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Congress Approves Act that Opens US Government Data To the Public; Requires Federal Agencies To Publish 'Non-Sensitive' Info in 'Machine-Readable' Format (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Congress has passed a bill that could make it easier for you to access public data released by the government. The House approved the OPEN Government Data Act on Saturday, while all eyes were on the shutdown, as part of a larger bill to support evidence-based policymaking. It requires that federal agencies must publish any "non-sensitive" info in a "machine-readable" format (essentially in a way that's legible on your smartphone or laptop). The act also insists that agencies appoint a chief data officer to oversee all open data efforts. Having passed the Senate last Wednesday, the bill is next headed to the President's desk.
Obama paid off a man in 2007 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter they had in the mid 1990s.
Why now? It seems on the face of it to be a common-sense transparency measure, but why is this going through NOW as the government is shut down, what the..? Someone needs to read it carefully, trust nothing, VERIFY.
I bet there's something slippery in it. There's a reason they're ramming it through right now like this. Good ideas don't require these kind of passages.
big lips and watermelon
It requires that federal agencies must publish any "non-sensitive" info in a "machine-readable" format
I take it the dear leader's tax returns are still deemed 'sensitive information' ?? Suppose we'll have to wait for the house to subpoena them.
And after Trump signs it, we'll find out how from the MSM how open access to information is unAmerican and destroying our great nation. My first guess on the angle will be how costly it is to publish records.
That's how you know they're still around, waiting for Trump to go to prison before they kill themselves en masse rather than deal with reality. It's the Manafort prison diet! Caution - may cause gout, traitors!
I have to wonder if it will also be 'search-able'
I'd start with space aliens. (because too many results returned on just aliens.)
would've hated this bill!
Must be published in a machine-readable format... so that precludes XML.
When the Republicans took office, one of the first things the thugs did was remove all of the EPA's climate data from the internet. The EPA had massive volumes of data accessible to anyone, and Republican thugs removed it all. Immediately.
Does this new law require them to put it all back?
"OCR" equals "machine readable", right?
You expect your 'Fake news is in truth any inconvenient truth' President to pass this?
I hope someone explains to him what "evidence-based policy" is. He deserves to know why all those Pinocchios keep happening.
Next there's the senators with their great sky god and their way-out-of-date popular theology...
Thanks Obama!
I note it was approved almost unanimously.
Documents should be required to be created in open formats such as Open Document Format, instead of closed formats like the disgusting closed Microsoft XML (.xlsx, etc)
n/t
Republicans control all 3 branches of Government right now - AND HAVE SHUT IT DOWN OVER BULLSHIT. Yeah be sure to clap them on the back for ramming this through in the middle of the night though, that's good governance.
By law tax returns are confidential - yours, mine, and his.
Many politicians voluntary choose to release some tax returns many don't. (Similar to how some politicians have a brain, many don't.)
I agree we can anticipate the house will subpoena them and the OOPS illegally leak them.
Nazi homosexual recruiter RAY MORRIS pushing debunked Nazi propaganda even after corrected, #ROPE
Internal stuff that will make no clear sense without context will be re-construed by trolls, and all heck can brake loose. Workers will be afraid to put anything into concrete form for fear of something being publically spun for trollism or politics. They'll feel pressured to either do everything by voice, or type things very carefully. Either way, it will slow things down, making gov't even MORE inefficient.
There's the old adage about the law making process being like sausage: it's best you don't see it being made. That applies to other things as well. It's a well-intentioned idea that can backfire.
Table-ized A.I.
> When the Republicans took office, one of the first things the thugs did was remove all of the EPA's climate data from the internet.
They remodeled the website and moved a few things around, apoplectic headlines aside. Then the newspapers claimed he'd reversed course when it became clear they were never doing what people claimed they were doing.
That entire story was just Russian propaganda to make us hate each other over nothing.
It will be machine-readable....by their machines. Ours, not so much.
A lot of government sites currently publish data that can be easily downloaded, but the average user has trouble making sense of it. For example, the city of Chicago has a website where you can download crime data https://data.cityofchicago.org... for the last 18 years. You can pick from formats like CSV or XML (but they don't have Json yet) to download. Their website visualization tools are getting better, but I wish they were much more flexible.
