words, don’t bother saying or implying why a co-panelist thinks what he does because you don’t know, and because I’ll make fun of you for it.

It might be worth coming just to see how well I do with my moderation duties. Whatever the case, I think our panelists will provide a vibrant discussion on the question of where libertarians and conservatives should be on copyright. Register here now.

In previous posts about the battle for control of the Cato Institute, I’ve noted (Part I) that the “Koch side” is a variety of different actors with different motivations who collectively seem not to apprehend the Cato Institute’s value. Next (Part II), I looked at why the Koch side is fairly the object of the greater scrutiny: their precipitous filing of the original lawsuit.

My premise has been that the Koch side cares. That is, I’ve assumed that they want to preserve Cato and see its role in the libertarian movement continue. Some evidence to undercut that assumption has come around, namely, their filing of a second lawsuit—and now a third! [Update: Mea culpa—there hasn’t been a third lawsuit. Just a new report of the second one. I had assumed the second was filed in state court and thus thought this was distinct. I’m not following the legal issues, obviously, which matter very little.]

The Koch side may be “on tilt.” Lawsuit-happy, win-at-any-cost. We will just have to wait and see.

For the time being, I will continue to assume that the Koch side has the best interests of liberty in mind and explore the dispute from that perspective. I owe the world some discussion of Cato-side miscalculation—of course, there is some—but before I get to that in my next post, I think it’s worth talking about the burden of proof in the Kochs’ campaign to take control of Cato.

Only fringies will deny that the Cato Institute adds some value to the liberty movement. It does. The question—if preservation of liberty is the goal—is how well it will do so in the future. The central substantive issue in the case—there are many side issues—is how Cato will operate in the future.

Now, here’s a quick primer on public campaigns and the difference between the “yes” side and the “no” side.

A “yes” campaign is hard. The moving side—the “yes” side—has to make the case that there is a problem, and it also has to make the case that it offers the best available solution.

A “no” campaign is easy. The “no” side can choose to dispute the existence of the problem, or it can dispute that the “yes” side’s solution is the right one.

In 1994, I worked for a campaign to defeat a single-payer health care initiative, California’s Prop. 186. The most memorable work we did—and the most fun—was a weekly release we faxed out (yes, faxed!) called the “Whopper of the Week.” Our side would take any dimension of the other side’s campaign and pound on it as hard as we could with mocking disdain and a smattering of the facts as we saw them.

By the end of the campaign, the “yes” side was arguing that their losses in battles like this were becoming more narrow each time around. Pathetic. We blasted out an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed Whopper. No, health-care socializers, a loss is not a win.

In the battle for control of Cato, the Kochs are the moving party, the “yes” campaign. But it has done almost none of the work that a “yes” campaign should.

As I wrote previously, they didn’t even make the case that there is a problem:

In terms of communications and public relations, this is kind of jaw-dropping stuff. It looks as though the Koch side laid little or no groundwork for public discussion of their move to take control of Cato. They didn’t register a public complaint about the direction of Cato’s research. They didn’t enlist a single ally or proxy into raising questions about Cato’s management.

And it’s becoming conspicuous with the passage of time that the Koch side isn’t putting forward a solution.

When the Kochs filed their original lawsuit, their public messaging was that it was a narrow contract dispute. “Nothing to see here.”

Then, the Koch messaging aimed at Ed Crane’s personality and management style. A statement from David Koch cited Ed’s rudeness. A pair of unsigned stories on Breitbart.com expanded on that theme a little breathlessly (using a picture of Ed that makes him look mean and fat!). I presume the Kochs helped with the placement of these stories, though I could certainly be wrong.

[ UPDATE: (4/23/12) A third Breitbart story went up today, but is no longer available at its original source. A mirror of the story, “The Crane Chronicles, Part III: Ed Gone Wild,” is available here.]

You only have to look at that “mean and fat” picture of Ed Crane to know he was going to be out the door soon anyway. Hopefully, to a chaise lounge and a mai tai with a little umbrella in it. Ironically, the instant dispute may keep Ed at Cato longer than he would have been if someone just said “thank you” and thrown him a nice going-away party.

