Last year we called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), H.R. 3523 in the 112th Congress, "terrible on transparency," because of a provision that would exempt a broad and poorly defined swath of information from the Freedom of Information Act.

CISPA is back in the 113th Congress and not much has changed. According to OpenTheGovernment.org, the bill still contains language that would exempt all "cybersecurity threat information" shared under the act from the FOIA. This is a dangerous and unnecessary precedent to set. As we noted last year, implementing a broad exception for poorly defined information without a public hearing "is irresponsible and should be opposed."

The Congressional debate over CISPA is currently taking place behind the closed doors of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Chairman Mike Rogers has announced his committee's intent to mark up and vote on CISPA this month and a committee spokesperson has suggested that it will meet behind closed doors next week to consider the bill.  The committee does not appear to be planning any public hearing or vote.

Along with 40 other groups, Sunlight has signed a letter urging the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to hold any markup of CISPA in the open.

The committee should consider CISPA in the light of day. CISPA has the potential to affect the lives of every American and has drawn criticism from numerous privacy groups as well as the White House. Legislation this critical, and with this much potential to hinder the public's ability to hold their government accountable, deserves to be debated in full public view, not hidden behind closed doors.

You can follow CISPA using Scout, Sunlight's legislative tracking tool.

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.

Plastic.

We weren't  looking for it, but thanks to Sunlight's Scout alert system for tracking legislative and regulatory actions, we found it--and the result was this story on our Reporting site: ExxonMobil lobbies consumer agency on phthalates.

One of the alerts I have set up in Scout is the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the independent agency that regulates the safety of consumer products. In the past, Sunlight has followed controversy around a public CPSC consumer complaint database launched in 2011 that is opposed by industry and often under attack by congressional Republicans.

The alert that came my way recently was this one regarding a final rule the commission was publishing in the Federal Register dealing with pthalates. Pthalates are plasticizers that are under scrutiny for possible health effects, particuarly in children. Specifically, the rule addressed standards for phthalates in parts of toys that are not accessible to children.

Originally I thought I'd do a story focusing on this rule, but as I talked to advocates working on the issue they brought up another, more encompassing issue. As I soon learned, the CPSC, under mandate from a 2008 law known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was nearly a year late with a study on the health effects of these chemicals, and nobody knew quite why.

As I dug into the topic I realized it had a number of elements that Sunlight cares about: public data and influence. As it turns out, the advisory committee, known as CHAP, or Chronic Hazard Advisory Panel, that was conducting the review of science around phthalates for the CPSC conducted its deliberations largely in public. The Commission maintains a spot on its website that gathers together records of all of the committee's meetings, including links to materials submitted by participants and logs of the attendees, some of which took place at the commission's office in Bethesda, Md.,  some of them by teleconference.

For us, this was a gold mine of information. I was particuarly interested in the meeting logs, as we have conducted analyses in the past on similar logs voluntarily disclosed by financial agencies on rulemaking for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But while it is commendable that the CPSC makes these logs public, like those at the financial agencies, the format varies widely, ranging from handwritten lists like this one to pdfs like this one. There was no standardization and no easy way to put thse into a spreadsheet to figure out who was attending these meetings the most.

So Jake Harper, a Sunlight fellow, and I went to work, typing these records into a database by hand. After doing some standardization of company names and some sleuth work we were able to code these participants by type, such as "industry," and "ngo" for "non governmental organization." A pattern quickly emerged: industry attendees far outweighed nongovernmental advocates, and ExxonMobil, its lawfirm Latham and Watkins, and the American Chemistry Council, fierce advocates for the safety of phthalates, participated the most.

Of course we'd far prefer that federal agencies not only make such information public but do so in a downloadable, machine readable format. Sunlight was able to marshall the resources to do the data entry in this case, but we can't in every case, nor do we think we or others should have to do so.

So: a story found sideways from a Scout regulatory alert that led to an interesting story about how regulatory sausage is influenced after laws are passed, and which showed how a government agency that does better than most in making information public could still improve. Plastics.

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.

