Part-Time Policy Wonk

From OpenTheGovernment.org:

Candidates for the House of Representatives and President have been filing contribution reports electronically for years, but the Senate still allows candidates to file paper reports with the Secretary of the Senate. After receiving the reports, the Secretary of the Senate delivers the reports in paper to the FEC, who then must input them into their computer databases to be accessed by the public online. As a result of the delay, donors can bundle contributions in the final, critical weeks of a campaign - providing the funds necessary for last minute negative attack ads or push polls - with absolute anonymity.

The Senate is considering a bill, S.233, that would require candidates for the Senate to file reports electronically. The bill is widely supported by Senators on both sides of the aisle.

Posted by Anne at 07:52 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation blog:

As required by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the Clerk of the House launched an online database for current personal financical disclosures. The site only hosts PDF copies of these reports and is only searchable by member, not by anything they list on the reports.

Posted by Anne at 09:02 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

A longtime critic of the Smithsonian Institution introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate this week that would wipe out the national museum complex's exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and the Sunshine Act.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Finance Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, would require the Smithsonian to hold meetings in public and make records available to the public upon request.

‘‘Open and Transparent Smithsonian Act of 2008’’

Posted by Anne at 05:10 PM | Permalink

Thanks to Free Government Information for pointing out the new Government Executive magazine feature that allows you to easily track their stories about many individual government agencies.

Posted by Anne at 04:55 PM | Permalink

From SLA's Public Policy Connections blog:

SLA and others wrote a letter to Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), expressing serious concerns about the “exclusive” agreement between the GAO and Thomson West, a private legal information provider. The letter encourages that the agreement be revisited, keeping in mind the need to create partnerships that most benefit the public interest and urging that any future digitization initiatives build no-fee public access into the solicitation for bids.

Read letter.

Posted by Anne at 08:51 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.org:

The Government Accountability Office released 10 DVDs of materials, containing 619,481 PDF files. This material has been placed on-line for the public to examine. Even a cursory examination shows how incredibly valuable the Federal Legislative Histories are and what a loss to the U.S. Congress, the legal profession, and the general public it would be lock up this amazing resource created by those talented professionals, the Government Accountability Office legislative historians. As employees of the U.S. Congress, their work benefits us all and should be part of our common pool of public domain resources.

In response to the data release by the GAO, we have proposed an unsolicited joint venture [ pdf ] which would allow the GAO to ship to us the same materials they shipped to Thomson West.

Browse the GAO's data release.

Posted by Anne at 09:05 PM | Permalink

FEC Press Release:

The Federal Election Commission (FEC/the Commission) has introduced a new and improved version of its Presidential Campaign Finance map. Available on the FEC web site, the map now includes detailed information on each candidate’s campaign expenditures. It also provides a number of enhanced viewing and searching options for information about campaign contributors. The upgraded map is an easy-to-use online tool for obtaining detailed information about the Presidential campaigns and how they spend their money, including the payee name, purpose, date and amount of each campaign expenditure. These improved features were included on similar maps for U.S. House and Senate campaigns that were added to the FEC web site late last year.

Posted by Anne at 08:25 PM | Permalink

From NARA:

Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Tim Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com, today signed and announced a five-year agreement to digitize selected records from the vast holdings of the National Archives. The Generations Network’s Ancestry.com web site currently has the largest online collection of digitized and indexed National Archives content, including the complete U.S. Federal Census Collection, 1790-1930, passenger lists from 1820-1960 and WWI and WWII draft registration cards.

This agreement allows for the ongoing digitization of a wealth of historical content that will include birth, marriage, death, immigration and military service information. The new agreement will allow Ancestry.com (a division of The Generations Network) to place its technicians and scanning machines at the National Archives to digitize content for online access. Ancestry.com will make the digitized materials available via subscription. The Generations Network will provide free online access to the digitized materials in all National Archives research rooms nationwide. In addition, The Generations Network will donate to the National Archives a copy of all the digital images and technical and functional metadata that will enable retrieval of the material at the level of archival control.

Posted by Anne at 08:30 PM | Permalink

From Information World Review:

Records of proceedings at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913 have been put online today.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey has been developed by a group of universities including Sheffield, Hertfordshire and the Open University.

Almost 200,000 cases are on display, mainly as digital images of official documents.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

A memorandum of understanding (pdf) signed this month by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Archivist is expected to enable the transfer of many permanently valuable historical CIA records that are 50 years old or older to the custody of the National Archives (NARA), officials of both agencies said today.

Posted by Anne at 05:59 PM | Permalink

From Government Executive:

A bill urging the Senate to make Congressional Research Service reports publically available is stalled in the Senate Rules Committee and may be the latest of a series of such efforts to fail. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and eight co-sponsors last fall introduced a resolution that would allow the CRS reports available to lawmakers and their aides to be posted on a public Web site.

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has jurisdiction over the matter, is pushing a more modest plan, based on the House's system, in which members would choose whether to make reports public. Rules Committee Staff Director Howard Gantman said the proposal, which the committee can implement without a vote, would improve on the Senate approach by offering a standard system for publishing reports that would refresh reports on members' Web sites when CRS updates them.

Posted by Anne at 08:25 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

The U.S. Marine Corps has agreed to restore public access to unclassified doctrinal documents on its web site.

The official Marine Corps doctrine web site remains inaccessible. But in response to a Federation of American Scientists request (pdf) under the Freedom of Information Act, the Marine Corps said that all releasable contents would soon be made publicly available through the Publications directory of the main USMC web site.

Posted by Anne at 08:30 PM | Permalink

From NARA:

Footnote.com and the National Archives and Records Administration held a press conference at the Archives in Washington, DC, to announce the release of an online interactive photo of the Vietnam War Memorial. In addition to releasing this unique version of the Wall, Footnote.com enables visitors to search the Wall for people they know and pay tribute by adding photos, comments and stories of those who lost their lives during the Vietnam conflict.

View the Interactive Wall on Footnote.com.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Boing Boing:

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes,

John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation alerted me to a situation about a month ago that we've been pursuing (with EFF's help) at the Government Accountability Office, which is an arm of the U.S. Congress.

The law librarians at GAO have compiled complete federal legislative histories from 1915 on. These are the definitive dossiers that track a bill through the hearing process and into law. If you want to divine the intent of Congress, this is where you go.

GAO cut a contract with Thomson West to have these documents scanned. Thomson West claims they have exclusive access to these public documents and even go so far as to boast that you should purchase this exclusive "product" from West because the GAO law librarians (public employees!) have done all the work for you!

If you're interesting in tracking this issue, I've created a Scribd group that has all the documents we've obtained so far. Next step: we asked for a copy of every document scanned under the FOIA laws!

Posted by Anne at 08:34 PM | Permalink

From the Baltimore Sun:

With a few clicks of a mouse, Marylanders could soon be able to search through an online database to find out exactly how much the state is spending to construct the Inter-County Connector in Suburban Washington, or on Chesapeake Bay restoration projects, or even what taxpayers are coughing up for the King Barn Dairy Mooseum.

The proposed database, which earned preliminary approval in the House of Delegates and saw no opposition in a key Senate committee yesterday, would also allow anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to find out where the money is coming from, who was awarded the contracts and how much they received for anything else.

Posted by Anne at 05:08 PM | Permalink

From NARA:

The National Archives and Records Administration has opened 534 cubic feet or approximately 1.3 million pages of historic Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) records covering the Cold War period from 1946-1977.

This "Sunshine Week" event marks a joint effort of the National Archives and the CIA highlighting the importance of open government and freedom of information. It is also a part of the National Declassification Initiative program announced by the Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in April 2006.

Posted by Anne at 05:04 PM | Permalink

From the New York Times:

The National Archives and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Wednesday released more than 11,000 pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public schedule for her eight years as first lady.

The long-awaited documents, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and a lawsuit, show her daily activities for the 2,888 days that her husband was president, from her meetings with foreign dignitaries to designing the White House Christmas card. In some ways, they provide support for Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that she played a central public and private role in the policies of the Clinton Administration.

But some of the documents also serve to conceal much more than they reveal. There are redactions — blacked-out sections — on more than 4,400 pages, and on many days there is an entry for a “private meeting” that gives no clue as to whom she met or what the meeting was about.

These records are now available on the Clinton Library web site.

Posted by Anne at 04:53 PM | Permalink

From the Guardian:

The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open.

A small group led by Julian Todd, a "civil hacker" in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive. The site also links through to other decisions and debates.

Posted by Anne at 06:41 PM | Permalink

Thanks to Free Government Information for the pointer.

The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara has archived all Presidential Signing Statements from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. • Presidential Signing Statements Hoover - G.W. Bush

You can search or browse by year. The signing statements are part of a much larger documents section that includes executive orders, proclamations, "fireside chats" and more.

Posted by Anne at 08:28 PM | Permalink

From Yahoo! News:

Federal judges agreed Tuesday to grant the public more access to cases in which judges are disciplined by their colleagues.

Final orders on complaints about judges will be posted on appeals court Web sites and, in most cases, judges will be named if they have been sanctioned.

Posted by Anne at 08:42 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

The U.S. Army today restored public access to the Reimer Digital Library, as it had promised to do in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists.

At first glance, the site appears to be complete. Or at least as complete as it was before it was closed to the public last month.

Posted by Anne at 05:37 PM | Permalink

From The Hill:

A watchdog group will gain access to thousands of pages of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) schedules from her time as first lady, the group announced Tuesday.

Judicial Watch welcomed the decision from the National Archives and Records Administration to release the scheduling documents, but criticized the government agency for saying that release of Clinton’s phone logs would take “one to two years.”

Posted by Anne at 05:31 PM | Permalink

From NARA:

For the first time, the National Archives and Records Administration has made available online more than 5.2 million records of some passengers who arrived during the last half of the 19th century at the ports of Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The records were transcribed from original ship manifests into electronic databases by Temple University’s Center for Immigration Research at The Balch Institute. The Center donated the digital records to the National Archives. The records are known as Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, 1850-1897; Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Italians to the United States, 1855-1900; and Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Russians to the United States, 1834-1897. . .

. . . Access to these new electronic records is available through the National Archives Access to Archival Databases (AAD) system, a research tool that makes a selection of the National Archives’ most popular electronic records available to the public over the Internet. The AAD system currently includes almost 80 million electronic records from 50 records series in 30 record groups, and four collections of donated historical materials. AAD highlights include records of passengers who arrived at the Port of New York during the Irish Famine, World War II Army enlistment and Prisoners of War, records of Japanese-American internment, and Central Foreign Policy Files from the Department of State.

Posted by Anne at 08:42 PM | Permalink

Press Release:

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., is calling for greater public access to the expert reports produced by the highly acclaimed Congressional Research Service. In a letter to Rules Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, Lieberman thanked her for asking CRS to devise a system for the Senate similar to one now operating in the House. Lieberman, however, said the House standard was still inadequate and asked for her help in implementing S. Res. 401, which he introduced last fall with Senators McCain, Collins and others, to provide the public with greater access to CRS reports.

Posted by Anne at 09:46 PM | Permalink

From C-SPAN:

The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle is an index to the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings. The video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included here is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual remarks.

Posted by Anne at 08:31 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

The Army will restore public access to the largest online collection of its doctrinal publications within two weeks, an Army spokesman said yesterday.

Col. Michael J. Negard said the Army "underestimated the impact" of its decision to make the Reimer Digital Library password-protected on Feb. 6, a move that shut off public access to an electronic archive that is popular with researchers for its wealth of documents on military operations, education, training and technology. Critics of the decision noted that most of the documents in the library had specifically been cleared for public release.

Posted by Anne at 08:18 PM | Permalink

From ResearchBuzz:

The state of Connecticut has put a database of over one million criminal convictions (dating back to January 1, 2000) online. Unlike some other states’ criminal conviction databases, this one also includes minor infractions like traffic offenses. You can search it at http://www.jud2.ct.gov/crdockets/SearchByDefDisp.aspx. Using it is free.

Posted by Anne at 08:17 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.Org:

Creative Commons and Public.Resource.Org announced today that the first revision of a substantial corpus of U.S. federal case law is available for download by developers. The files are all clearly marked with the new Creative Commons CCØ label, indicating that the contents are Works of the United States Government and are thus free of copyright or other restrictions for their dissemination and reuse.

Developers may access this information at the following URL: http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/

Today’s release covers all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on. The release is equivalent to 1,858 volumes of case law in book form, a stack of books 348 feet tall.