Attacking Ed Crane does nothing to make the Kochs’ case for taking over Cato. It is at best one-third of the first half of a “yes” campaign.

What about the other two-thirds of the “problem” statement? Has Cato’s fundraising lagged? Is the scholarship weak? Has Cato failed to strike the right balance between principle and relevance? These are important, substantive questions … that the Koch side has barely raised.

Much less has the Koch side put forward the solutions that it thinks are the right ones. PR statements won’t do for the people who dedicate their every work-day to advancing liberty. What is the Koch vision for Cato? Who do the Kochs think should be at the helm? How can we know that Cato will remain a distinct, non-partisan voice in Washington? It takes something more than words when the devil we know has a 35-year track record.

The evidence of miscalculation I bring to bear in this post is the dog that didn’t bark. By all appearances, the Kochs didn’t prepare for the campaign to take over Cato. A fair inference is that the Kochs aren’t prepared to run it.

I’m fascinated in writing this post that I feel the need to explain to whoever is running this issue for the Kochs what they should have done in the effort to get control of Cato. It’s not because I wish the Koch side success. It’s because the evidence we have indicates fairly strongly that the Koch side is not prepared to run the Cato Institute. What happens if the dog catches the car?

It’s well known now that a long-simmering contest for control of the Cato Institute has bubbled over. On the last day of February, Charles and David Koch filed a lawsuit against the widow of former Cato chairman Bill Niskanen, Cato president Ed Crane, and Cato itself seeking to have Niskanen’s shares returned to Cato or granted to the remaining shareholders under the terms of a shareholder agreement. This would give the Kochs (one of whom participated in the founding of Cato) majority ownership, allowing them to elect a majority of Cato’s board. It would also position them to extinguish Crane’s shares so as to gain 100% control.

Cato disputes the Kochs legal positions, and it believes that their success “would swiftly and irrevocably damage the Cato Institute’s credibility as a non-partisan, independent advocate for free markets, individual liberty, and peace.”

The quote just above is from Cato’s “Save Cato” web page, but the more interesting commentary has been scattered by Cato staff and leadership across various blogs and outlets (e.g., Jerry Taylor, Gene Healy, Jason Kuznicki, Julian Sanchez, Jonathan Blanks, Justin Logan, Trevor Burris, Michael Cannon). There has been lots of commentary from many quarters, of course, led by Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy. Really, there’s too much commentary to list.

A Facebook page dedicated to “saving” Cato has zoomed past 5,000 supporters.

Now it’s my turn. Putting my thoughts here on TLF is a stretch because I won’t be talking about tech. Think of this as the “liberation” part of Tech Liberation Front. The reason many of my colleagues and I do what we do here is because of both Ed Crane and the Kochs, and the institutions they have built and nurtured. Now these giants in the modern liberty movement are fighting.

That’s a shame for a lot of reasons. There is the overall cause of freedom, of course, our part of which is side-tracked and sullied by the dispute. We Catoites love what we do, fighting for freedom backed by thousands of highly engaged supporters. But don’t go all analytical and forget the hundred-plus Cato staff whose livelihoods and careers are under a cloud. That’s concerning and frustrating, especially for the people with children. Once or twice, I’ve let my colleagues know when I found their arguments overwrought. That personal dimension might be why.

Yes, Cato people are people. And so are Koch people. This is important to surface as part of the theme I want to focus on: miscalculation.

Perhaps because we’re intellectuals, maybe out of courtesy, or in pursuit of simplicity, much commentary has forgotten that all the actors in this drama are people. And people make mistakes. Lots of ’em.

People on the Cato side have treated the Koch side as monolithic and acting in unison. From inside Cato, it’s rather obviously not, but the Koch side likely perceives the Cato side as monolithic and similarly orchestrated. But when I talk here about “the Kochs” or the “Koch side,” I do not mean the brothers as a unit, or either of them individually. I rather doubt that these successful businessmen devote a huge percentage of their time to their ideological work (and hope they don’t, for their sake!).

