How Is Obama Doing On Open Government?

An anonymous reader writes "OMB Watch today published an in-depth analysis of the Obama administration's progress on a wide-ranging set of open government recommendations. Key findings of the report include strong and consistent leadership from the White House on government openness and meaningful utilization of e-government and Web 2.0 technologies. But there has been no high-level effort to improve electronic records management and preservation, and the implementation of improved Freedom of Information Act policies has lagged."

Comments

Well....he certainly talks a good game

[Vinegar Joe]

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank. " - Barack Obama, October 27, 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr9ywEFRQkQ

Re:Well....he certainly talks a good game

[demonlapin]

William Safire, before he was a New York Times columnist, worked as a speechwriter for Nixon. He wrote a book called Before the Fall about the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and it's a pretty interesting set of stories about the man. One particularly informative anecdote is the story of Nixon trying to tear down a "temporary" building that had been erected on Pennsylvania Ave during WW2 as an office building (for the Navy, IIRC), on the grounds that it was unnecessary and architecturally inappropriate for the setting. It took the full might of the Presidency two years to get it torn down - much of which was spent fighting not Congress, but the Federal bureaucracy.

barley half meeting FOIA goals

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/barely-half-of-agencies-meeting-obamas-foia-request-goals-study-says/2011/03/11/ABImgsT_story.html

Though 49(of 90) agencies and departments complied with the study’s authors, 17 others — including the Transportation Department and U.S. Postal Service — provided no documents and two withheld information. Another 17 agencies — including the departments of Commerce, Energy, Justice and State — provided no final response, and four smaller agencies never acknowledged receipt of the FOIA request. The figures have improved significantly from last year, when just 13 of 90 agencies complied.

“At this rate, it’ll be the end of his term before the agencies do what Obama asked them to do on the first day,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

Bang-up job...

[benjamindees]

Gitmo is still open so that counts right?

Re:Okay...

[hey!]

Well -- I haven't seen a coherent argument that he should not be prosecuted, given what he's supposed to have done. I'm open to persuasion, but it seems to me that as long as he's given a fair chance to defend himself (including being detained under reasonable conditions), he *should* face trial.

Right off the bat I'll grant you the "Collateral Murder" video. I don't think Wikileak's spin on those tapes is fair or accurate, but I'll grant that atrocities *do* happen and that a reasonable person looking at the video might conclude that's what it showed. It's at least defensible to go public with that tape, given the assumption that the Army has no safe and effective mechanism for dealing with these matters.

The diplomatic cables and the Afghan war documents are a different matter. I don't think these turned out to be as damaging as Manning's more hysterical detractors claim, but I still think Manning did something wrong. He took a huge body of data, more than he could possibly have understood in detail himself, then he sent him to somebody he didn't actually know so that person could go on a fishing expedition. That was grossly irresponsible.

If he had a piece of information in his hands that he was familiar with and he thought it was something that the public ought to know, then I'd call him a whistle-blower and I'd support him. But teams of expert reporters took months to comb through the mountains of random stuff he leaked, just to figure what was there. Manning could not possibly have known what he setting in motion, and he must have known that. Until I learn otherwise, I'd call him a chaos-monger, not a whistle-blower.

The question isn't whether good things happened as the result of what Manning did, although I do think some good things have happened. And to my knowledge there's no documented evidence of any serious, irreparable harm resulting. But Manning's actions were unconscionably reckless, and a violation of a professional trust. I believe the Manning case shows we probably can afford to be a lot more open with information than we are, and that's a positive outcome. But a serious potential for harm to innocent third parties was there and Manning took no steps to prevent that. Even where some parties deserve exposure for being, as Assange calls them, "collaborators", the same principle of justice applies to them as to Manning. They deserve a fair chance to defend themselves before they are punished.