According to data from Sunlight's Influence Explorer, National Hockey League owners provided more than $3 million to politicians, PACs and independent expenditure groups during the 2012 election cycle.
Continue readingCalling Volunteers: Help Ensure Public Records Remain Public in Every State
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to uphold states’ rights to limit public information request to in-state requests, will likely hamper access... View Article
Continue readingSupreme Court FOI Decision Foolish and Shortsighted
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that generally prohibits non-Virginians from making use of its Freedom of Information law. As part of its decision in McBurney v. Young, the Court held that the Constitution's Article IV "Privileges and Immunities" clause does not extend to a non-Virginian's right to access public information on equal terms with Virginia citizens. The Constitution says that "the Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States," and the clause was intended to prevent a state from treating citizens of another state in a discriminatory manner. This ruling allows states like Virginia, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Tennessee to continue to make the benefits of their freedom of information laws available only to their citizens. The Court squares this logical circle by concluding that the access to public information made available under state FOI laws are not "basic to the maintenance or well-being of the Union," and thus not a "fundamental" privilege or immunity the Constitution was intended to protect. It baldly states, without evidence, that "there is no contention that the Nation's unity founded in [the absence of FOIA laws prior to the 1960s], or that it is suffering now because of the citizens-only FOIA provisions that several States have enacted."
Continue readingTop ten things to know about TCamp
Greetings TCamper!
If you are not one of the 620 people that purchased tickets this year, we will have a streaming google hangout at: http://snlg.ht/tcamp2013hangout. Streaming begins at 10am and will continue at least to 11 each day.
1. When is TCamp ?
- Saturday and Sunday, May 4th - 5th
- Registration begins at 9AM on Saturday.
- Conference starts at 10AM -- sharp! -- each day.
The Marvin Center - 3rd floor
The George Washington University
800 21st Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
Do members of Congress headline fundraisers in exchange for floor votes?
We at the Sunlight Foundation spend a lot of time looking over the political fundraising invitations that keep pouring into our Political Party Time website. So we were very excited to read a paper by Yale Political Science Professor Eleanor Neff Powell, who used our Party Time data to investigate an often underappreciated aspect of the political fundraising circle: headlining for others. By carefully analyzing the corpus of fundraising invitations that we’ve compiled over the years, Powell was able to uncover evidence of an economy of favors in the Washington fundraising circuit. Members of Congress who headline events for other members get something in return – votes for their legislation. Or, as Powell puts it:
Controlling for the ideological similarity of their past voting records, a Democratic Congressman is 5.5% more likely to vote for a bill for each fundraising event the bill’s sponsor has headlined for them in the past (Republican Congressmen are 2.5% more likely). These results show a strong relationship between fundraising assistance and subsequent legislative voting behavior and suggest potentially serious consequences for representationContinue reading
2Day in #OpenGov 4/30/2013
NEWS ROUNDUP:
- When the CFPB rolled out expanded access to its consumer complaint database recently the information lacked a certain amount of context. Now, the agency is working on a pilot project that would fill in some outstanding details on consumer complaints about credit cards that they hope can be expanded to all of the complaints in the database. (Tech President)
- With a week left until election day the increasingly absurd race between Mark "Appalachian what?" Sanford and Elizabeth "Don't call me Colbert (but really, do call me Colbert" Busch keeps making headlines. Yesterday, it was revealed that the DCCC is spending to ensure victory against the Zombie corpse of Sanford's political career which, despite being abandoned by the national GOP, is still managing to raise enough money to compete in the final week. (Roll Call, Roll Call, Washington Post)
- Vice President Biden came out in favor of disclosure of a Senate Intelligence report on the use of torture or enhanced interrogation that is currently classified. He was agreeing with a sentiment expressed by Sen. John McCain at a joint event held on Friday. (Roll Call)
- A national group of GOP donors supporting gay marriage is stepping up their efforts to persuade Republican lawmakers to switch positions on the issue. American Unity PAC and its lobbying arm American Unity fund are targeting state legislation, spending nearly $1 million in recent weeks in Rhose Island, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, Utah, and Minnesota. (Washington Post)
- The growing number of Senators that have recently announced their impending retirements can look to some former House members for cues on how to spend the money sitting in their campaign accounts. A number of recently retired lawmakers sent large sums to various charities, foundations, and educational institutes last quarter. (Roll Call)
- Paul Singer, a major Republican bundler, is quietly inserting his influence into the immigration debate. He recently cut a six figure check to the National Immigration Forum, a group that works to get conservatives to support reform. (POLITICO)
- The Supreme Court upheld a lower court opinion that said state government agencies are only required to respond to FOIA requests from residents of their state. A man from California and another from Rhode Island, who was a former resident of Virginia, sued the state for access to state records, but were denied based on their residency. (The Verge)
- A new report suggests that the CIA has been delivering bags of cash to the offices of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on a regular basis for more than a decade. They payments reportedly help the government pay off war lords, fund diplomatic efforts, and likely provide a little extra lining for their pockets. The White House declined to comment after the story broke. (POLITICO, New York Times)
Sanford continues to draw big money in S.C. race versus Colbert Busch
How many political lives does former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford have? Even though much of the Republican establishment abandoned him after news broke that his ex-wife is suing him for trespass, a stream of last-minute contribution reports shows that the bottom has not fallen out completely for the once-rising and now badly tarnished political star.
As he heads into the final week of this effort to win back his old House seat in a race against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, Sanford continues to reel in support from some prominent party mavericks, as well as some deep-pocketed donors. The two ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 4/29/2013
NEWS ROUNDUP:
- The George W. Bush Foundation, the organization responsible for funding the former President's library, released it 2010 and 2011 tax returns. The returns show that Bush raised almost $30 million for his library while still in office and that half of foundation's donations between 2010 and 2011 came from just 16 donors. (Roll Call)
- Immigration reform faces a unique hurdle as it races through the legislative process. Some of its strongest backers are "special interests," including business, labor, and religious groups, meanwhile the bill has some strong, grassroots opponents. (National Journal)
- Both the Democratic and Republican Senate campaign committees are working hard to pay down significant debts that they incurred during the 2012 cycle. Despite strong fundraising quarters the DSCC still owes $15 million while the NRSCC is down $9.5 million. (Roll Call)
- President Obama nominated Howard Shelanski to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Shelanski is currently the director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics and has worked as a professor at Georgetown law, in the Clinton administration, and for the law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell. (The Hill)
- CISPA, which passed the House last week, looks like it has met its match in the Senate for the second year in a row. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who chairs the Commerce Committee and has a seat on the Senate's Intelligence Committee has signaled his opposition, noting that the bill's privacy protections are insufficient, likely ending CISPA's chances in chamber. (ars technica)
- FWD.us, Mark Zuckerberg's vehicle into the political sphere, has added a couple of big tech names to its founders list. Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, and Bill Gates have added their clout, and presumably some of their money, to the organization. (The Hill)
Happy 7th Birthday to the Sunlight Foundation!
On April 26, 2006 the Sunlight Foundation began as an experiment to empower citizens and encourage transparency in government through... View Article
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Data at a crossroads – The big dilemma of what to do next in the fight for openness
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
With Sunlight`s growing involvement in the global open government movement, we are introducing some of the innovative and interesting open government tools and projects outside of the U.S. We welcome our first international guest blogger, Eva Vozárová, who works as an IT projects manager at the Slovak watchdog NGO Fair-play Alliance. She worked as a journalist for five years at the largest Slovak economic weekly, Trend, before joining FPA. Currently, she mostly works on open data-related activities. Eva will join us at TransparencyCamp next week, and it’s not too late to register for TCamp!
Slightly over a year ago, an important shift happened in the field of access to information in Slovakia. The government of the Prime Minister Iveta Radičová was due to leave office in a couple of weeks. The involved parties lost elections in March 2012 and were soon to be replaced by their opponents.
But in a final move before going out of business, the Cabinet Office decided to make a push for openness in Slovakia and launched an official governmental data portal at data.gov.sk. The whole process took about a month and was greatly helped by OKFN and their CKAN platform, which was used to power the portal. For the first time, Slovak government made a commitment to publish data proactively, systematically and in machine readable formats.
True, the data was not of very good quality at the beginning. Even now, a year later, it is still lacking in several aspects. The formats are often inconsistent, often linking to plain .html websites. The licensing is not sorted out at all with public licenses not being available under Slovak copyright law. And some of the most interesting datasets are still stuck in the process of being published. But anyway -- the shift happened and the data is slowly being released.
It was to a great extent thanks to the work of Slovak Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) that this shift happened at all. The Fair-play Alliance started working with data 10 years ago. In 2003 we first started requesting public data through FOIA requests, collecting it and analyzing it. Since then, we created an extensive database of public information called Datanest.sk -- a website storing loads of information about flows of public money in Slovakia (subsidies, EU funds, funding of political parties). In short, a website filled with as much corruption-related data as you can possibly get in Slovakia. The data is accessible and searchable through the web and is also available through a simple API. It’s far from perfect and it has been a long time in the making, but it was available long before the state started publishing its own data and even today, Datanest is still the only source to have published several interesting datasets.
The reason why we originally decided to go for data was pretty simple. As a watchdog organization made up of several former journalists, we wanted to focus on anti-corruption advocacy through publishing of corruption-related cases. In order to prepare these stories properly, we needed to look at hard evidence - and getting the data about public finances was simply the best way to go about it.
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