The “Koch side” is actually a variety of different actors, including each of the Koch brothers themselves and any number of advisors and allies. The things any one person has said, the suit the Kochs’ attorneys filed in their names, and the press releases put out for them are the products of different actors within the “Koch side,” each of which may have different motivations and strategies.

Examining the Koch side’s actions, I have a suspicion that it is not acting in a highly coordinated and planned fashion, and that it is not actually pursuing the interests of the Koch brothers all that well. That’s saying a lot, and it’s a little presumptuous. I hope to bring the evidence forth in a series of posts.

My work at Cato on counterterrorism, including the production of the book Terrorizing Ourselves, is something no politically active group would do because it doesn’t help one party or the other. Same goes for my anti-national-ID work. Growing the government is a bipartisan project. But I think of the counterterrorism work in particular because it exposed me to national security and foreign policy concepts that pertain well here.

In national security and foreign policy, no theme is stronger than the problem of miscalculation. So often, international powers misunderstand one another and misinterpret each others’ actions. They develop theories of each others’ behavior (treating each other as monoliths), then act and react based on those theories until conflagration ensues. The victor writes history.

As we libertarians all know, war kills people and saps the world of wealth. Now “war” among libertarian powers causes libertarians to suffer, and it saps strength from the libertarian movement. So we really, really ought to avoid miscalculation, oughtn’t we?

It seems to me that a central miscalculation on the Koch side is to misapprehend what the Cato Institute is and what gives it value.

Before I get to that, let me start with a premise: I believe the Kochs want what’s best for liberty. The Kochs’ work to advance liberty over many decades is very strong evidence that they want to see its advance continue. The statements put out in their names are creditable evidence of the same. This doesn’t exclude other goals within the Koch “side” or secondary goals on the part of the Koch brothers themselves, but consistency on liberty over decades suggests that the Kochs themselves want Cato to remain an organization that advocates liberty well.

Now, what makes Cato a valuable part of the libertarian movement? Here, the Koch side is not calculating well.

Cato is not a profit-making enterprise, but concepts from that world apply fairly well to its examination. Take “going-concern value.” That’s the value of an enterprise as an ongoing entity, over and above the value of its assets if liquidated. Going-concern value includes liquidation value plus the value of intangible assets such as goodwill.

Goodwill. That’s the positive reputation of an enterprise, the “something” that enables it to do more with a given set of intellectual and physical assets than another enterprise could with the same assets. Reputation (as you can learn starting on page four of my recent Cato policy analysis) is the set of conclusions one makes by combining identity and biography.

Cato has a clear identity—a brand—and it has a thirty-five-year history/biography of being a reasonable, consistent, and honest intellectual advocate for libertarian and free-market policies. This has caused a number of non-libertarians to come to Cato’s defense in the current dispute.

The simpleton might use this against Cato—“Aha! They’re admired on the left!”—but people who care about persuasion know that gains come from bringing fence-sitters to the side of liberty. Gains come from convincing opponents of liberty to moderate their positions. Real persuasion happens in small increments over a long time, and it comes from engaging with the other side.

There are lots of inputs into reputation, and one of them for advocacy groups is most definitely funding and control. One need only look at SourceWatch to see that ownership and control is an important input into reputation. (Again, because of the propensity for cheap argument in some quarters: Citing to SourceWatch is not endorsement. I am pointing out a reality of participation in public debate.)

The properties of reputation are somewhat like the properties of physical assets. A machine that is not maintained will start to work less well over time or suffer catastrophic failure at some point. A reputation that is not maintained will slide or even collapse. Cato has ideological opponents who are constantly and often unfairly trying to tear down the organization’s repuation, mostly using proxies for substance such as funding and control. (It’s the easy way. Debating us on the merits is hard.)

It is not to endorse that I state the following: The Koch Brothers do not have the same reputation as Cato. The Center for American Progress puts out reports that call the Kochs “financiers of the radical right” while it joins with Cato and Cato scholars on issues like immigration, gay marriage, national security, and transparency. For whatever reason, while Cato has successfully cultivated the currency of legitimacy in Washington, D.C., the Kochs unfortunately have not. I believe they have tried, and the Kochs’ reputation in the public policy arena is undeserved in my opinion, but it is a reality. (Speaking of cheap argumentation, some have argued that the Cato side is buying into or fostering “lefty” arguments about the Kochs. There is very little evidence of this, and the proponents of that idea should put themselves to proof.)

A Koch takeover would affect the reputation of Cato. Such a thing generally wouldn’t happen with an industrial firm, but a change in corporate control of an advocacy group most definitely would affect its operations. A Koch takeover would degrade Cato’s reputation, its goodwill, and its value as a going concern. Cato would lose some measure of its ability to persuade. I don’t believe the Koch side fully considered this effect when it embarked on its current course of action.

This miscalculation permeates the Koch/Cato dispute. Jonathan Adler recognized it insightfully in the early going:

Even if one assumes that the Kochs have better ideas for how Cato should direct its resources, know more about how to advance individual liberty, and are correct that the Institute is too “ subject to the personal preferences of individual officers or directors,” any benefit from whatever changes they could make will be outweighed to the permanent damage to Cato’s reputation caused by turning it into a de facto Koch subsidiary.

I hear a counter-claim to this argument: Unfairness! Ed Crane pushed this idea! He pushed the idea of a ‘takeover’!

Maybe. Ed’s an interesting one. And if I’m not fired for something in this post (!), I’ll say more later about him. But “unfairness” is not an answer to the underlying point.

Think of that industrial machine. Without proper maintenance, it either degrades over time or seizes up. In the end, it doesn’t matter which. The enterprise can no longer produce what it did. I have a hard time blaming the person who built an enterprise over thirty-five years for hastening the discussion about whether his machine will run better in the next thirty-five years, or whether it will cough and sputter, potentially to grind to a halt.

I’ve focused on miscalculation on the Koch side rather than the Cato side. The cause of this is not simply Cato partisanship (which I fully admit to). I will explain the reason for focus on the Kochs in a future post—and why I think it is a product of more Koch-side miscalculation.

From Cato’s “Job Opportunities” page:

Policy Analyst, Telecommunications and Internet Governance

The Cato Institute seeks a policy analyst to work on telecommunications and Internet governance issues. The suitable candidate will have several years of work experience in the field of telecommunications and Internet law and policy. An advanced degree in law or economics is preferred

Sought-after qualifications include: familiarity with or practice before the Federal Communications Commission; familiarity with the technical and governance bodies of the Internet; familiarity with and/or work experience on Capitol Hill; a solid background in the First Amendment and other civil liberties; familiarity with classical liberal history and scholarship; strong analytical reasoning skills; the ability to simplify complex issues in oral and written communications; and good interpersonal skills. Responsibilities include monitoring developments in government regulation and oversight of telecommunications and Internet governance at all governmental levels; researching and writing on these topics in all formats (research papers, policy briefs, editorials, blogposts, etc.); and public speaking. Candidates must support Cato’s mission of promoting individual liberty, free markets and limited government.

Information on how to apply here.

I was reminiscing last night with my Cato Institute colleague Dan Mitchell about a favorite TLF post of mine: the Persuade-o-Meter. Woo! I slay me!

Dan is very excited about the blue curtain that Santa Claus brought him for Christmas. It matches the ties of his two favorite recent presidents. And he made this video to show it off.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush Administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system.

Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage of the stimulus package to help the unemployed, his Administration delayed implementation of a rule designed to protect jobs for U.S. citizens and legal workers.”

E-Verify may well have been designed or intended to protect jobs for citizens and legal workers, but that’s not at all what it would do. I wrote about it in a Cato Policy Analysis titled “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration” (a ten-year follow-on to Stephen Moore’s “A National Id System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration“):

A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work.

Even if E-Verify were workable, mission creep would lead to its use for direct federal control of many aspects of American citizens’ lives. Though it should be scrapped, the longer E-Verify is delayed the better.

You wouldn’t think that a book called In Search of Jefferson’s Moose could be about the Internet, but it is.

In his book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, Temple University Law Professor David Post draws remarkable and entertaining parallels between the Internet and the natural and intellectual landscape that Thomas Jefferson explored, documented, and shaped.

Post will be at the Cato Institute for a lunch-hour book forum on Wednesday, February 4th. Clive Crook and Jeffrey Rosen will comment.