This morning the House Judiciary Committee kicked off their first hearing on immigration reform and it's a great opportunity to remind folks invested in this topic to utilize our Scout project to track developments. I've pulled together a number of terms relating to immigration into this public collection to help you find when they appear in state or federal legislation, speeches in Congress, regulations and more.

To create this public collection, I simply created individual alerts for terms I knew related to immigration. These included general phrases like "immigration" or "naturalization" and more technical terms like "I-130" (the form to petition for relatives to receive U.S. lawful permanent residence) and commonly discussed legislation like the "DREAM Act." I tagged all these alerts with "immigration" that then creates a private collection of the terms you've tagged. I incorporated the RSS feed of Sunlight blog posts tagged as immigration, hit the "Make Collection Public" button and added a brief description of the collection. Now anyone can follow all the terms I've made or click through to each term and fine tune what they get alerts about. This is a great way to encourage folks to follow terms you're interested in and help others track the actions of government.

What a year 2012 has been! We faced an onslaught of unprecedented amounts of political spending. In this post-Citizens United landscape, it was even harder to connect the dots and know who was paying for the campaigns and what they'll get in return. Dark money rained down, super PACs sprouted like mushrooms and negativity reigned all while our Congress experienced one of its least productive years, stalling meaningful reforms like the DISCLOSE Act.

But, all was not dark. During 2012, the beginnings of something very positive started to take root as the movement for online open government grew on a significant scale. This year, we launched a major global initiative, collaborating with transparency organizations to define best practices and norms for open government around the world. We joined more than 100 organizations in a Declaration on Parliamentary Openness to improve openness, transparency and citizen participation in the legislative process on an international scale.

To see all what we've accomplished this year, please watch our 2012 year-in-review video and share it with someone you know.

• our popular Politwoops, hailed by TIME magazine as one of the best websites of 2012 for creating a permanent record for tweets deleted by elected officials.
• Ad Hawk, our "Shazam for Political Ads" that earned the very cool rating of “Essential iPhone App of 2012” by Gizmodo.
• Scout, which alerts you on actions that federal regulators, Congress or your state legislature take on a specific bill or issue you care about.

2013 already promises to be an exciting year with new initiatives that will give you more opportunities to join us in shining sunlight on politics and government. If you want to be kept in the loop about these new developments -- and help us continue our nonpartisan research and tech development -- please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to the Sunlight Foundation today.

We won't be able to do it without you, so please stand with us to keep politics and our government transparent and accountable.

Thanks and best wishes for a happy new year!

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a foundational law that guarantees US citizens the right to request and receive information from federal government agencies, with some relatively narrow exceptions. In a move reminiscent of the the Department of Justice's attempt to defang FOIA, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service—which mediates labor disputes around the United States—just finalized some changes to their FOIA rules that appear to raise the price and difficulty for citizens requesting information.

For example, current law offers a straightforward public interest fee waiver or discount:

Documents are to be furnished without charge or at reduced levels if disclosure of the information is in the public interest; that is, because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the Government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.

The new rule changes this to explicitly say that this determination is up to FMCS, and to leave room for the FMCS to deny a waiver even if the request is judged to be in the public interest (emphasis mine):

Documents may be furnished without charge or at reduced levels if FMCS determines that disclosure of the information is in the public interest; that is, because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the Government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.

There is a raft of other changes that raise fees, increase standard processing times, allow the agency to label a request as "complex" and put it into a longer queue, and allow indefinite delays to processing.

Interestingly, two policies are being removed entirely - one that says dispute notices are disclosable, and one that mandates that the agency report to Congress what requests were denied and why. The regulation states these are removed because "they are neither required by law nor necessary to interpret the law." It's not clear whether the agency now believes that the original legislative statute is sufficient to guarantee these policies, or whether the agency no longer believes they are required to implement them.

These regulations were first proposed in 1999, then re-proposed in 2007, and only made final on Tuesday, November 6th. The second and final versions each say that no public comments were received on the version before it.

If you'd like to analyze what this rule changes, the easiest way I've found is comparing the rule's web version (or public inspection PDF) on FederalRegister.gov to Cornell's online Code of Federal Regulations. To follow ongoing changes to FOIA around the government, I recommend using Scout, a tool we built to do just that, and how this particular rule came to our attention.