At Sunlight we're immensely proud of our community of API users and today we're launching a new section of our website to learn more about them, see how others use the data and a snazzy query builder to easily see what's possible. Sunlight creates APIs to power our own tools as well as to provide infrastructure to the Open Gov and advocacy community at large. We hope this free and open data will improve your ability to create transparency around the issues you care about.

API stands for application programming interface and is a system that makes it easy for programers to use each other's data. At Sunlight we are eager for you to be able to access and build great projects on top of the data we use in our own projects. Nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, media outlets, students and citizens all use our collection of APIs with more than 7,000 keys issued and 735 million API calls made to date.

On the overview page we include a list of the APIs we provide, which projects each API powers, if it's functioning normally and an in-browser ability to see the kind of queries possible. We are showcasing Open Gov projects that could use technical or non-technical contributions on the community page, such as helping LittleSis track influence by building profiles and connections for powerful people and organizations or helping the unitedstates project on github to collect data on Congress. The bottom of the community page is a section called "When We Dream" where we share problems we'd love to see addressed and hope to open up a conversation on how to tackle the issue. On the events page we feature upcoming meetups, hackathons, conferences and camps that may pique your interest.

The new API section also features a gallery of how others use our data in interesting ways along with analytics on our number of keys, average daily calls and total calls. This section will hopefully serve as inspiration with ideas like how MinnPost used our Open States API to build a feature tracking the most important legislative bills in Minnesota, or how One Block Off the Grid added a call your member of Congress feature to their solar estimator tool to find local incentives. We list other organizations that have used our free data in the sidebar of the overview and although we can't endorse or claim any responsibility for how others use our data, we're just happy to see people using it!

We feature the new API section of our website in the top level navigation across our site to reflect our renewed focus on the data we provide and hope that you are inspired to sign-up for a key to build something. Keep up with the latest news about our APIs through the Sunlight Labs API Google Group or follow Sunlight Labs on Twitter.

Churnalism US is a new web tool and browser extension that allows anyone to compare the news you read against existing content to uncover possible instances of plagiarism. It is a joint project with the Media Standards Trust.

Simply feed in a link or block of text to the Churnalism site or let the browser extension run in the background to notify you of any matches of text from Churnalism's cache of documents. They include most articles in Wikipedia, press releases from PR Newswire, PR News Web, EurekaAlert!, congressional leadership offices, the White House, a sampling of Fortune 500 companies, prominent philanthropic foundations and much more. The browser extension available for Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox (full approval pending) allows Churnalism to extract article text from a whitelist of common news sites and lets you know when something you're reading may be copied from another source. It's a rare occurrence, but it's not unprecedented. Just last week Tom Lee, a noted Churnalism beta tester and Sunlight Labs Director, found through Churnalism that Reuters' prematurely published obituary of still-alive-human George Soros borrowed heavily from the collection of quotes on his Wikipedia page.

For a video walkthrough of how to use the Churnalism web tool and extensions please watch this two minute tutorial on Sunlight Academy featuring Kaitlin Devine, a developer on Churnalism:

Sunlight’s Churnalism is based on a UK site of the same name and is driven by open-source text analysis technology dubbed SuperFastMatch, both developed by the awesome Media Standards Trust. For a deeper dive into the underlying technology and process behind the project, check out this detailed post from Drew Vogel, another developer on Churnalism.

With the extension installed, you can learn about the sourced and unsourced flow of text copied from somewhere else. For some anecdotal evidence from my experience using Churnalism, I've found a number of instances of articles about science topics relying heavily on press releases and study summaries. For example, take this piece on the BBC website about epilepsy and migraines. Churnalism found a significant portion of the text came from this press release in EurekaAlert! and let me know with a ribbon notification on the top of the page. By tapping the Show Me button on the notification, Churnalism overlays a side-by-side display of the article and the possible match with copied text highlighted for easy comparison:

The best way to detect influence and language sharing from other sources is to install the browser extension and continue consuming news. You'll slowly start uncovering overlaps of language seen in this CBS News report, this NY Daily News article, this piece on NBC News or maybe uncover a reverse application of Churnalism, like this New York Times article that is cited heavily in a Wikipedia article.