Register here to see just how nicely Thomas Jefferson, cyberspace, and a rather large moose fit between the covers of Post’s new book.

The video of last week’s Cato policy forum can be viewed here. (Check out TLFer Jerry Brito’s fine presentation.)

If your preference is for a briefer taste of the transparency issues, a podcast with Ed Felten recorded that day is here:

(Before you finish reading this, if you’re in D.C., you’ll want to sign up for this policy forum.)

Ben Goddard’s most recent column in The Hill is called “Obama Marketing Lesson,” and he reviews how the Internet and savvy use of media energized President-Elect Obama’s campaign effort. “[S]ocial networks have returned as one of the most powerful forces in politics,” he says.

President-elect Obama has a database of some 10 million names and e-mail addresses, and those who built it have made clear they’ll activate that army to support the new president. MoveOn.org is already preparing its supporters to advocate for progressive policies. Groups like Divided We Fail, Healthcare for America Now! and the American Medical Association are already running television and online campaigns to advocate for healthcare reform.

(Goddard will be lending some of his insights about communications strategies to secure the country against fear and overreaction at our January conference on counterterrorism strategy, by the way.)

The substance of the campaigns he talks about might be far from encouraging for libertarians. None of these are limited government advocates. Politicized online social networks could be the agar in which a new mobocracy grows – something our republican form of government was designed to prevent.

But what’s the solution? To oppose democracy and an active citizenry? Other than restoring constitutional limits on government, I don’t think so. As with speech, the cure for bad democracy is more of it, but good.

It’s not a given that online politics will amount to crowds of avatars with digital pitchforks and torches. The Internet is a fertile medium for careful debate about our public policies. Social networks can be smart and informed – if they get the data.

That process is starting. USASpending.gov delivers data about where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go. This was a project of President-Elect Barack Obama who, with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), made transparency a signature issue in the Senate. The non-profit effort that broke ground for this is OMBWatch’s FedSpending.org,which logged its 10 millionth search in June.

My humble effort, WashingtonWatch.com, attaches cost estimates to the bills in Congress and recently welcomed its millionth visitor for the year. The Sunlight Foundation has a list of insanely useful Web sites, each exposing some dimension of government action to greater public scrutiny. The organization is dedicated to developing a stable of private, non-profit, and volunteer efforts that promise revolutionary change once they can access standardized, structured, and open government data.

And that’s the bottleneck: access to good data. Government information now comes to us mediated by government Web sites and government-defined database queries. Getting the raw data would allow all kinds of actors to generate all kinds of new information about government. All citizens would have better information to work with, not only about taxes and spending, but about the results of government programs.

Libertarians bet that this would reduce demand for government. Liberals and progressives believe that this would deliver on the promise of government. If either side wins, we’re better off than we are here in the dark disappointment of government today.

On December 10th, the Cato Institute is having a policy forum on this topic. The title is “Just Give us the Data!“

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will hold “a series of public hearings beginning on December 5, 2008, in Washington, D.C., to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP).”

It’s timely, then, that we will be having a forum Monday on a provocative book whose thesis is the title: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Co-author Michele Boldrin will present the book, and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will critique it.

Highlighting one of the issues at Monday’s forum, the Arts+Labs blog points to Atkinson’s testimony about the value of American intellectual property on the export market. Over 50 percent of U.S. exports depend on some form of IP protection, according to Rob Atkinson.

It’ll be a good, interesting discussion. Register here now.

If you find the title of this post provocative, you’ll be interested in a Cato Institute book forum on Friday, October 10th.

In The Crime of Reason, Nobel laureate in physics Robert Laughlin argues that intellectual property laws and government security demands threaten the development of new knowledge. Without change, we risk bequeathing our heirs a world where knowledge is criminalized and our intellectual tradition of unfettered inquiry is lost.

The event should be a fascinating inquiry into the role of information and information rules in our society. Thomas Syndor of the Progress & Freedom Foundation will comment. I’ll be your humble moderator. It’s noon on Friday, October 10th, at the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Luncheon to follow.

You can register for the event here.