Sunlight Before Signing: Turning the Corner!
As I noted on Monday, the White House has begun posting the bills Congress sends down Pennsylvania Avenue so they can get a final public review. This was a promise President Obama made on the campaign trail.
The posting of bills actually began some time ago. I mistakenly believed that a promise administration officials made to the New York Timeshad been broken. But with no link trail leading from the Whitehouse.gov homepage to the posted bills, there was no way to find them. This was only technical sunlight, not the actual warming, disinfecting rays the president promised. So, sadly, we can’t put the many bills that got posted this way in the “win” column.
With a link on the homepage pointing to bills awaiting the president’s signature, a new era in Sunlight Before Signing is about to dawn. The White House’s current dismal SBS percentage (1 for 114, or .009) will be rising soon, and could ultimately be quite high!
Did the administration fail to execute on this simple promise from the beginning? Yes. But the good news is that we’re going to see implementation: average Americans will get a look at the bills that come to the president’s desk before he signs them, with an opportunity to say their piece.
That’s simple transparency, and as I’ve articulated elsewhere it will have salutary effects, reducing last-minute shenanigans in Congress.
Before we take a look at the full Sunlight Before Signing chart, here are some of the numbers:
- President Obama has signed 114 bills into law.
- Of those, 86, or 75%, have been held at the White House for five or more days as a matter of course. Simply posting them accessibly on Whitehouse.gov for comment would have fulfilled the president’s pledge.
- Forty-seven bills (41%) have been posted on Whitehouse.gov for five days, but without links leading visitors or search engines to them, they can’t be counted as fulfillments of the Sunlight Before Signing promise.
- One bill has been posted online for for five days, accessible to the public for their review, before receiving the president’s signature: The DTV Delay Act, Public Law 111-4.
Without further ado, the chart that lays out the Obama administration’s Sunlight Before Signing record so far: Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Sunlight Before Signing Progress: Whitehouse.gov Encourages Public Comment
The White House’s web site, Whitehouse.gov, has begun posting the bills Congress sends down Pennsylvania Avenue so they can get a final public review. This actually began some time ago, but a link from the home page now directs visitors (and search engines) to the bills that await the president’s signature.
This is an important step toward fulfilling President Obama’s campaign promise to post the bills he receives from Congress online for five days before he signs them. I’ve written about it several times, most recently here.
Take a look for yourself: On the Whitehouse.gov home page, a link at the bottom of the “Featured Legislation” column says “Comment on Pending Legislation.”
Currently, four bills are listed there, arranged in order by the dates they were posted. The final language isn’t posted at the link, and it takes a little sophistication to find the final version at the linked-to page on the Thomas system, but this is substantial progress.
Kudos to the White House for moving toward full implementation of President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Whitehouse.gov Switches to Drupal
There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it.
The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost and high security.
Arnold Kling wrote recently on the Library of Economics and Liberty blog relating the work Elinor Ostrom did to win the Nobel prize in economics to how the Internet enables private provision of public goods—no regulation, little to no centralized authority at all.
Open source is nothing if not an example of that, and it’s good to see this use of open source joining many others across the big, beautiful Internet.
Obama Transparency Update II
An editorial in the New York Times the other day reminded me that it’s a good time for another look at the Obama administration’s record on transparency.
The editorial lauded a new policy of disclosure for the Secret Service’s logs of White House visits, naming the visitor, who set up the meeting, where it was held, and how long it lasted. The Times gushed: “[T]he administration is well on course to be the most open in modern times, with such earlier initiatives as the online Data.gov to allow citizen access to huge amounts of federal agency information.”
These things are good—and the White House certainly means well—but I’m a little less enthusiastic, and I think the Times set the bar at the wrong height: A ham sandwich is more transparent than recent administrations. Candidate Obama made some firm commitments about transparency that are better for gauging his performance.
Disclosure of White House visitor logs is a small step forward, but I agree with the Times that a three to four month delay in revealing visits is too long. Much of this information is computerized at the White House and could be revealed in real time or within 24 hours. Also, visits that are not revealed for security or diplomatic reasons should be noted as such so that the quantity of such visits can be tracked over time and misuse of this secrecy ferreted out.
It’s also slightly ironic to see the Times sing President Obama’s transparency praises while the White House flouts a transparency commitment made to the paper back in June. For a story called “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye, “[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online.” It hadn’t happened yet when I wrote about it in July, and it still hasn’t happened, even though 22 more bills have passed into law since then.
Below the jump is an updated ”Sunlight Before Signing” chart, reflecting all the bills President Obama has signed to date. Still only one (of sixty-one bills) has been posted on Whitehouse.gov for five days before signing. (That’s a .016 average, baseball fans.)
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
A Bizarre Privacy Indictment
Page one of today’s Washington Times—above the fold—has a fascinating story indicting the White House for failing to disclose that it will collect and retain material posted by visitors to its pages on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. The story is fascinating because so much attention is being paid to it. (It was first reported, as an aside at least, by Major Garrett on Fox News a month ago.)
The question here is not over the niceties of the Presidential Records Act, which may or may not require collection and storage of the data. It’s over people’s expectations when they use the Internet.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.
Of course, the White House is free to disclose or announce anything it wants. It might be nice to disclose this particular data practice. But is it really a breach of privacy—and, through failure to notify, transparency—if there isn’t a distinct disclosure about this particular data collection?
Let’s talk about what people expect when they use the Internet and social networking sites. Though the Internet is a gigantic copying machine, some may not know that data is collected online. They may imagine that, in the absence of notice, the data they post will not be warehoused and redistributed, even though that’s exactly what the Internet does.
There can be special problems when it is the government collecting the information. The White House’s “flag@whitehouse.gov” tip line was concerning because it asked Americans to submit information about others. There is a history of presidents amassing “enemies” lists. But this is not the complaint with White House tracking of data posted on its social networking sites.
People typically post things online because they want publicity for those things—often they want publicity for the fact that they are the ones posting, too. When they write letters, they give publicity to the information in the letter and the fact of having sent it. When they hold up signs, they seek publicity for the information on the signs, and their own role in publicizing it.
How strange that taking note of the things people publicize is taken as a violation of their privacy. And failing to notify them of the fact they will be observed and recorded is a failure of transparency.
America, for most of what you do, you do not get “notice” of the consequences. Instead, in the real world and online, you grown-ups are “on notice” that information you put online can be copied, stored, retransmitted, and reused in countless ways. Aside from uses that harm you, you have little recourse against that after you have made the decision to release information about yourself.
The White House is not in the wrong here. If there’s a lesson, it’s that people are responsible for their own privacy and need to be aware of how information moves in the online environment.
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