We understand the privacy sensitivities with an extension extracting text from what you read, so we've designed Churnalism to be quite customizable and never retain identifiable information such as your IP address. You can easily change which sites Churnalism runs on by going into the settings for the browser extension. We've provided a basic whitelist of major news sites, a listing of local news affiliates and the ability to let Churnalism run on any site with news or article in url, but all these can be removed or paired down (or expanded!) to whatever sites you're interested in.

We're very excited to get this project out into the public and hope to continue to improve the underlying software as there are some excited potential applications for large corpus text matching. We used the SuperFastMatch technology to look at model legislation and it drove stories like our look at how ALEC distributed the 'Stand Your Ground' legislation for adoption in a number of different states.

Let us know any interesting Churnalism matches you uncover!

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., says he recently utilized the Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops site that monitors deleted tweets from politicians to stage an elaborate trick on the media (or ethics lesson, depending on how you see it), saying, "The best way to get a message out is to tweet and delete." The quote, documented by Washington Post and Politico reporters, came during the press conference Cohen held on Friday afternoon to discuss the recent deleted tweet that read: "@cyndilauper great night,couldn't believe how hot u were.see you again next Tuesday.try a little tenderness. http://t.co/zz4Orccryf"

In a press release issued following the news conference, Cohen said:

“On Tuesday night, the President and Mrs. Obama, along with the Grammys and PBS, hosted a musical tribute to Memphis Soul at the White House. Wanting to promote this great program, which will air this coming Tuesday on PBS, I realized the best way to do this was to tweet and delete. I knew the Sunlight Foundation would highlight the deleted tweet as a Politwoop and knowing how some in the media report deleted Politwoops as nefarious, it occurred to me that a perfectly innocent, factually-correct tweet, once deleted, would receive great media attention. And that is exactly what happened [...]"

We're flattered Politwoops is becoming more a part of the political message machine, but this is hardly the first time deleted tweets surfaced by Politwoops were deleted specifically to appear in Politwoops. Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif.,  gave a holiday greeting by politwooping "Merry Christmas to Byron and the politwoops crew" and Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Penn., once deleted "This one is for Politwoops." House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Rep David Schweikert, R-Ariz., even tried to turn Politwoops into a hashtag, saying "You know what else has been deleted? Jobs in the Obama economy. Where are the jobs? #politwoops" and "Wish #politwoops would hold Obama and Holder accountable for their missing facts on #FastandFurious just as it does missing tweets." As members of Congress learn about the existence of Politwoops, we've seen tweets simply reading "test" which may imply they are checking if the site tracks their particular accounts. Politwoops is a project to document messaging changes from politicians and it's fascinating to see how the site's role has developed since launching last May, including being named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2012 by TIME Magazine.

For things politicians can't delete, check out their Influence Explorer and Party Time profiles to see who gives them money or holds fundraisers for them.

Update: Cohen's statement on deleted tweets is surfaced by Politwoops after the tweet was deleted:

My statement on deleted tweets http://t.co/xkg8Ub9Vek #CyndiLauper #MemphisSoul

Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the Democratic nominee for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, deleted more than 500 tweets from her campaign Twitter account this morning. Colbert Busch will face the winner of tomorrow's Republican runoff in the May 7 special election to fill the House seat that Tim Scott vacated when he was appointed to the Senate.

The deletions of @ColbertBuschSC's account were caught by the Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops project that will archive them in perpetuity. "We just had a much higher percentage of 're-tweets' then tweets directly from the account," campaign Communications Director James Smith emailed Sunlight. "Some followers said it was just hard to keep up with stuff we actually put out like for events, fundraisers, etc."

At approximately 8:45 a.m. Monday, Colbert Busch -- or, more likely, someone on her staff -- began systematically purging her Twitter feed, beginning just 12 hours earlier and going back more than four weeks. Many deletions are retweets of support and replies thanking voters for supporting her campaign. Other tweets that got the hatchet today are mentions of the fundraising firms assisting her, digs on Republican ideology and responses sharing her beliefs.

To sift through the full collection of deletions, check out @ColbertBuschSC on Politwoops here.

After years of waiting for the technology and regulations to catch up to our goals, we’re finally able to unveil our latest project: Transparency Drone.

Transparency Drone is a semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that will allow the public to access real-time data on the activities of Washington’s influence peddlers on an unprecedented scale. This project is a result of diligent research involving dozens of prototypes and we’re proud to release our quadcopter into the wilds of Washington and beyond. Following the recent congressional interest in drones, Sunlight is opening the conversation by now allowing any citizen to follow their member of congress from above, attend all those exclusive fundraisers and zip through the halls of the hill.

For the most pertinent and elevated perspective on politics follow the Transparency Drone’s twitter account and share your ideas of where it can head next. (We can promise you’ll never see us in Politwoops!) It is surveillance by the people, for the people. So what's the legality of this? "An unmanned drone flying the skies of Washington, DC? What madness!", you are thinking to yourself. Without our lawyer around or access to the secret DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memos, we can only assume that there is a redacted opinion text entitled: "Interpretation of Sunlight Foundation's Proposal for a 'Transparency Drone' to Fly Around the Country Under Semi-Autonomous Control of Twitter Replies: It's a Great Idea!"

The Transparency Drone represents the latest effort by Sunlight to apply cutting-edge technology to give citizens information that the government won’t:

• For years, we’ve been waiting for for the Senate to begin filing campaign disclosure forms electronically so voters can have a clue, sometime before Election Day, as to who is in their elected representative’s pocket. With Transparency Drone, the delay is over: Now, we can update Influence Explorer as soon as we capture the lawmakers schlepping their paper files into the Senate Office of Public Records.
• Lobbyists seem to be equally unaware of the dawning of the 21st century. Altough the technology exists to post lobbying disclosure forms as soon as they are filed, the men and women who are trying to influence your representatives only have to report their activities four times a year. Enough, already! Drawing up flight plans from Political Party Time, we’ll be able to see the schmoozing and bundling live!

Sunlight Labs technicians have inhaled the fumes of thousands of feet of solder during the creation of Transparency Drone. We've created the most advanced surveillance quadcopter available in the 48 contiguous states: 2 Arduinos, 5 Raspberry Pis, and 10 2.2 megapixel Kodak EasyShare DX3500s for stunning hi-res images. The audio system has been licensed from the industry leader in digital signal processing, Margolies and Carbaugh International Computation Supplies Inc. Finally, we strapped on an Android-based mobile phone with the most basic data plan available and took to the big blue skies.

The quadcopter is designed to fly long ranges at supersonic speeds, so we’re not going to be limited to tracking influence Inside the Beltway. (Can you say Paris Air Show?) Stay tuned for the partner Drone Docket™ mobile app (iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, and Windows 8) that will allow anyone to follow scheduled appearances of Transparency Drone. We plan to get an inside look on fundraisers that we know about from the Political Party Time calendar and perhaps hover over the Organizing for Action headquarters in Chicago. Just who are President Obama’s big benefactors?

To cover the costs of its voracious power needs and ridiculous data caps, Transparency Drone will also be available to stand in line for committee hearings for any individual or company, at a flat rate of just $50.

The, um, sky’s the limit when it comes to future plans for our Transparency Drone. Already we’re envisioning live overhead shots of Washington’s cityscape with Sunlight data overlaid to make the centers of influence transparent. Alas, so far, no one has awarded us the Google Glasses we need to make this dream a reality. Donations anyone?

Happy April Fool's day from everyone here at the Sunlight Foundation.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), a co-sponsor and major supporter of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), deleted a retweet of an analysis of contributions to lawmakers from pro-CISPA companies. MapLight looked at the powerful House Intelligence Committee, where Rep. Rogers serves as Chairman, and followed campaign contributions to the members who are currently considering the bill that would allow companies to share more information on Internet traffic and users with the U.S. government.

Rep. Rogers, or possibly a member of his staff, retweeted the story that identified that members of the House Intelligence Committee "have received, on average, 15 times more money in campaign contributions from pro-CISPA organizations than from anti-CISPA organizations." He retweeted MapLight's tweet of this information from his iPhone and after 23 minutes thought better of it and removed it. Fortunately the Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops project caught it and archived this change of message and of heart. According to the MapLight piece, Rep. Rogers received $214,750 from interest groups that support CISPA.

To follow all the action and updates on CISPA, check out our collection of alerts in Scout.

The Sunlight Foundation's Capitol Words project has finished processing Senator Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the C.I.A. from the Congressional Record. We took the text of Sen. Paul's statements (not questions from other Senators) from the two sections of the record (filibuster start and the Unanimous Consent continuation) and created the above word cloud. Click through for the full-sized version.

Last week the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, was reintroduced by Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD). The best way to stay on top of the latest developments is through the Sunlight Foundation's Scout that will notify you on actions or mentions of the bill. I've set up a collection of alerts about CISPA that you can easily follow to keep you updated.

The collection starts with the alert on the recently introduced CISPA bill that will send you an email or text message for any official activity and votes on this bill including notices of upcoming hearings and when it's coming to the floor. The CISPA collection also has alerts you can follow about speeches in Congress that use the phrase "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act" or "CISPA" and, for those interested in wider coverage, has alerts for any mentions of "Cybersecurity" in federal regulations and state-level bills. It's just a few clicks to follow the full collection of CISPA alerts, cherry-pick favorites or create your own custom ones at Scout.SunlightFoundation.com.

Scout is free and easy for anyone to use, just ask Harvard's Paul D. Thacker that recently wrote this in a Life on the Hill blog post entitled, "Tips for Congressional Staffers: Why Are You Not Using Scout?":

I’ll ask the question again: why are you NOT using Scout? If you work on the Hill, tracking legislation, new amendments, or your boss’s speeches, you need Scout. If you work as a reporter, tracking Members, you need Scout. If you work at a nonprofit, tracking Members and new policy, you need Scout.

After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

If you're interested in your state lawmaker, you'll be able to get notifications for their actions, a map of their district, voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance records from Influence Explorer, local news articles and contact information. If you're curious about a particular piece of legislation, Open States allows you to check on its status, find the sponsors, break down votes, view bill text and all supporting documents. Our powerful search capabilities allow you to find similar topics across states and view overview pages for each state, chamber and committee.

Each state's website has different quirks and the process of collecting and scraping legislative data into one unified, reliable and machine-readable format was a long challenging process. Here's a brief video about the story behind Open States:

To get started visit OpenStates.org and enter any U.S. address, browse a state from the drop-down or enter a term you're interested in into the search box in the top right corner. For a more thorough walkthrough of the site, please join us for a free training webinar on Friday, February 22nd from 1-2pm.

Legislative information is also available for previous and special sessions, making Open States an important archive of data that often disappears when a new session begins or a new state website is unveiled. The archives will vary from state to state based on when we scraped their sites and how much information they display.

Open States also has a companion iPhone and iPad app to easily browse the data on the go. All the data seen in Open States is available through our API or by bulk download and the code is open sourced and available on GitHub here. If you are interested in contributing to the project, feel free to join the Open States google group here. Some notable uses of Open States data includes NPR's StateImpact project and this visualization from MinnPost.com.

The Open States project would not be possible without the help of our volunteers and the generous financial support from the Rita Allen Foundation, Minnesota Historical Society and Open Society Foundations.

In a few hours, President Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union address to update Congress and the public on his administration's priorities. In addition to the usual contest of claps and ovations v. frowns and silence, there are sure to be many reactions across social media. Along with many citizens following at home, members of Congress will be commenting including Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) who promises to be "live-tweeting official responses to the Address, debunking myths and fact-checking the President." The Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops is the best spot to track the bloopers among these rapid responses. We've just finished a full audit to make sure we follow as many official and campaign accounts of those in power.

Perhaps in preparation for an evening of active twittering and in fear of making Politwoops, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) deleted a tweet simply reading "Test" and Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) deleted one saying "This one is for Politwoops." As our alert Jake Harper discovered earlier today, members of Congress are already getting a little over-eager with their thumbs. Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), who is no stranger to historical mix-ups, plainly (and incorrectly) tweeted: "Abraham #Lincoln was the 14th President of the United States." Instead of a correction, she opted to simply say "Happy Birthday President Abraham #Lincoln!"

Previous events that caused a flurry of Politwoops included the debates from the 2012 elections when a number of Republicans reacted negatively to Joe Biden and Rep. Ele claimed Mitt Romney "shot his whole wad in the first debate." The incorrect news that the Supreme Court struck down the individual mandate was also a moment of regret caught by Politwoops. So if you're watching the State of the Union, be sure to keep a tab of Politwoops open to follow the conversation of members of Congress that they may wish you hadn't heard.