I am building an analytic tool that makes it really easy to create relational tables from CSV or Json files and do all kinds of analytics using it. See a quick 4 minute demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to see a few things we can do with that Chicago data. It is just as easy to do similar things against any data you can download. In this instance, trying to load the 6.5 million row table into Excel is not very practical.
It's going to be amazing how much data is going to be classified as sensitive.
Nothing like a show of across-the-aisle holiday unity on a straightforward public interest bill right? And we've got a whole bunch of non-traditional new congressfolk incoming, maybe not as loyal to the existing power structures, and looking like they intend to try to shake things up.
If I'm being cynical, the biggest poison pill that springs to mind, without even looking at the bill, is the straightforward (un?)intended consequences when this bill hits bureaucratic inertia.
It seems to me like a great way to make the day-to-day bureaucracy encourage secrecy, with no ill-will by anyone making the choice. If you've got a report that needs to be either stamped sensitive and filed away, or published online through the appropriate bureaucratic channels, how much more tempting will it be to just reach for/recommend the stamp? What's the penalty for "accidentally" stamping something that shouldn't have been? For publishing something sensitive? What are the odds of getting caught in either case? It's probably better just to use the stamp, if there's the slightest hint of a doubt.
And just like that, a vast swath of inconveniently useful data is kept out of the public's hands, firmly beyond the reach of a straightforward FOIA request. All in the name of government transparency.
Worse, how do you fight that in the court of public opinion? You seriously want to try to get people united behind promoting open government, by repealing the open government act? Think of the soundbites just waiting to be harvested from any representative trying to arguing for that.
I hope I'm just being too cynical.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
All data will be available in Visicalc, dBase II or Wordstar format.
Take a good look at how "Open Office XML" got created to duck the Massachusetts legislative mandate to have an actual standard for government electronic documents, and got turned into the biggest standards fraud of this century. The name was selected to confuse people who were consering OpenOffice and its OpenDocument format, It was well analyzed at the time on www.groklaw.net as an abuse of the standards committees and process, and it remains one of the most inconsistent and uneven standards on the planet. It is *nasty*, but lets Microsoft claim "open standards" and erratically violate them at whim to enforce incompatibility with all other versions of all other software, including newer or older versions of their own office suite.
It doesn't quite rip screaming kittens out of their mother's womb and sacrifice them to PaperClip Bob, but lordie, it's close.
"machine-readable" format (essentially in a way that's legible on your smartphone or laptop)
That isn't what "machine-readable" means.
A problem government agencies have had with making data available is the IT cost of distributing it. For the longest time the Patent Office has made patents a pain-in-the-ass to download not because the patents are not public documents, but because they could not handle the demand. So they told the public to go buy them from private companies if they wanted good service.
If that problem has just been passed on to the entire Federal Government, it is an ineffective command.
The Republican congress is doing this. The Democrat congress back when Nancy Pelosi was running it before and constantly yammering about "openness" never did it. In fact, her "open" House routinely locked the doors to meeting rooms in the Capitol building to prevent the press and the Republicans from seeing what she and her party and the lobbyists were doing. The Republicans have still not been able to see a list of the names of the people who took part in those Obamacare negotiation meetings.
Obama never did this either.
Whenever there's a story about some Democrat in DC doing something positive, there's a nice patriotic jackass (and, no, I'm not being a jerk here, read some history - the Democrat mascot is a jackass not a "mule" or a "donkey") icon attached to the story.
IMHO it's rather easy to consider some datum non-sensitive that turns out to be sensitive when viewed as part of a group. Certain large web-based service providers make a fortune out of data mining, and once someone spot connections between "non-sensitive" data and some humongous database of definitely-sensitive data, all bets are off.
only in EBCDIC format in many counties. That is still machine readable. for an IBM mainframe.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
Yes, there will be abuse in the direction of classifying all sorts of things "sensitive"; OTOH how much of this is a grab by business to get hold of data (even more data) that is currently less available, and making taxpayers pay for destroying their own privacy (what little is left)? Just because something is revealed in interaction with the government, doesn't mean that it is completely "public" data. An old example - someone's alibi for not being at a crime scene is being at a hotel with a lover. Witnesses etc. (nowadays security video) confirm. But neither someone nor lover wants it to be "public" knowledge, and police have no reason to make it so if it's not germane to the crime; their only statement is "suspect has a solid alibi, no longer considered a suspect".