After a few posts on the Open House Project blog, the conversation about the CITP paper “Government Data and the... View Article
Continue readingIn Broad Daylight: News from Congress
Today’s news from Capitol Hill includes the never ending Jack Abramoff investigation, congressional staff still running for K Street, and... View Article
Continue readingPersonal Financial Disclosure Forms: What They Can Tell You
The Personal Financial Disclosure forms that lawmakers are required to file annually are the little explored powerhouse of information about... View Article
Continue readingBig News In Investigative Journalism
Craig sez: ProPublica launches. The site has some nice features: Scandal Watch, 7 different RSS feeds, and a nice “breaking... View Article
Continue readingThe Internet As Conduit For Congress and the Public
Yesterday, the Congressional Management Foundation released the report, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement, in which... View Article
Continue readingReflections on Election Laws
Bob Bauer, political campaign attorney who invented the legal justification for "soft money" and now council to the Obama campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, authors the Web site More Soft Money Hard Law on the side. Late last week, Bauer posted a transcript of comments he gave to a panel of the American Constitutional Society on the topic of "Can Campaign Finance Reform Actually Work?" In his comments titled "Enforcement Expectations and Hard Calls," Bauer writes that we should temper our expectations about campaign law by what we want enforced. "On the basics," Bauer writes, "the law has been plentifully enforced." But hard issues exist in election law, and "tough calls" inherently exist. He warns against putting too much expectation on the law, and to strive to reach "comprehensible and rationally administrable" regulations. As an example, he praises the Federal Election Commission for adopting broad exemptions of campaign finance laws regarding blogging and other Internet uses for campaign-related purposes.The FEC wrote rules that places Internet activities within the media exemption, activity that should largely be free of regulation, he argues.
Continue readingIs Your Favorite Public Interest Group (Unnecessarily) Copyrighting Their Work?
When writing articles on legislation for the Congressional wiki I work on, Congresspedia.org, I often look around at what the various public interest groups have to say about what's in a bill and what their take on it is. Many groups write their reports so well that I'd often like to just copy and paste their whole take into the wiki, exposing their message to its many readers. Unfortunately, all to often I'm stopped in my tracks by a copyright notice at the bottom of a group's website. Many - perhaps most - public interest groups are unnecessarily hamstringing their own effectiveness and reach by using the same copyright protections that prevent Mickey Mouse knock-offs and xeroxed Harry Potter books. Our copyright laws are designed to protect profits by keeping information from being freely disseminated, but unlike Disney or Simon & Schuster, most public interest groups want their research, opinions and publications to spread, unencumbered, through the public.
The advent of the Web has infinitely expanded that potential as reports no longer have to be mail-ordered or press releases picked up by reporters to get your message out. That is, unless you copyright your materials, preventing them from finding their way into Wikipedia, blogs or the classroom. You may even be copyrighting materials without knowing it - since 1989, U.S. law assumes an implicit copyright on all published materials, regardless of whether a webpage or document has a copyright notice.
Continue readingBuilding a Compendium of Earmark Stories
Lizzie Nolan, our communications assistant extraordinaire, has been compiling links of stories generated by APME's earmark project. I'm going to toss a few additional links her way, but if we're missing some, feel free to leave them in the comments section and we'll add them.
Continue readingEarmarks Unrelated to Campaign Contributions, Earmark Recipients Claim
In the Denver Post, Anne C. Mulkern reports on the earmarks of Rep. Doug Lamborn and finds one of those "only in Washington" wordings that make the head spin:
Lamborn made seven requests for projects tied to specific companies. Of those, five were to businesses whose political action committees had given him campaign contributions. Officials with two of the companies, Goodrich Corp. and Aeroflex Inc., said there's no connection between their contributions and their requests for earmarks. The political action committees support lawmakers who back defense spending, both said. The committee wants to help lawmakers who are the most responsive to their business needs, said Thomas Bezas, Aeroflex's vice president of government and trade. "We want to do everything we can to make sure they stay in office," Bezas said. "The longer they stay in office, the more it benefits our company."So they make contributions to a member who's most responsive to their business needs, who supports defense spending, but their business needs have nothing to do with earmarks, and awarding defense earmarks is unrelated to defense spending? Continue reading
Public Medicare Data
(from the OHP blog)
Add another tally to the list of public conversations about federal data availability.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of Health and Human Services, is hosting another in their series of "Open Door Forums", to discuss Medicare Part D Data regulations. (See here for CMS's description of the new rule and its data availability implications, and here for an example of coverage of their conference call, and for conference call details.)
This is the nitty-gritty of public data availability. A new public project has created a complex and rich public data resource, detailing the ways that the federal government spends money on drugs through Medicare.
The compromise here isn't obvious. Whole scale release of the data would violate probably both beneficiary and commercial privacy, so that isn't really an option. This is, however, public data, with a very clear public benefit. A very large and new public program is generating a huge amount of new and potentially useful information about the way we use prescription drugs. CMS is struggling with how to balance privacy/commercial concerns with the public good involved in releasing the information.
Clear federal information availability guidelines would probably be helpful in cases like this, where there's an immense stake for everyone involved. Insofar as the information is public, then it should ideally be available for bulk public download and analysis, given that that arrangement doesn't violate other concerns. Negotiating a new terrain of public data benefits and pervasive data will take measured dialog and analysis (as I wrote on Friday), so it's heartening to see an agency engaged with the communities affected by their work. I wonder if there's a place for the public access community within the debate around Medicare data, although my knowledge of health issues makes opinionated involvement impossible.
For other examples of similar officially sponsored public conversations about public data, see the USPTO's Public PAIR discussions, the EPA's recent webcast, Sen. Durbin's broadband dialog, Rep. Honda's new education legislation, the development of the original e-gov act (partially done online), and the Open House Project.
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