I’ve been catching up on Radio Berkman, the podcast produced by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a great companion to the TLF’s own Tech Policy Weekly Podcast. There’s been a lot of talk about government transparency on the TLF lately, including TPW 40: Obama, e-Government & Transparency. But that conversation has been mainly focused on how to make “public” records accessible.
The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:
The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security.
Radio Berkman pokes its head into a recent talkback with the directors of the film
Secrecy, Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. They are joined by Harvard Law School professors Jonathan Zittrain, Martha Minow, and Jack Goldsmith.
I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).
What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in). Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are
some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans. But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy. Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task. But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism. Continue reading →
Yesterday I wrote about some of the questions left open at the launch of Recovery.gov. Today some of these questions are answered in a memo issued by OMB to all agency heads, giving guidance on implementing the Recover Act (PDF). Among other things, the memo lays out their obligations regarding accountability and transparency.
First, I asked yesterday whether the Recovery.gov site being run out of the White House is in fact the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board website mandated by the Act. The answer seems to be that it is. Everything in today’s OMB memo points to Recovery.gov being treated as the one and only site to comply with the Act’s requirements. I’m not sure this poses a problem for transparency, but we need to be clear that Recovery.gov is not in the Board’s control
per se as the Act seems to mandate.
More importantly, however, I asked yesterday how deep reporting would go, and whether reports from stimulus money grantees would be standardized and centrally housed. I wrote:
The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
Well, today the OMB helpfully answers me directly:
Continue reading →
The much anticipated site Recovery.gov has just been launched. It has been advertised by the administration as the place where stimulus spending will be completely disclosed to the public. As President Obama says in an introductory video on the home page, “once the money starts to go out to build new roads, modernize schools, and create new jobs, you’ll be able to see how, when and where it is spent” on the web site.
Reading the transparency and accountability portion of the stimulus bill today, however, I’m left with a few questions:
- The House bill called for the creation of a site to be called Recovery.gov, but that was stripped out from the final legislation. Instead, the Act calls for the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to create a website to house stimulus-related disclosures. Is the newly launched Recovery.gov that website? If so, is it indeed under the control of the independent Board? Right now the site’s content is certainly not independent of the president. If Recovery.gov is not the same thing as the legislatively created Board website, then won’t the launch of Recovery.gov serve to confuse citizens?
- I don’t see any mandate in the legislation for deep reporting of how stimulus funding is spent. The Act requires fund recipients to report on a quarterly basis to the agencies from which they received funds (HUD, DoT, DoE, etc.) how they have spent the funds. Thirty days after receiving these reports, the Act requires agencies to publish not necessarily the recipient reports themselves, but “the information submitted in reports” publicly available on “a website.” That is, not necessarily on Recovery.gov or the board website (if they are separate sites).
Can we be assured that the full text of all recipient reports will be published? And can we be assured that they won’t be scattered across dozens of sites, but placed in a central and easy to access place?
- Finally, how deep will the data go? The Board website mandated in the Act only requires the publication of “detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds” in the same fashion that USASpending.gov now employs. (Emphasis added.) The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
That said, there is a requirement for contractor and subcontractor reporting, but it comes in the recipient report mandate I explained in question 2, and like I said, there is no guarantee that we will get the full report data, nor that it will be centrally housed. Can we get that assurance?
As Recovery.gov and any other official stimulus accountability sites come on line, StimulusWatch.org and other will be looking to make the data useful to citizens. We can only do this, however, if the administration keeps its pledge to be transparent. Mr. President, just give us the data.
. . . with calls to televise the conference committee on the economic stimulus bill.
A good idea, with reservations which I discuss on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
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:
Continue reading →
On the first full day of the new Obama administration, I wrote here, and later followed up, expressing regret that the Obama White House hadn’t ported the “Seat at the Table” program over from the transition. Change.gov published documents submitted to the transition on its Web site for public review and comment. Whitehouse.gov does not.
Now we learn that the White House will not honor an Obama campaign and Whitehouse.gov pledge – not more than nine days old – to post all non-emergency legislation on the White House Web site for five days before the President signs it.
One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.
President Obama signed the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009” into law today, one day after Congress delivered it to him. And there’s the bill law, posted on Whitehouse.gov for public review. But it sure hasn’t been up for five days. And it’s not emergency legislation: Bills like it have been floating around in Congress since at least June 2007.
If I was a little demanding about transparency from day one, it was a bit of counterpoint to folks who were going dewy about Obama’s transparency promises. Those were simply words. Judging by the Whitehouse.gov screen cap below, transparency got thrown over the side for a photo op. Welcome to Washington.
Update: Just got an email that helps illustrate why the sound practices of letting legislation cool and taking public comment would go by the wayside. Getting credit from the ACLU is much more important than pleasing the relatively tiny coterie of transparency fans – and there is almost no expectation among the public that a White House should practice good lawmaking hygiene.
Google has—as I noted it would last June—finally released (PCWorld, Google’s policy blog) its eagerly-awaited suite of tools available for free (of course) at MeasurementLab.net that allow users to monitor how their ISP might be tweaking (degrading, deprioritizing, etc.) their traffic—among other handy features. Huzzah!
So, now that we have visibility into traffic management practices on a large scale, remind me again why the FCC would need to
mandate “net neutrality” requirements? Why not just leave the matter up to the FTC to enforce each ISP’s terms of use under the agency’s existing authority to punish unfair and deceptive trade practices? Won’t the threat of users switching to another broadband provider discipline ISPs’ traffic management? (As long as ISPs have traffic nationwide traffic management policies, even those users in areas lacking meaningful broadband competition will be protected from discriminatory network management practices by pressure in other markets.)
“If you believe that network neutrality government regulation is not needed, if you believe that the market will handle this … then you should also welcome Measurement Labs,” [Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy director Ed] Felten said. “What you are appealing to is a process of public discussion … in which consumers move to the ISP [Internet service provider] that gives them the best performance. It’s a market that’s facilitated by better information.”
Yes, it’s true (as PCWorld article linked to above points out) that a consumer might not be able to discern whether apparent degradation of their traffic was actually caused by the ISP or whether it might be the result of, say, spyware or simple Internet congestion. But they don’t
need to figure that out for themselves. Although the relatively small percentage of users who install this tool are likely to be highly sophisticated (at least the early adopters), all they need to is “sound the alarm” about what they think might be a serious violation of “net neutrality” principles, and a small cadre of technical experts can do the rest: examining these allegations to determine what ISPs are actually doing.
Sure, there will be false alarms and of course many advocates of “net neutrality” regulation will still insist that ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to practice certain kinds of network management, no matter how transparently the ISPs might disclose their practices. But the truth
will emerge, and in the ongoing tug-of-war between public pressure and ISPs’ practical needs to manage their networks smartly, between the desire of some to have practices disclosed very specifically and the ISPs’ desire to maintain operational flexibility, I suspect we’ll find a relatively stable (if constantly-evolving) equilibrium. It won’t be perfect, but do we really think government bureaucrats will do a better job of finding that happy medium?
Speaking of transparency… My colleague Barbara Esbin has a great piece on the PFF blog about changes being implemented by Acting Chairman Copps to make the agency less dysfunctional and more open to the public:
the new Acting Chairman has confirmed what FCC insiders, outside practitioners, and the House staff investigating former Chairman Kevin Martin’s management practices have long known: Commission staffers were not permitted to freely communicate either with one another, or with the other Commissioners. The liberation of the staff, together with changes concerning how the Bureaus and Offices work with each other and how the Commission communications with the public, certainly falls under the category of “change we can believe in…”
Acting Chairman Copps has outlined other important changes in how the FCC does business, including establishing a calendar for regular open meetings in advance, and updating the FCC’s website to be more user-friendly, particularly its Digital TV Transition pages. These and other changes and commitments together constitute an extremely promising start for Acting Chairman Copps, and his commitment to transparency and order bode very well for the FCC, its staff, the companies the agency regulates, and the American public.
Great news. Let’s hope the FCC also gets to work
soon on updating its painfully antique website, with its proliferation of databases.
On this week’s show, we discuss government transparency—a topic a number of us here at the TLF have written about lately. Among other things, we discuss:
- Why transparency is important
- What data the government should provide and how
- Good and bad examples of transparency
- President Obama’s promise to have the most accountable administration in history
- Obama’s plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer
My guests for this show are:
You can subscribe to our podcast here or through iTunes here. Or, you can play or download this podcast using the online player below.
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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.