Cairns Blog

Open, Accountable and Ethical Government and the Democratic Platform

Michael Kinsley's Learning to Read Democrat in the New York Times today poked fun at the vagueness and redundancies in many parts of the democratic party platform.  One section we can be proud of, however, is the strong, specific, and visionary discussion of open government that sets the party's plan apart:

A Connected America  (p. 17)

In the 21st century, our world is more intertwined than at any time in human history. This new connectedness presents us with untold opportunities for innovation, but also new challenges. We will protect the Internet’s traditional openness to innovation and creativity and ensure that it remains a dynamic platform for free speech, innovation, and creativity.  We will implement a national broadband strategy, especially in rural areas, that enables every American household, school, library and hospital to connect to a world-class communications infrastructure.  We will rededicate our nation to ensuring that all Americans have access to broadband and the skills to use it effectively.  In an increasingly technology-rich, knowledge-based economy, connectivity is a key part of the solution to many of our most important challenges: job creation, economic growth, energy, health care, and education. We will establish a Chief Technology Officer for the nation, to ensure we use technology to enhance the functioning, transparency, and expertise of government, including establishing a national interoperable public safety communications network to help first responders at the local, state and national level communicate with one another during a crisis.

Open, Accountable and Ethical Government  (p. 47-48)

In Barack Obama’s Administration, we will open up the doors of democracy. We will create a new “open-source” government, using technology to make government more transparent, accountable and inclusive. Rather than obstruct people’s use of the Freedom of Information Act, we will require that agencies conduct significant business in public and release all relevant information unless an agency reasonably foresees harm to a protected interest.  We will lift the veil of secret deals in Washington by publishing searchable, online information about federal grants, contracts, earmarks, loans, and lobbyist contacts with government officials.  We will make government data available online and will have an online video archive of significant agency meetings.  We will put all non-emergency bills that Congress has passed online for five days, to allow the American public to review and comment on them before they are signed into law.  We will require Cabinet officials to have periodic national online town hall meetings to discuss issues before their agencies.

Implementing our Party’s agenda will require running an efficient government that gets results. We will develop a comprehensive management agenda to prevent operational breakdowns in government and ensure that government provides the level of service that the American people deserve.  Because we understand that good government depends on good people, we will work to rebuild and reengage our federal workforce.  We will make government a more attractive place to work.  Our hiring will be based only on qualification and experience, and not on ideology or party affiliation.  We will pay for our new spending, eliminate waste in government programs, demand and measure results, and stop funding programs that don’t work. 

We are committed to a participatory government.  We will use the most current technology available to improve the quality of government decision-making and make government less beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists.  We will enhance the flow of information between citizens and government—in both directions—by involving the public in the work of government agencies.  We will not simply solicit opinions, but will also use new technology to tap into the vast expertise of the American citizenry, for the benefit of government and our  democracy.

Americans want real reform that will help them pay their medical bills and put the country on the path to energy independence.  They are tired of lobbyists standing in their way. So we’ll end the abuse of no-bid contracts and tell the drug companies and the oil companies and the insurance industry that, while they may get a seat at the table in Washington, they don’t get to buy every chair. We will institute a gift ban so that no lobbyist can curry favor with the Administration. We will close the revolving door that
has allowed people to use their position in the Administration as a stepping-stone to further their lobbying careers. We support campaign finance reform to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests, including public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time. As a national party, we will not take any contributions from Political Action Committees during this election.

McCain Tech Plan

Dow Jones reports that McCain will release his Tech Plan in the coming week.  The Obama Tech Plan came out in November 2007.  The failure of the McCain camp to address technology until nine months later and only at this end-stage of the campaign signals how little understanding McCain has about the relevance of technology.

Former FCC Chairman and McCain advisor Michael Powell says: "We're talking about the policy of the U.S. president, not the FCC chairman."  The outdated notion that "Tech = FCC" is hardly surprising from a public figure who proudly tells the world that he doesn't use email.  The fact that McCain does not want FCC regulation  doesn't tell us much about what he does want or how he will use the power of the Internet to improve American education, create jobs, grow the economy, or strengthen our democracy.

Clearly, McCain  wants an opportunity to reiterate to his big donors and their lobbyists that he opposes "net neutrality" and government efforts to ensure an open and free internet. The idea, however, that innovative companies like Google sprung up in the absence of any government regulation (as the article suggests) is ludicrous.  The government created the Internet in the first place.  Without an open telecom regime, Google never would have been able to provision its services to us.

Without efforts to reduce media concentration and prevent monopoly, we would not have a competitive hi-tech environment in which innovative companies flourish.  The notion that government has no role to play abdicates responsibility for ensuring an Internet that promotes commerce and respects free speech.

In addition, without the right technology and broadband policy we don't have wired schools and literate children.  We end up without a job-ready workforce that can compete in the 21st century and we disadvantage low-income communities by forestalling access to the Internet.  No doubt, the telecom bloggers and their readers will have a ball critiquing the McCain regulatory proposals when they publish.

Most important to point out is that without the Internet, we cannot have a transparent, open, legitimate democracy.  As Craig Newmark (of Craigslist) aptly put it last week in the HuffingtonPost, the President has to care about technology because: "It has to do with staying in touch with your community and constituency....A president is the leader of the American community, a lot of people, many of which don't yet have Internet access or comfort. That's being addressed, too slowly, but we do have the critical mass online that a president needs to listen to, to be in touch."

This report of the McCain plan suggests that he would continue the Bush policy of closed and secretive back-room dealings.  He is obviously not focused on how to use new tools to ensure that government information is published online or that government does its business in the open.

He is not talking about how to use the Internet to solicit information back from the American people so that when an agency makes an important public decision it is on the basis of the best possible information.  He is not thinking about the  cyber-security threats that face us in an era of information warfare.  He is also not focusing on how to strengthen the critical technological infrastructure upon which our nuclear and electric power grids run.  He clearly doesn't care about how the Web could play a role in coordinating relief in the event of another natural disaster.  The fact that government depends squarely on technology to deliver its services efficiently is also not on the radar screen.

For someone who claims to be opposed to big government and government regulation, such a blinkered view of technology condemns us to a large, inefficient, centralized institutions.  For the only way to realize a smaller, leaner, more efficient and yet more trustworthy government is to begin to connect institutions to public networks.  If you want the private sector to do more, then government needs to be able to use new technologies to communicate its priorities to citizens, obtain information from them, interact seamlessly among government institutions, and coordinate action.

Larry and Eben

Today Larry Lessig gave his inaugural Change Congress speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

I was struck when listening to it by the parallels (superb delivery) and the profound differences to Eben Moglen's talk last year to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law.  Nominally, a speech about the computer industry after GPL v. 3, it was, in fact, a disquisition about freedom and the opportunity to transform law into a collaborative act of creative people.

Not surprisingly, their intellectual approaches to politics mirror their political approaches to intellectual property.

For Moglen, the crusader for open source licensing, it's not about software but about freedom and societal reform writ large.  He wants to upend the intellectual property regime as we know it and the monopoly industries that profit from it.   "If it is easily possible to give to each human being who wishes it everything of utility and beauty at low or zero cost, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything she wants?”

By contrast, Creative Commons focuses on the individual.  Give people the freedom to decide how to dispose of their own intellectual property.  Preserve property but enable the means to give away the rights that we don't want to keep.

Now Powerpoint Goes to Washington, not to get rid of Congress, but to reform it.  Get politicians to pledge not to take money form lobbyists and to commit to public financing for elections but preserve the status quo.  Use wiki-based tools to deploy an army of collaborators to keep the politicians honest and accountable (though, I must add, that is not one of the better visualization tools available by a long shot!). It is the incremental approach, the practical approach, the doable reform.  And like Creative Commons, it'll happen and will take off.

Moglen says “What the Net can do to politics in the YouTube, Wi-Fi, MoveOn, Facebook,the MySpace, FlashMob era remains to be written out in full.”  He wants to move away from a political regime where governance is based on territoriality and, instead, let affiliation drive the legitimacy of governance.  The audience of lawyers was expecting to hear about software contracts and, instead, was treated to a lecture about democracy.  His vision is reflected in the verve he has brought to the free software movement which has fundamentally transformed innovation today.

While Eben is an optimist, inclined to trust people's ability to collaborate and work together, Larry is strikingly a pessimist, full of dismay at the state of the body politic.  Yet while Eben is revolutionary, nay, evolutionary, in his take on government, Larry wants to preserve the status quo (or at least pretends to and it is one way to get things done).

My own view is that we need to combine both: Lessig's orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen's boldness of vision.

We need to stop viewing our institutions of government and governance as static and reified in their current form and, instead, start asking, not how to use technology to make Congress more transparent but how to use technology to make us more powerful.

I don't want to blow up Congress (well, I do but that's for another day) but to extend its intelligence by connecting the power of the network to the structure of the institution and to change fundamentally the way government works.  Michael Schudson writes about the "monitorial citizen" who, because she is so busy and overwhelmed (read: not too bright) should play the role of policing government and making it more accountable.  This is what the Change Congress movement will do using the cool tools.  It's important and useful but it's not enough and does not fully recognize the potential of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  It's pretty pessimistic, not about Congress, but about us.

The idea that all we are good for is to blog about what happens in Washington or even to make maps and mash-ups of when and with whom the politicians went to lunch is to ignore the larger opportunity to get involved with making the science that contributes to our understanding of public health and obesity, analyzing the data about global warming, participating in the drafting of policies about these and other fields and overseeing the work of those who implement them through citizen juries assigned to every official.  I'm all for "change Congress" but then let's really change it for the better!

Really Secret

Craig Newmark sent around the link for Lessig's Sunshine Week lecture today on corruption and transparency.

Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he's launching the ChangeCongress project where he'll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.

Check that link for the webcast and more.

Ironically, I can't access the webcast.  Despite 47 different downloads of various bits and bobs, the webcaster only wants to work with IE, which I don't have.  Too funny.  I'll wait for YouTube.

 

Powerpoint Does Not Go to Washington

Lessig is not running.

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/on_why_i_am_not_running.html

Draft Lessig Change Congress: Donate!

"There's chatter about the possibility that Professor Lessig would make a terrific member of Congress to replace the wonderful Rep. Tom Lantos, who recently passed away. This group is for anyone who thinks that Prof. Lessig would be a great candidate and an even better member of Congress," explains the new Facebook group set up by John Palfrey to launch the movement.  I'm proud to have been among the first to join the now 2,000+ and growing number.  Here's the website.

The special election is April 8th.

Sign up for the mailing list here.

And more important: here's the fundraising page at ActBlue.

I'll be co-hosting the New York Fundraiser.  Date TBD.

As one mutual friend remarked: "what has he done to deserve this."  It's true, we're not doing him any favors but we're doing one for ourselves and for future of politics and civil liberties in this country.

Wow!

""Hope is the bedrock of this nation.  The belief that our destiny will not be written for us but by us....by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be...Together ordinary people can do extraordinary things."  (Barack Obama, Iowa victory speech, January 3, 2008).

New Hampshire, here we come!

Junk Science

In a recent issue (15.11) of Wired, Clive Thompson argues that in order to combat anti-evolution sentiment, scientists ought to be less tentative in their language and refer to scientific consensus as law not theory.  The assault against scientific reason is in full swing and it’s necessary to step up the battle tactics. 

The Bush Administration represents the nadir of a slow descent into the abyss of abuse against scientific truth in policymaking.  Whether it is imposing ideological litmus tests on scientific advisors, such as a proposed appointee for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, restructuring or eliminating advisory panels like the Energy Research Advisory Board, selectively editing reports on environmental hazards, rejecting scientific consensus on climate change in favor of spurious alternative scientific studies, or lying about the availability of stem cell lines for research, it is not surprising that the Union of Concerned Scientists got 44 Nobels, 62 Medal of Science winners, 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences and thousands of others to sign a report against the widespread and unprecedented “manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions.”  It is not without a hat tip to this hypocrisy that Barack Obama calls for a democratic, progressive administration to move away from the era of “junk science” a term more often leveled by the Right against the Left.

Chris Mooney in his book, the Republican War on Science, persuasively makes the case that the marriage of big business to the religious right to create the support base of the Republican Party has resulted in a systematic abuse of science in regulatory decision-making. What began during World War II as an intimate relationship between science and politics, the flames of whose passion were fueled by the competitive jealousy of the Cold War and the attentions of an intellectually-inclined Kennedy administration, that love affair has now waned.  The rise of conservatism spurred a movement to create alternative sources for scientific information in its own interest.  Hiding behind the skirt of science, anti-evolution and anti-abortion politics create pressure to distort science to serve political ends.  At the same time, the motivation of big business to undermine scientific research that might impel the need for expensive environmental and consumer regulation further contributes to a distortion of the use of science in policymaking.  Mooney readily acknowledges that the Left as well as the Right make decisions on the basis of values rather than facts.  Whereas Democrats, he contends, sometimes do politics in spite of science, Republicans dress up politics as science and attempt to couch their positions, such as “creation science” behind the veneer of scientific legitimacy. 

Why does this matter?

When the data is fundamentally flawed or incomplete, the resulting decision is ultimately incorrect.  So whether it is a regulatory proposal about the environment, transportation, health or safety, if government is to make a decision in the public interest, it needs to be based on some kind of factual reality and not the economic interests of companies seeking to avoid regulation.

More important, flouting scientific consensus undermines the legitimacy of science and erodes public trust in the mechanisms of decisionmaking.  How can we place any trust in democratic institutions that reject truth in favor of ideology?  It’s one thing to make a decision based on values – a decision with which not everyone will agree.  It’s another to pretend that the political position is supported by scientific method.  When the truth comes out, which it invariably does, the luster of our institutions is tarnished.

Claims for strict adherence to scientific truth as opposed to science’s best guess (the scientific theory that Clive would want us to call law) that are designed to delay the regulatory process and throw stumbling blocks in front of regulators represent an abuse of process.  Administrative law scholar, Stephen Johnson, (Junking the "Junk Science" Law: Reforming the Information Quality Act, 58 ADMIN LAW REV. 37 (2006))
like Chris Mooney, vehemently rejects the notion, for example, that the Information Quality Act was designed to do anything other than allow companies wishing to avoid regulation to challenge its scientific basis.

Whether the cause is ideological or economic self-interest of simply a blameless lack of information on the basis of which to make policy, there is much that can be done to improve the quality of decision-making.

If one cares about the environment, the economy, education, crime, or any issue, it is important to get the practices of how we make decisions about these  topics right.

We must ensure that regulatory officials:

• disclose the full and complete basis for their decisions;
• provide an opportunity for the concerned public to critique that information and to submit alternatives online;
• articulate clear and transparent standards and methods by which data quality can be challenged (so that such challenges cannot turn into a form of “holdup suit.”);
• move away from closed-door peer review practices to open practices;
• use new technology to provide opportunities for critique and analysis of data used in decision-making;
• maintain free, open and transparent channels of communication between scientific and governmental experts;
• recognize that enthusiasts are often as good at critiquing data quality as professionals.

Policymaking is not necessarily the equal sum of the two parts of scientific information and values.  We recognize that some decisions will fly in the face of science.  And sometimes science turns out to be wrong and so-called scientific information is later falsified by new empirical evidence.  Nonetheless, why allow ourselves to conflate science and values interchangeably lest we do grave harm to legitimacy of decision-making?

New Student Capstone Projects at the Do Tank

Institute for Information Law and Policy Tech Law Lab/Capstone Class 2007-2008

Profs. Grimmelmann, Johnson, Noveck, Sherwin

Introduction:

This year-long course seeks to train a new generation of lawyer: the one who can wield a wider array of tools (law, policy, technology) to solve complex social problems. The lawyer in the digital age must be able to think, not only in traditional legal terms, but also with an understanding of how information and communication work today.  Put another way, the new jurist has to translate the values of law into the world of media, technology and communication. This class aims to inculcate these skills through collaborative work on real-world projects that leverage hi- tech tools to promote civil liberties and social justice, promote open access to law and legal information, foster collective action and deepen democracy.  In this class, students work in small group teams. Each team has a faculty mentor as well as a client. These are all real projects with serious, real-world impact.

Descriptions for: Virtual Company (Johnson), Open Access Law (Grimmelmann),  New York Law School Visual History (Sherwin) and IP Matrix (Noveck) Projects follow.

Iraqis Use Google Earth for Survival and Insurgency

A recent BBC news article discussed how Iraqis have been relying on Google Earth satellite maps and technology (websites, cell phones, satellite television) to avoid death squads. The Iraq League website (run from the UK) for example, allows people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth's detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can create escape routes and work out the most likely approach of their attackers.