by Sunlight Foundation policy intern Melanie Buck

The role technology can play in streamlining the declassification process was the topic of a Public Interest Declassification Board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 23. The PIDB is an congressionally-established advisory committee that works to facilitate public access to national security-related records. It is considering how to advise agencies on their efforts to declassify approximately 410 million pages of records by December 2013. An agenda for the meeting is available here [PDF].

The Board heard presentations on the feasibility of using an automated computer systems to streamline document review. The speakers were Jeff Jonas from IBM, Tom Lee from the Sunlight Foundation, and John Verdi from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Jeff Jonas outlined a hypothetical automated system that would tag documents based on key words and phrases to make predictions about whether a document should be declassified. A high level of accuracy would come from training the system on documents that have already been reviewed, combined with determining how the new document relates to the old information, in a process known as "context accumulation." He analogizes context accumulation to solving a jigsaw puzzle in this blogpost. The technology already exists, but would take some time to implement.

Tom Lee described the requirements for determining whether a document should be declassified, focusing on how a computer system could help prioritize the work queues of reviewers. For example, pages that the system determines most likely to be sensitive can be reviewed first, and if the system is determined to have made a correct judgment, the rest of the document (and potentially the document series) can be removed from the work queue. A search algorithm could be trained to return sophisticated results that would give human reviewers a clear indication of the content of a given document. Such a system would involve a static up-front cost, with additional computational costs varying on the system's operational speed.

John Verdi approached the issue from a policy perspective, explaining his evaluation of what transparency groups and the public want from a declassification process. He suggested that the preparation of unclassified summaries adds work without adding much public value and is an unnecessary burden on the declassification process. In his opinion, resources would be better spent reviewing entire documents and declassifying whenever possible. He also discussed a few transparency tools that many hope to see, such as a large, openly-accessible searchable database of declassified records.

The Board has another meeting scheduled for Nov. 9, 2010 to further investigate ways to facilitate declassification.

Declassification has been a current focus in Congress as legislators promote a cultural shift from “need to know” to “need to share.” Just last week, Congress sent the "Reducing Over-Classification Act," H.R. 553, to the President for his signature. Among other things, the legislation requires the Director of National Intelligence to establish policies and procedures to identify the classification of portions of information within an intelligence product, hopefully thereby facilitating automated review.

We summarized a July 22 discussion of the declassification of historical congressional records here.

This morning The Hill newspaper reports that K street is “scouring the ranks of lawmakers facing tough reelection races or retirement” in an effort to “snag top-tier lobbyists.” That effort raises questions about possible conflicts of interest between Representatives who are negotiating for their next job while working at their current one. I’ve examined this issue before.

Representatives are required to file a form with the House Ethics Committee within 3 business days of the "commencement of direct negotiations or any agreement of future employment or compensation." That form isn’t made publicly available unless a Representative takes the additional step of recusing himself or herself from a matter where a conflict of interest arises. That recusal -- and the filing of additional paperwork with the Ethics committee -- causes the statement of negotiations to be made available to the public.

Of course, the public availability of that record is in name only. You have to go to the Clerk’s office to get the records as they’re not available online. So my recommendations?

The statement of negotiations form should be made publicly available at the time they’re filed, without waiting for the official recusal form to be filed. Members should be reminded of their obligation to file these reports. The forms should be available online for inspection. And Representatives should have to declare that they've started negotiating for a job regardless of whether the talks are "direct."

This is such a good idea, we included it in our suggestions for reforming the House Rules. Until those rules are changed, Representatives should go the extra mile and publicly declare that they are negotiating for their next job.

The Office of Law Revision Counsel has just launched a pilot project to make updates to the U.S. Code available to the public more quickly. The public will now be able to see how recently-enacted legislation is broken apart and reconstituted into the U.S. Code in a more timely way. The Office of Law Revision Counsel is a body within the House of Representatives that consolidates and codifies laws passed by Congress.

The project, called “USCprelim,” will “update certain titles of the U.S. Code on the website throughout the year as laws affecting those titles are enacted, rather than waiting until the end of the congressional session.” So far, the project focuses on the Internal Revenue Code, which is contained in title 26. There are 50 titles in the U.S. Code.

The preliminary release of the Code is still subject to further revisions, but this is a boon to those who seek a more current version of the law.

Yesterday, Rep. Bill Foster introduced a bill that would improve public access to legislative information. Specifically, H.R. 6289 calls for:

• Bulk access to THOMAS legislative summary and status data,
• The creation of an advisory committee that would issue recommendations on improving services provided by THOMAS, and
• The Library of Congress to work towards adding bulk access to the full text of legislation.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. In the last year, one in five adult Internet users downloaded or read legislation, according to Pew’s 2010 “Government Online” report. And yet THOMAS, the official public portal to congressional information, has a dated web interface that often obscures its rich contents.

Although there are ongoing efforts to improve THOMAS, its limitations have spurred the private and non-profit sectors to create alternative legislative data interfaces, like GovTrack.us and OpenCongress.org. Unfortunately, their innovative designs are needlessly limited by unreliable access to information.

Public “bulk access” to THOMAS data allows users to download large amounts of information at one time. Technology innovators can mix the reliable information stored in THOMAS with flexible interfaces to address unmet needs, solve new problems, and create more ways for people to make use of legislative data. Currently, third parties write programs that extract human-readable information from THOMAS in a time-consuming and error-prone process known as “scraping.”

In 2009, Congress directed the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Printing Office, and other appropriate entities “to prepare a report on the feasibility of providing advanced search capabilities” via “more direct methods such as bulk data downloads.” So far, I am unaware of the release of any such report. Rep. Foster’s pushes the matter forward by requiring bulk access to certain types of THOMAS data and calling for all legislative information to ultimately become available for bulk download. (The legislation cited our 2007 Open House Project Report, which called for bulk access to all legislative data.)

