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Bill Would Require Public Information To Be Online
Andurin writes "A bill that was introduced in the US House of Representatives last week would require all Executive Branch agencies to publish public information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. The Public Online Information Act would also establish an advisory committee to help craft Internet publication policies for the entire US government, including Congress and the Supreme Court. Citizens would have a limited, private right of action to compel the government to release public information online, though common sense exceptions (similar to those for FOIA) would remain in place."
While "common sense" is terribly rare in government, "exceptions" are never in short supply.
Some other countries have had laws like this for awhile. It's a kind of bill that I can't imagine either party or any politician disliking out of principle.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
All rights are limited and nuanced. Society is not (and should not be) math-y -- the real world is too complex and demands too much comprimise for logicians to be satisfied :)
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It's a great idea but I find it a bit funny that the legislative branch is not included in this bill.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I don't know that we have such a law in Ireland despite a *lot* of online information. Some Irish examples:
Irish Statute Book: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/
Oireachtas (Houses of Parliament): http://www.oireachtas.ie/ (including all past parliamentary debates)
Citizens Information: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/
All very useful for both everyday use (particularly the latter) and political research (although it would seem our journalists aren't that interested in searching the parliamentary debates to dredge up interesting material - there's a *lot* there but it doesn't appear in the media!)
I can see how the proposed US legislation if properly implemented might help (but might be completely unworkable). In the Irish case, those three websites are the tip of the iceberg as there are a plethora of official sites (even if for example citizensinformation collates and presents much of the pertinent information in one place). Most or all government departments for a start have their own sites. For a lot of government services, people have to act through their local county council - each of these has its own website (some are very proper and comprehensive, others are less so).
Examples of the 36 or so council websites (you might check these e.g. for waste/recycling facilities, contact details for water or local road problems):
Dublin City: http://www.dublincitycouncil.ie/
Cork City: http://www.corkcity.ie/
County Cork (rural south): http://www.corkcoco.ie/
County Mayo (rural west): http://www.mayococo.ie/
County Meath (Dublin commuter/eastern): http://www.meath.ie/
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Rush Limbaugh sayz: "Government loves PDFs because they aren't searchable".
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What exactly is going to be disclosed that isn't already being disclosed? Personally, I'm more interested in what Congress (and the lobbyists) are doing than I am in the President, since the Legislative is the branch that actually creates laws.
Rush Limbaugh: Democrats "have reformatted the [economic recovery] bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. ... And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this."
http://mediamatters.org/research/200902130016
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Why do all these transparency things only apply to the executive branch of government?
I think it should be just as important to the public to know who lobbied which congressman and how as it is to know who talked to the White House about energy policy or heath care.
How about emails? Is there any rational arguments why rules about email archiving and disclosure are different for the different banches.
I'm afraid that the real answer to my question is that Congress always exempts itself from any kind of onerous rule. Just think how angry the public would be if they could read all those blackberry messages sent between members of the same party.
The judicial branch may have better arguments for secrecy, but even there the default rule ought to be openness. Let them argue case by case to exempt different classes of records.
All three branches would argue that public disclosure puts a chilling effect on honest deliberations. True, but all three branches need to deliberate to make decisions. Again, there's no reason to give different treatment to any of the branches.
PDF seems to be the format of choice for this sort of thing. Indeed, in addition the Adobe's own reader, free ones like kpdf exist too and, for some reason, politicians care to preserve the exact formatting of the pages. (Yes, I know, lawyers need that, but they could — and do — just as easily refer to the sections and paragraphs...)
But the format could be perfectly evil by, for example, prohibiting printing of the viewed document... For example, the New Jersey Fire Prevention Code are deliberately non-printable — and even kpdf obeys that restriction (you can still print it by running it through pdf2ps first, but try to teach your mother that).
On top of that, it is also too easy to just scan a printed page into a PDF — as a monolithic (and thus not searchable) bitmap.
Is the law being discussed smart enough to address these two problems? I don't think so...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They should make a law that requires transcripts of all discussions with lobbyists to be published.
And define a lobbyist as "anyone who claims to represent the opinions of anyone else".
- The Sigless Wonder
That sounds like a nasty cough.
You should see a doctor.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
There is actually a lot of public information "on-line", but it is rendered almost useless because many .gov websites ban spiders from crawling through them and Google (and I assume others) obey this ban. I have actually found some information that was very valuable to me, but only because I found and followed the right links. These pages on a public website under the .gov tld were never indexed and could not be found easily as a result.
I would suggest that the law require that spiders not be banned from open public sites, otherwise it is a sham. I would also suggest that Google considers who really owns the information on .gov sites and considers programming its spiders to not obey such a bogus instruction.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Gates or Clinton?
Or (Heaven forfend) O'Reilly?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost