Before considering an amendment to combat Citizens United, perhaps there's another approach to limit the ability of well-heeled special interests to give to political organizations that act as surrogates for politicians.
Continue readingObama administration agrees with Sunlight: Agencies should disclose what data they keep private
A Sunlight FOIA request has turned into effective policy: The Obama administration now instructs all agencies to illuminate not just public datasets, but private assets as well. It ensures the public will have the fullest knowledge of agency data holdings.
Continue readingLiberal dark money group eyeing Iowa TV ads
A left-leaning dark money group could go up with the first Democratic-allied Iowa ads as early as this weekend, just as Hillary Clinton, the party's presidential frontrunner, called for an end to "unaccountable" money in politics.
Continue readingOpening up Indiana’s hard to reach legislative data
Accessing Indiana's legislative documents is hard to do in a consistent way. So, we created a work-around that obtains bill text and makes it available to anyone via our Open States tool.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How civil society can nudge Nigeria to deliver on its open data promise
Nigeria's open-source community has high hopes, but low trust in government and little internet access. That didn't stop Reboot, which created a dataset on school construction — and then used the data to open a valuable civic dialogue.
Continue readingThe Week on Politwoops: Politicians duped into retweets
Politwoops is starting to see more opportunists trick politicians into retweeting embarrassing things that they later delete.
Continue readingSunlight Foundation joins coalition demanding an end to illegal mass surveillance
Sunlight has united with our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in an effort to stop mass surveillance under the Patriot Act. Join us at Fight215.org.
Continue readingCivil society in Ukraine takes a stand for open government
Transparency International Ukraine, with the support of broader Ukrainian civil society, has sent an open letter to Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk demanding that the country fulfills commitments to the Open Government Partnership.
Continue readingTeam Rand tries to quash anonymous attack ad
A lawyer for Rand Paul's presidential campaign told TV stations that they could lose their broadcasting licenses if they continued airing the "false and misleading" advertisements.
Continue readingCorporations get more breaks on Tax Day
If corporations shouldered the same ratio of the tax burden relative to individuals that it did throughout the 1950s, they’d have paid an additional $560 billion to Uncle Sam in 2014.
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