Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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.
An Associated Press story posted at 9:31 pm last night by Brett J. Blackledge notes that the Obama adminsitration “has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.” Recipients of federal money were originally supposed to report how many jobs they had “saved or created.” Now, they’re just supposed to report how many people got paid with the money.
The “saved or created” approach was an attempt to estimate how the Recovery Act spending affected employment. Unfortunately, it was impossible for this approach to deliver what it promised, as I pointed out in testimony to Congress last May. To know how many jobs the Recovery Act spending saved or created, we need to control for other factors that affect employment. We also need to control for the employment effects of the borrowing (and future taxing) that pays for the spending.
This is what good “macroeconomic” analysis does. It is not what employers do when they put people on the payroll. Asking employers who received federal money to tell us how many jobs were created or saved is asking them to give us information that they do not have and cannot acquire.
Under the new approach, employers will report quarterly how many people they are paying with the federal money. Since the reports will be quarterly, some jobs may be counted more than once — I guess as much as four times a year. According to the AP story, some Republicans are complaining that the new approach will lead to even larger and more misleading job numbers.
The numbers will likely be higher. But they will not necessarily be misleading, as long as recovery.gov makes clear that these are simply reports on the number of people paid with the federal money, not an attempt to measure the number of jobs created.
Estimating jobs created is work for serious macroeconomists who try to control for other factors affecting the results. There’s of course plenty of room for disagreement over how to do this, as this commentary by my Mercatus Center colleagues Garrett Jones and Veronique de Rugy demonstrates.
The administration’s decision demonstrates once again the old adage that data is not knowledge.
AFF’s Doublethink has a nice story on “Open Source Democracy,” featuring TLF’s own Jerry Brito, founder of StimulusWatch.org.
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
The White House announces its open government plans today, live at 11:00 am Eastern, on Whitehouse.gov.
But what about the president’s promise to run his own White House more transparently? In a post on Cato@Liberty this morning, I look into a new development on the Sunlight Before Signing promise, which he has violated more than 100 times since taking office.
At some point earlier this year, the White House began posting links on Whitehouse.gov to bills that were heading its direction, a half-measure the White House told the New York Times it would take. I failed to notice the existence of these pages, but I think it is forgivable error. There is no uniform structure to them, and there is no link I can discover on Whitehouse.gov that would bring anyone to them. Based on my spot-checking, they haven’t been crawled by any search engine, so the only way a person could find them is by searching on Whitehouse.gov for phrases on the yet unseen pages or by searching the House or Senate bill numbers of bills that you know to look for because they have already passed into law. This doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the Sunlight Before Signing pledge. It doesn’t give the public an opportunity to review final bills and comment before the president signs them. I doubt if a single one of the people who cheered when President Obama made his Sunlight Before Signing pledge has visited one of these pages and commented to the president as he told them they would be able to do. There are further curiosities: The pages themselves are undated, but their “posted” dates, which appear in search results, are sometimes well beyond the date on which they became law. A Whitehouse.gov search for H.R. 2131, which became Public Law 111-70 on October 9th, shows that it was posted for comment on October 23rd.
Is the White House posting bills for review after they’ve become law, trying to make it look like they’re providing some measure of sunlight?
Here’s something that may appeal to transparency enthusiasts, as well as to environmental skeptics…
WASHINGTON, November 9, 2009 – BroadbandCensus.com has been investigating broadband stimulus projects and focusing on the preferred projects from the states. We still lack letters to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration – or notices that states are demanding confidentiality for their letters – from 13 states and territories.
The first person to send any letters from the following states will get a complimentary seat at the November 10 Broadband Breakfast Club at Clyde’s of Gallery Place at 707 7th Street NW, Washington, DC. The breakfast runs from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the topic is “Setting the Table for the National Broadband Plan: The Environment.” Information about the event, and registration, is available at http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.
Update: The article is now online. Citizen Tools has collected some responses to it at the end of this post.
Lawrence Lessig has a provocatively titled article in the October 21 issue of The New Republic: “Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government.” (Couldn’t find a link.) As a reader, I found it alternately mysterious, boring, and LOL funny.
I’m a person who notices premises, and Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement”—unvarnished access to government data—“is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”
Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.
Given the pains Lessig had taken to define the “naked transparency movement” and preemptively critique its effects, I was prepared for a straightforward criticism of public access to raw data. Continue reading →
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.
Read Part II here
In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that… they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments ! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining: 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.
More on the FCC’s e-Government Transparency Efforts: ECFS, RSS, Social Media & Setting Priorities
by Berin Szoka on September 11, 2009 · 12 comments
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →