This is great news. Over the weekend, the Obama–Biden Transition team switched the copyright policy for their Web site, Change.gov, from the old fashioned “copyright protected model” to the most  open Creative Commons license. Lots of folks had noticed this oddity and there had been a low buzz of conversation about it. It’s really terrific to see the Transition team catch this early on and free the information. So we can now mix and remix the content there. It will be interesting to see what we can do with it.

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Seth Hettena spills the beans on the names of the five lawmakers that Mitchell Wade provided information on to federal investigators. They are:

Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hi.

Rep. Alan B. Mollohan,  D-W. Va

Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.

Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va.

Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla.

As Hettena explains, Inouye and Lewis are more directly related to deals that Wade’s former partner Brent Wilkes was seeking from the government. Harris, Goode, and Mollohan all received large campaign contributions from Wade and his company MZM, Inc. as he sought to locate his operations in their respective districts.

Both Harris and Goode are no longer in Congress; Goode having lost his seat this year. Mollohan and Lewis have both been under investigation by the Justice Department for some time. This is the first word that the Justice Department has been looking at the actions of Sen. Daniel Inouye, the incoming chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

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New contribution disclosure rules provide some transparency in the world of “soft” influence seeking. In this case, these disclosure rules require the disclosure of contributions made “in honor of” a covered official, a lawmaker, executive branch or military official. A Seattle Times article looking into these contributions in honor of Washington state lawmakers shows Rep. Norm Dicks, a senior member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, as a frequent honoree for contributions made by corporations seeking defense contracts.

Boeing gave $10,000 earlier this year to one of Congressman Norm Dicks’ favorite charities, the National Guard Youth Foundation.

So did Boeing’s archrival, EADS, the parent company of Airbus.

But that’s small change compared to another defense contractor, TriWest Healthcare Alliance, which gave $100,000 to the youth foundation’s gala dinner in February honoring Dicks, a Bremerton Democrat, for his staunch support of the charity.

TriWest followed that up with a $50,000 contribution to another charity event hosted by Dicks and four other members of the powerful defense-appropriations subcommittee that doled out $459 billion in contracts this year.

Giving money to a charity favored by a lawmaker isn’t quite like giving to their campaign committee, but it will likely gain you brownie points when money for your business is on the table. In this case, the desire to influence behavior, while denied by all parties involved, is plain as day for anyone looking from the outside.

Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense is quoted in the article saying, “There’s nothing outrageous at all about giving to something that helps a National Guard entity … I think it’s a soft lobbying tactic that can make lawmakers think you’re in their camp and loyal to their interests.”

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According to TPM Muckraker, a Senate Republican placed a secret hold on the nomination of Neil Barofsky to lead the office of special inspector for the bailout.

Earlier this month, the Bush administration nominated Neil Barofsky, a federal prosecutor, to be the Treasury Department’s special inspector general on the bailout program. That’s a crucial post, given the astronomical sums at issue, the broad authority that Treasury has been given to distribute them, the concerns that have been raised about possible conflicts of interest, and the general urgency of our efforts to prevent an economic collapse.

So you’d think Congress would be doing everything it could to get Barofsky confirmed right away. You’d be wrong.

Last week, Sen. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the banking committee, issued a little-noticed statement saying that although the nomination “was cleared by members of the Senate Banking Committee, the leadership of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and all Democratic Senators,” it was “blocked on the floor by at least one Republican member.” (itals ours.)

We’ve had our fair share of experience with secret holds, having fought to reveal the identities of those secretly blocking the Coburn-Obama bill (FFATA) and the campaign finance e-filing bill (S. 223). The first thing of note is that secret holds were, for the most part, abolished during the 110th Congress. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act mandated the disclosure of the identity of a senator secretly blocking a “measure or matter” “not later than 6 session days” after the initiation of the hold.

The Barofsky nomination provides a good example of the loopholes in this mandate of disclosure. If a bill or, in this case, a nomination comes up prior to a long recess, the disclosure of the offending senator’s identity will have to wait until the Senate reconvenes for at least 6 session days, not calendar days. So far, since the nomination was blocked, the Senate convened for two session days. While they are expected to convene tomorrow for a pro forma session, it is unknown whether the Senate will convene for four more days by the end of the year.

TPM Muckraker suspects Sen. Jim Bunning to be the secret hold senator, having opposed the full funding of the office that Barofsky is nominated to lead. If you can’t wait another four session days to find out who is blocking oversight of the $700 billion bailout, feel free to call your senator and ask. Leave your findings in the comments or head over to TPM Muckraker and let them know.

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If you happen to live in the Washington, DC area, here are a few events relating to government transparency to check out during the month of December:

Tues, Dec 2

“Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption”
Presented by the Johns Hopkins University Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
Featuring Robin Pande, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John Kennedy School of Government
4:30 p.m. @ 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Rm 714, SAIS

“Ethics and the Future of Democratic Media” (Reception / Discussion)
Presented by the Wisconsin Alumni Association
Featuring Stephen Ward, University of Wisconsin, Madison James Burgess Professor of Journalism Ethics.
6:30 p.m. @ 14th and F Sts. NW, National Press Club

Wed, Dec 10

Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses
Presented by the Cato Institute
Featuring Ed Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University; Gary D. Bass, Founder and Executive Director, OMB Watch; Jerry Brito, Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and Peter Swire, C. William O’Neill Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Moderated by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute
Noon @ 1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW, The Cato Institute

Tues, Dec 16

Transitioning to High Definition for Government Video Applications
Presented by Sony and GovernmentExecutive.com
Moderated by Steven Vito, President and Group Publisher, Government Executive
2:00 p.m. Webinar

I’ll post more events here as they get announced. To view a larger list of events head over to the Upcoming Transparency Events page at SourceWatch.org (compiled by Sunlight Foundation intern Alli Broad).

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The chief witness in the investigation into former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham may have spilled the goods on more lawmakers than the now imprisoned San Diego Republican. According to Seth Hettena, the author of a book about Cunningham’s crimes, Mitchell Wade’s sentencing memo contains new revelations about his cooperation with federal authorities:

A 42-page sentencing memo filed by Wade’s attorneys says he aided the government in its investigation “of at least five other members of Congress” who were under investigation for “corruption similar to that of Mr. Cunningham.” These no doubt include Virgil Goode and Katherine “Pink Sugar” Harris. Wade wanted to open facilities in their districts and made $78,000 in “straw” contributions  to grease the wheels. Neither Harris nor Goode has been charged with wrongdoing.

Prosecutors drop tantalizing hints about an even bigger, ongoing investigation. Wade was debriefed in 2006 and provided “moderately useful” background information in another “large and important corruption investigation” that also has not yet resulted in any charges.

Who are the other 3 members of Congress? And what is this “even bigger, ongoing investigation”? Ken Silverstein has some speculation on who the 3 unmentioned members of Congress are.

Of particular interest is the way in which Wade revealed the information to law enforcement: he released a searchable, electronic database of 150,000 documents.

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Our friends at Change Congress have asked their members and supporters to take a survey to help them decide what they should be focused on for the coming year. And a number of questions they asked dealt with government transparency: Are earmarks fundamentally wrong or just need to be more open and transparent to the public? What’s one thing that would create a more open and transparent government? And finally, should lobbyists have a role in government? All good questions.

Japhet Els, Change Congress’ political director, lists some of the responses they have received. Regarding earmarks:, “I believe that if earmarks are going to exist, they ought to be transparent.” Another, “Nothing is 100% wrong or right. Earmarks have their use and full and timely transparency should check abuses.” We agree with these sentiments. That’s why we worked with our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense to create Earmark Watch, where we’ve placed over 3,000 earmarks online, and ask citizens to research them.

(more…)

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Scott Amey at the Project for Government Oversight’s POGO blog writes about being positively surprised by one thing he found at USAspending.gov, the government site modeled after OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org. 2007 data has been replaced by updated FY 2008 and 2009 totals. (This is shocking on two fronts. The government is usually years behind in reporting contract spending dollars.)

But Scott’s more shocked to find that the government spent over $510 billion on goods and services in FY 2008. “And if history repeats, this total will increase by an additional $10-$20 billion as agencies report additional information,” he writes. That amount would rank as the 25^th largest GDP in the world, he figures.

In the shadow of the huge multi-trillion dollar financial bailout, all these huge numbers are mind numbing. Federal contract spending is out of control, and deserving of much more oversight and transparency, don’t you think?

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Don’t forget to vote for Party Time!

Party Time, our site that helps you keep track of congressional fundraising parties (and that crashed the convention parties this summer), has been nominated for a BOB award for “Best English Weblog.” Cast your vote now for Party Time.

Also Vote for Transparency on Change.org. Let lawmakers know that they need to be more transparent.

Support government reform with just a few clicks.

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Doc Searls, author and Senior Editor of the blog Linux Journal, interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin in an article about open source in politics and government. Here are the choice parts from Greg describing Sunlight’s work, the data that backs it up, and the future of it all:

Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source — though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it. Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache… The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony…

The work I’m most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting — what I think about as “flow-and-go” data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as “rack-and-stack” data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.

Two examples of flow. A Sunlight database, LouisDB.com, scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley did a word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress’ “Word of the Day” and the microsite http://capitolwords.org — which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and a widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record — and now there’s a script boiling it down into tweetable content that others can use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members are doing in Parliament by parsing the Parliament’s daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber’s http://govtrack.us b/c. Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills in Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh’s data is open and so also is his code. It’s a tremendous contribution.
…
Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of open source and Web 2.0. They are collaborating with — and sometimes competing with — existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It’s uneven, it’s bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government — the question remains only where the tree is going to land.

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