The bill takes an additional step by bringing the public further into the conversation about improving THOMAS’s functionality. In the last year or so, the folks who run THOMAS have made serious efforts to get feedback from the public about improving THOMAS, including creating a blog and collecting user feedback. The creation of an advisory committee would formalize the process and ensure that all relevant parties keep talking about how to improve THOMAS. It would also require them to issue regular progress reports.

The legislation is an important step forward and we hope that it receives prompt consideration when Congress returns from recess. In the meantime, the Library of Congress, Government Printing Office, and other relevant parties should act even in Congress's absence. The way forward is clear.

Starting next week, the Supreme Court will release audio recordings of oral arguments on Fridays. Since 1955, the Supreme Court has released audio recordings of oral arguments to the National Archives at the end of each term. Those recordings are theoretically available to the public, although as a practical matter the best way to listen to Court proceedings is via the website The Oyez Project.  This new policy will make the recordings available to the public much more quickly, but still delayed several days after arguments take place.

Last year, the Sunlight Foundation called upon the Supreme Court to revisit how it makes available online, including adding contemporaneous releases of audio recordings, publishing all amicus and merits briefs, and much more. The Court redesigned its website this past March, but still has much more to do in terms of content and design before it meets the needs of the public. We welcome this small step forward.

(H/T CQ and BLT)

A coalition of lobbyists and good government advocates today released 5 principles for reforming how Congress grants earmark requests. The principles call upon Congress to:

1. Impose a limit on earmarks directed to campaign contributors
2. ban congressional staff from participating in fundraising
3. Build an earmarks database (structured along the lines of the database called for in the Earmark Transparency Act)
4. Require GAO to conduct random earmark audits
5. Require Members of Congress to certify that earmark recipients are qualified to handle earmarks

The coalition is composed of Melanie Sloan from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Rich Gold of Holland and Knight, Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste, Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, Craig Holman of Public Citizen, and former Representatives James Walsh.

The Sunlight Foundation has long called for improving transparency in the earmark process. As my colleague Lisa Rosenberg wrote after a Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing on the Earmark Transparency Act, “a single database of earmark requests is an idea whose time has come.”

Yesterday the House passed legislation to close a loophole that may have allowed the SEC to disregard certain FOIA requests. The Senate passed identical legislation on Wednesday; S. 3717 now goes to the President for his signature. Many organizations, including the Sunlight Foundation, had called for removal of the exemption which was created in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill passed earlier this year.

Our graduate policy intern, Eric Naing, offers a few farewell words. We will miss him.

My time as the graduate policy intern at the Sunlight Foundation is at an end and I can't stress enough how much I've learned and how much I will miss it.

When I first started working here, I was an aspiring journalist with an interest in government and politics. Several months later, I can say that I am not only leaving Sunlight knowing far more about government and transparency than I expected to learn, but I also have a broader understanding of issues that I didn't have much experience with such as grassroots organizing, government data, and even web development.

Working with John Wonderlich, Daniel Schuman, Lisa Rosenberg, Alexis Rudakewych on the Sunlight policy team has been wonderful. Their mentoring and the institutional knowledge of government that they shared has been invaluable. And enough really can't be said about the importance of working with highly motivated and knowledgeable people like them.

I would highly recommend this internship to anyone interested. The work I did was always substantive and challenging. For example, evaluating Open Government Plans allowed me to cast a critical eye on federal agencies and learn how they operate and are structured. Cataloging bills related to earmarks, lobbying, and transparency allowed me to better understand how to track legislation and left me with the skills to ably navigate THOMAS. Researching material for and attending Transparency Caucus events allowed me to learn more about things like Congressional Research Service Reports and provided me with a first-hand view of how congressional committees work. Even doing simple things like tracking transparency news has given me new insights to issues I never followed before such as government oversight, web development, federal agency news, and the broader government transparency movement.

Beyond the policy department, I also have to thank everyone else at Sunlight. The organizing and communication teams showed me the nuts and bolts of grassroots organizing and how to work with the press. Sunlight Labs introduced me to a previously unknown world of technology and showed me how it can be used to organize and educate. The Reporting Group showed me the importance of keeping the government accountable, particularly on the most basic and overlooked levels. All these people and the others at Sunlight have been exceedingly helpful and kind to me in my time here. It's been an honor to work with them and I'll miss them all.

One final thing that's worth noting is that I leave Sunlight with a stronger and clearer belief in the importance of transparency in government – a concept that bridges ideological divides. Regardless of what you do or who you are, anyone should appreciate having better access to government data and having a better understanding of what your government is doing. Though achieving these goals requires a constant struggle fraught with compromise and disappointment, they are absolutely worth fighting for.

This afternoon, the Senate failed to reach the 60 votes necessary to cut off debate and proceed to vote on the Disclose Act. 59 senators voted to “create a transparency regime so that corporations, unions and wealthy individuals who want to advance their own agenda by paying for independent expenditures could not do so while hiding their real identity,” in the words of my colleague Lisa Rosenberg.

Yesterday the Senate unanimously voted to close a loophole that may have allowed the SEC to disregard certain FOIA requests. The loophole was uncovered only after the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill was enacted in July.

Many organizations took issue with the SEC FOIA exemption, prompting letters from the Project on Government Oversight on August 3 and OpenTheGovernment.org on August 10. The Sunlight Foundation endorsed both letters, as did many others.

The measure enacted in the Senate, S. 3717, was the subject of a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 16. Companion legislation, H.R. 6086, was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The measure enjoys bipartisan support, although time is running out for the House to act before the mid-term elections.