Posted by Anne at 08:28 PM | Permalink

Press Release:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) today called for the papers of the Founding Fathers Project to be made available to all Americans through the Internet, at a hearing to examine the program. Established more than 50 years ago to catalogue, annotate and public the writings of some of the country’s Founders, the program has been criticized because of slow progress and high costs. The Committee heard from Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough, whose access to the papers of John Adams contributed to research for his award-winning biography of the nation’s first vice president. Scholars have been meticulously combing through the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, providing annotation and scholarly context for the thousands of papers, including letters and correspondence, of the Founders. The project has already cost more than an estimated $60 million in federal and private funding.

Posted by Anne at 09:20 PM | Permalink

From the Project on Government Oversight:

This week, the state of Alaska launched a website that tracks every state expenditure of over one thousand dollars, as reported on today's NPR Morning Edition. This makes Alaska the tenth state government to provide such a service to its taxpayers. On a side note, Alaska also has the lowest individual tax burden of any state in the U.S.

Alaska calls its website "Checkbook Online." According to the state, this service "...is part of a national trend for governments to develop websites that allow constituents to view financial information in searchable formats. Such websites are widely considered to improve transparency into the financial operations of government."

Posted by Anne at 08:21 PM | Permalink

From the Law Librarian Blog:

Excellent resource from the U.S. Senate: Active Legislation is a list of current bills, arranged by subject, that have been receiving legislative or media attention.

Posted by Anne at 06:59 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

President Bush this week ordered executive branch agency heads to respond to dozens of recommendations that were issued earlier this month by the Public Interest Declassification Board, an official advisory group, regarding the declassification of historical records. . .

. . . The Board's report hardly made a ripple when it was released earlier this month. And since it is purely advisory, it could easily have been ignored.

But the President's response increases the likelihood that the Board's recommendations will now receive serious consideration, inside and outside of the executive branch.

Posted by Anne at 06:57 PM | Permalink

From Free Government Information:

Here's some great news for those of you who have not heard: the UN Treaty Series Collection online can now be accessed without subscription! That's right ... "Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations" is now available for free.

The United Nations Treaty Series is a collection of treaties and international agreements that have been registered (or filed and recorded) with and published by the Secretariat of the United Nations since 1946, pursuant to Article 102 of the Charter. The UNTS includes the texts of treaties in their authentic language(s), along with translations into English and French, as appropriate.

The collection currently contains over 158,000 treaties and related subsequent actions which have been published in hard copy in over 2,200 volumes. Currently, the UNTS is being enhanced to include the latest desktop published volumes.

Posted by Anne at 06:48 PM | Permalink

From the National Journal's Technology Daily, January 23, 2008 PM edition [subscription required]:

The legislative process could become a lot more exciting if lawmakers get their way in freeing the data inside the Library of Congress' legislative Internet database so that independent Web sites can repackage the information.

In November, the House Administration Committee asked the library to explore solutions for supplying the public with raw legislative information from the database, dubbed THOMAS, committee spokesman Kyle Anderson said on Wednesday.

Posted by Anne at 03:17 PM | Permalink

From the Library of Congress:

The Library of Congress and Microsoft Corp. have signed a cooperative agreement that will change the way Library visitors experience history. The joint technology initiative will electronically deliver the Library’s immense collection of historical artifacts to patrons visiting its Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C., and will allow unparalleled and immersive interactive experiences that will bring the institution’s vast historical collections and exhibits to life–on-site and online–through the upcoming myloc.gov Web site.

Posted by Anne at 07:24 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

In a report issued today, a Presidential advisory board proposed dozens of steps to promote a more rational, uniform and productive process for declassification of historical records.

Declassification policy must "take into account the interest of ordinary citizens in having as 'thorough, accurate, and reliable' a record of their country's history as soon as it is possible to provide it," wrote Martin Faga, acting chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board (and former director of the National Reconnaissance Office) in his transmittal letter.

"Improving Declassification," a report to the President from the Public Interest Declassification Board

Posted by Anne at 07:21 PM | Permalink

From the Library of Congress:

Twenty-one states, working in four multistate demonstration projects, are today joining the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in an initiative to catalyze collaborative efforts to preserve important state government information in digital form.

