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Newspaper Crowdsources 700,000-Page Investigation of MP Expenses
projector writes with an interesting project from the UK: "The Guardian are crowd-sourcing the investigation of 700,000 pages of UK MPs' expenses data. Readers are being invited to categorize each document, transcribe the handwritten expenses details into an online form and alert the newspaper if any claims merit further investigation. 'Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked "investigate this!" and we'll take a closer look.'"
But I'm pretty sure that almost ANYONE in their shoes would have done the same...it's called the human condition. You are given the power to abuse something and you think nobody will notice....so you do. Flame away but i probably would have.
I argue because it's the internet....and I can.
Two things about crowdsourcing:
1) It is terribly efficient.
2) It solicits input from the public.
Interestingly enough, neither of those are directly related to truth.
Why don't our corporate controlled, drug-addled newspapers act like their British counterparts?
Ours is a direct republic, so in theory, our press must be more active in exposing the illegal, false and corrupt expense accounts of the numerous Ted Stevens clones that walk the same halls that Lincoln and Jackson walked.
Why don't our media have a daily expose show at 7 PM detailing the latest claims our diseased congressmen and senators claim as expenses?
British press is so Cool!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
As it happens though the claim for the duck island does not appear in the official expenses data as it's blacked out along with, I would guess, almost anything else likely to cause embarrassment for the MP.
Apparently once the fees office had blacked out the bits they didn't think the public should see the MPs had several months to look at their own claims and recommend any other sections they didn't think should be public so when you look at the actual claims, and some MPs are much worse than others, there is an awful lot you can't see.
What really pisses me off is the string of MPs saying
"Well my claim was completely within the rules and I have done nothing wrong however I now realise the rules were horribly wrong and fundamentally flawed so what we need to do is change the rules to make them stricter."
No ! What you need to do is behave in an honest and honourable fashion and not try to screw the system for as much as you think you can get away with.
Anyone who has seen the expenses will know that the important stuff is all blanked out.
There are pages that are entirely black in there.
There are pages that say things like:
"Dear xx, here is your invoice of £2,500 for the following work:" ...and then everything below it blanked out.
The BBC had a copy of Gordon Brown's uncensored expenses document and compared it to the official version. The uncensored version said "£99.00 Sky TV", the censored version just said "£99.00".
The whole thing is a farce, we need to get the uncensored version - there was suggestion yesterday the Telegraph who obtained the leaked uncensored versions would release them to the public today but I've heard nothing more since.
There are some gems in the official version, under MP Ian Cawsey's expenses I noticed he'd sponsored a local football team £300, and then charged the tax payer for that sponsorship via the expenses system, but I feel if we start this now we'll only need to start right over when we do finally get hold of the uncensored version.
I suppose there's an argument finding breaches in the official release will allow us to apply more pressure to get the uncensored version though maybe? I'd have thought people's time would be better spent actually pressuring for the release though of the uncensored versions overall and then do something like this.
Still, good work to the Guardian for working with what we have at least, you can't fault them for that.
Hardly. This is a set of expenses paid for by the taxpayers, and we have also had to pay to have it censored before it was released. Ostensibly this was for privacy, but it was more likely to hide the shame of our MPs. Some of the most unforgivable expenses-laundering (flipping the status of primary and secondary residences to avoid capital gains tax and to gain a property portfolio at our expense) is hidden in the official release. In the meantime the Telegraph got a hold of the unredacted claims a month before now through a leak.
Also, the Guardian's claim that there's a receipt for a duck-house in there is false, as that claim was rejected and no rejected claims have been released officially. Arguably this is no great omission, but to see what MPs have tried and failed to claim for illuminates their sense of entitlement.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
MPs salary, pension and expenses are exempt from tax, unlike standard practice in the private sector. Everyone's first home is free from capital gains tax, MPs just allowed themselves to claim a home was their secondary residence for expenses purposes and then claim it was a primary residence for tax purposes, occasionally at the same time.
Exempting themselves from the tax system is a good sign of tyranny, not to mention hypocrisy.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
The Register is the IT version of The Sun; A Red Top tabloid.
Not quite. The Register deliberately copies several traits from the tabloids. The red masthead is the most obvious of these. They also use a lot of slang, and run plenty of trashy comedy stories. However, these are always reported in a very cynical and/or tongue-in-cheek fashion, not at all like the crap you read in newspapers like The Sun.
What's more, when it comes to their tech-related articles (the majority of their output) they often publish some very interesting pieces of investigative journalism. They put out some slightly dodgy op-ed occasionally, they don't always nail their stories, and their copy editing is poor (rarely a story without a typo) but overall the site is an entertaining, and usually highly informative, read.
Yep, and why should we give a fuck about their privacy when they obviously don't give a rat's arse about ours.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.