One year ago, the U.S. government launched Data.gov, a central plank in its Open Government initiative to make it easier for the public to find and use official datasets. The site has grown from an initial 47 databases to more than 272,000, and attracted nearly 100 million hits. It inspired eight American cities – including San Francisco and New York City – eight states, and six other nations to launch similar sites of their own. By most metrics, the project has been a success.
But government transparency advocates say the site has plenty of room for improvement. Gabriela Schneider ...
Free repository offers copies of PACER federal court records
Want to see the federal indictment of a mortgage fraudster? You got it. Need the docket for a U.S. appeals court case? It’s yours. All with the click of a mouse — and your 16-digit credit card number.
For a price, federal court filings have been available via the Internet through Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) system since the early 1990s. But its fee of 8 cents per page is too steep for public documents, critics say.
Steve Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, says public access to federal courts ...
Citizens United: North Carolina’s possible response
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case has rendered 24 states' election laws unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United reversed a provision of the McCain-Feingold act that prohibited any electioneering communication—defined as advertising via broadcast, cable or satellite that is paid for by corporations or labor unions. Many states have acted fast to counter corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections by passing laws that force disclosure of all independent expenditures in near real time. The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group has decided to report what each of ...
Continue readingStates of Transparency: Illinois
The Open Government Directive encouraged states to put valuable government data online. In this series we're reviewing each state's efforts in this direction.
This week: Illinois
Website: www.accountability.illinois.gov
In a state where good government groups have been working to increase transparency since the days of Al Capone, how is Illinois doing in bringing their transparency efforts into the 21st century? Quite well, say open government boosters like US Public Interest Research Group, who recently ranked the state third in their review of state websites designed to get crucial spending data online. Still, local transparency advocates ... Continue readingCitizens United: New York, California and Washington
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case has rendered 24 states' election laws unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United reversed a provision of the McCain-Feingold act that prohibited any electioneering communication—defined as advertising via broadcast, cable or satellite that is paid for by corporations or labor unions. Many states have acted fast to counter corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections by passing laws that force disclosure of all independent expenditures in near real time. The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group has decided to report what each of ...
Continue readingOpponents of net neutrality attending congressional telecom meetings spend more on lobbying
Last Friday, two congressional committees held closed door discussions with 31 representatives from industry and activist groups to discuss writing... View Article
Continue readingStories to start the day
1) Eight lawmakers use earmarks to fund charities that they have close personsal connections to. 2) The Right to Know... View Article
Continue readingCole§law: Visualizing the US Legal Code
To take a break from the routine and our official projects, the Sunlight Labs organized an internal "labs olympics", in which teams would compete for outrageous prizes by building an extracurricular project. This installment brings you the contribution from "Team Intern".
The Team
As team intern, we felt we had something to prove. Could four unseasoned new recruits withstand the blazing glory of the veteran sunlighters? On the team were Charlie DeTar (from MIT, working at Sunlight Labs on Transparency Data), Dan Schneiderman (from RIT, working on the Fifty State Project), Michael Stephens (from RPI, also with the Fifty State Project) and Ryan Wold (consultant, working on the National Data Catalog).
The Process
We started off on Monday morning with a couple of vague ideas of what we might work on (Some sort of direct message/twitter bot for RSS feeds? Something to do with mapping?). We kicked it off with a brain storming session for a couple of hours, putting ideas on post-it notes, sorting them into categories, pruning, and we eventually settled on a "Legalese Translator" service: a wiki which lets people annotate legalese documents – such as Terms of Service and Privacy Policies – with more human-readable summaries, and eye-catching icons indicating major problem areas (such as the company asserting they can change the TOS at any time). We started poking around the MediaWiki codebase to see what it would take to do a few extensions to suit our needs. After spending a couple of hours on this, we started to second guess ourselves: would we be able to pull something off with this worthy of a demo? Challenges included coming up with a taxonomy of legal problems (none of us are lawyers), coming up with enough seed data to make the wiki work, and a realization that the vast majority of the work in a project like this would involve community management, expectation setting, and organization, none of which were particularly strong points in any of our expertise.
So, at 1pm on Monday with 1/4 of the alloted time already consumed, we shifted gears. Gathered around a whiteboard, we almost instantly converged on another topic: mapping the complex references in bodies of law. Legal code tends to refer to itself, often in noodley, snakey paths that are hard to traverse, and most of the laws were written before such a thing as "hypertext" existed. This stayed in our general topic area of "legalese", but gave us a much more finite and concrete objective: visualizing and navigating references in laws. We started exploring a few different bodies of law to choose one for the project, and settled on the US Code – a gargantuan body comprising more than 50 titles broken into more than 60,000 sections with a decidedly complex subsection hierarchy. To get started, we made use of Cornell University's XML translation of the code. For the rest of the day, we worked on importing the code into a relational database from which we could generate the reference hierarchies necessary for our navigation and visualization tools. And a name.... we needed a name. Since we were dealing with the law in a shredded and stringy form, we decided to call it "Coleslaw", or if you prefer, "Cole§law".
The US code is awfully complex. Among the 50 titles of the US Code, there are 168,000 references – including those within and between sections. Now on to the eye candy.
Continue readingUS Russian Anti-Corruption
Last week, I had the pleasure to serve as a cochair to the anti-corruption and institutional integrity working group for... View Article
Continue readingHow the Supreme Court Misunderestimates The Power of Technology in Doe v. Reed
Having described the ticking time bomb in the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Doe v. Reed, which concerns disclosure... View Article
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