States face formidable challenges in caring for digital records with long-term legal and historical value. A series of Library-sponsored workshops held in 2005 and involving all states revealed that the large majority of states lack the resources to ensure that the information they produce in digital form only, such as legislative records, court case files and executive agency records, is preserved for long-term access. The workshops made clear that much state government digital information—including content useful to Congress and other policymakers—is at risk of loss if it is not now saved.

Posted by Anne at 08:55 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

The Senate Office of Public Records launched an enhanced database for lobbying disclosure on New Year's Eve, one that allows users for the first time to search previously unsearchable fields like "specific lobbying issue." What this means is that you can plug in a bill number -- say S. 681, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act -- and find out that 19 organizations disclosed lobbying on the bill, including top political donors Citigroup, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Posted by Anne at 08:29 PM | Permalink

From Sunshine Week:

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a Democrat seeking the presidency, chided the Bush administration for building "a culture of secrecy that dishonors America's democratic principles of government openness and accountability.

"As president," he wrote in response to the Sunshine Week 2008: Sunshine Campaign Survey, "I will work to restore Americans' trust in their government by creating a transparent government."

Posted by Anne at 08:48 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.Org:

Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and the Boston Public Library announced today the commencement of phase 1 of a project that aims to create a comprehensive digital archive of 60 million pages of government documents over the next two years.

Phase 1 of the project will produce a minimum of 2.5 million pages of digital text using a scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) technology suite developed by the Internet Archive. The Boston Public Library is the first Contributing Library in the program, and has agreed to lend a 50-year run of Congressional Hearings from 1936–1986, as well as a complete copy of the Catalog of Copyright Entries. Scanning will take place at the Boston Library Consortium's Northeast Regional Scanning Center.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

The National Archives says it is exploring new methods to accelerate the disclosure of records at Presidential libraries.

Archivists "decided to undertake an in-house study in the spring of 2007 to review ways to achieve faster processing of Presidential records," stated Emily Robison, acting director of the Clinton Presidential Library, in an October 2 declaration (pdf) that was filed in a lawsuit brought against NARA by Judicial Watch.

Posted by Anne at 08:24 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

A bipartisan resolution to provide online public access to Congressional Research Service reports was introduced in the Senate yesterday.

"The Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, in consultation with the Director of the Congressional Research Service, shall make available through a centralized electronic system, for purposes of access and retrieval by the public ... all information described in paragraph (2) that is available through the Congressional Research Service website," the Resolution states.

Exemptions from disclosure are included for copyrighted and personal information, and for reports that are prepared confidentially for an individual member or committee.

The resolution, S. Res. 401, was jointly introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Susan Collins, Patrick Leahy, John Cornyn and Tom Harkin.

Posted by Anne at 08:29 PM | Permalink

Press Release:

Governor Crist today announced two new open government initiatives that will improve Floridians’ ability to access public documents and meetings. The first initiative involves a Bill of Rights for all Floridians trying to access public records. The list of rights was compiled by the Commission on Open Government, established by the Governor on June 19, 2007, by Executive Order 07-107. The second initiative involves improving Internet access to state agency contact information.

Posted by Anne at 08:24 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo today unveiled "Project Sunlight," a powerful and easy-to-use website giving the public unprecedented access to the workings of state government and the information it keeps. . .

. . . New York's Project Sunlight allows tracking, in as real time as the reports are available, seven different state databases -- campaign financing, lobbying, agency contracts, member items, legislation and both for-profit and not-for-profit corporations -- and the links between them.

Posted by Anne at 08:22 PM | Permalink

From The Huffington Post:

Bloggers and other citizen journalists have a new and exciting opportunity to find and shed light on stories the mainstream media are missing -- by combing through transcripts of recent Congressional oversight hearings. Without any fanfare, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started posting preliminary transcripts of many of its hearings on its Web site, giving everyone a chance to pore through testimony and find news the MSM may have overlooked.

Posted by Anne at 08:25 PM | Permalink

From the Mercury News:

Under a new partnership announced Monday by Gov. Charlie Crist, Google Inc. is providing free consulting and software that help make more files recognizable to most search engines.

Florida joins five other states - Arizona, California, Utah, Virginia and Michigan - already participating in Google's effort. Google hopes to get local governments involved in the effort.

Posted by Anne at 08:26 PM | Permalink