Another Word For It

IBM battles Amazon over $600M CIA cloud deal by Frank Konkel, reports that IBM has protested a contract award for cloud computing by the CIA to Amazon.

The “new age” of government transparency looks a lot like the old age in that:

• How Amazon obtained the award is not public.
• The nature of the cloud to be built by Amazon is not public.
• Whether Amazon has started construction on the proposed cloud is not public.
• The basis for the protest by IBM is not public.

“Not public” means opportunities for incompetence in contract drafting and/or fraud by contractors.

How are members of the public or less well-heeled potential bidders suppose to participate in this discussion?

Or should I say “meaningfully participate” in the discussion over the cloud computing award to Amazon?

And what if others know the terms of the contract? CIA CTO Gus Hunt is reported as saying:

It is very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,

If the proposed system is supposed to “compute on all human generated information,” so what?

How does knowing that aid any alleged enemies of the United States?

Other than the comfort that the U.S. makes bad technology decisions?

Keeping the content of such a system secret might disadvantage enemies of the U.S.

Keeping the contract for such a system secret disadvantages the public and other contractors.

Yes?

White House Releases New Tools For Digital Strategy Anniversary by Caitlin Fairchild.

From the post:

The White House marked the one-year anniversary of its digital government strategy Thursday with a slate of new releases, including a catalog of government APIs, a toolkit for developing government mobile apps and a new framework for ensuring the security of government mobile devices.

Those releases correspond with three main goals for the digital strategy: make more information available to the public; serve customers better; and improve the security of federal computing.

Just scanning down the API list, it is a very mixed bag.

For example, there are four hundred and ten (410) individual APIs listed, the National Library of Medicine has twenty-four (24) and the U.S. Senate has one (1).

Defenders of this release will say we should not talk about the lack of prior efforts but focus on what’s coming.

I call that the bank robber’s defense.

All prosecutors want to talk about is what a bank robber did in the past. They never want to focus on the future.

Bank robbers would love to have the “let’s talk about tomorrow” defense.

As far as I know, it isn’t allowed anywhere.

Question: Why do we allow avoidance of responsibility with the “let’s talk about tomorrow” defense for government and others?

If you review the APIs for semantic diversity I would appreciate a pointer to your paper/post.

Cato’s “Deepbills” Project Advances Government Transparency by Jim Harper.

From the post:

But there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for things to improve. Given the incentives, transparency is something that we will have to force on government. We won’t receive it like a gift.

So with software we acquired and modified for the purpose, we’ve been adding data to the bills in Congress, making it possible to learn automatically more of what they do. The bills published by the Government Printing Office have data about who introduced them and the committees to which they were referred. We are adding data that reflects:

- What agencies and bureaus the bills in Congress affect;

- What laws the bills in Congress effect: by popular name, U.S. Code section, Statutes at Large citation, and more;

- What budget authorities bills include, the amount of this proposed spending, its purpose, and the fiscal year(s).

We are capturing proposed new bureaus and programs, proposed new sections of existing law, and other subtleties in legislation. Our “Deepbills” project is documented at cato.org/resources/data.

This data can tell a more complete story of what is happening in Congress. Given the right Web site, app, or information service, you will be able to tell who proposed to spend your taxpayer dollars and in what amounts. You’ll be able to tell how your member of Congress and senators voted on each one. You might even find out about votes you care about before they happen!

Two important points:

First, transparency must be forced upon government (I would add businesses).

Second, transparency is up to us.

Do you know something the rest of us should know?

On your mark!

Get set!

Go!

I first saw this at: Harper: Cato’s “Deepbills” Project Advances Government Transparency.

Forty-seven years after Nowhere Man by the Beatles, a U.S. Senate panel discovers several nowhere men.

A Wall Street Journal Technology Alert:

Apple has set up corporate structures that have allowed it to pay little or no corporate tax–in any country–on much of its overseas income, according to the findings of a U.S. Senate examination.

The unusual result is possible because the iPhone maker’s key foreign subsidiaries argue they are residents of nowhere, according to the investigators’ report, which will be discussed at a hearing Tuesday where Apple CEO Tim Cook will testify. The finding comes from a lengthy investigation into the technology giant’s tax practices by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sens. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.).

In additional coverage, Apple says:

Apple’s testimony also includes a call to overhaul: “Apple welcomes an objective examination of the US corporate tax system, which has not kept pace with the advent of the digital age and the rapidly changing global economy.”

Tax reform will be useful only if “transparent” tax reform.

Transparent tax reform mean every provision with more than a $100,000 impact on any taxpayer, names all the taxpayers impacted. Whether more or less taxes.

We have the data, we need the will to apply the analysis.

A tax-impact topic map anyone?

Lobbyists 2012: Out of the Game or Under the Radar?

Executive Summary:

Over the past several years, both spending on lobbying and the number of active lobbyists has declined. A number of factors may be responsible, including the lackluster economy, a gridlocked Congress and changes in lobbying rules.

CRP finds that the biggest players in the influence game — lobbying clients across nearly all sectors — increased spending over the last five years. The top 100 lobbying firms income declined only 6 percent between 2007 and 2012 but the number of registered lobbyists dropped by 25 percent.

The more precipitous drop in the number of lobbyists is likely due to changes in the rules. More than 46 percent of lobbyists who were active in 2011 but not in 2012 continue to work for the same employers, suggesting that many have simply avoided the reporting limits while still contributing to lobbying efforts.

Whatever the cause, it is important to understand whether the same activity continues apace with less disclosure and to strengthen the disclosure regimen to ensure that it is clear, enforceable — and enforced. If there is a general sense that the rules don’t matter, there could be erosion to disclosure and a sense that this is an “honor system” that isn’t being honored any longer. This is important because, if people who are in fact lobbying do not register, citizens will be unable to understand the forces at work in shaping federal policy, and therefore can’t effectively participate in policy debates and counter proposals that are not in their interest. At a minimum, the Center for Responsive Politics will continue to aggregate, publish and scrutinize the data that is being reported, in order to explain trends in disclosure — or its omission.

A caution on relying on public records/disclosure for topic maps of political influence.

You can see the full report here.

My surprise was the discovery that:

[the] “honor system” that isn’t being honored any longer.

Lobbying for private advantage at public expense is contrary to any notion of “honor.”

Why the surprise that lobbyists are dishonorable? (However faithful they may be to their employers. Once bought, they stay bought.)

I first saw this at Full Text Reports.

A great visualization of the impact of sequestration state by state.

And, a post on the process followed to produce the visualization.

The only caveat being that one person read the numbers from PDF files supplied by the White House and another person typed them into a spreadsheet.

Doable with a small data set such as this one, but why was it necessary at all?

Once you have the data in a machine readable form, putting faces in the local community to the abstract categories should be the next step.

Topic maps anyone?

I left off yesterday pointing out three critical failures in the Digital
 Accountability and Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act)

Those failures were:

• Undefined goals with unrealistic deadlines.
• Lack of incentives for performance.
• Lack of funding for assigned duties.

Digital
 Accountability and Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) [DOA]

Make no mistake, I think transparency, particularly in government spending is very important.

Important enough that proposals for transparency should take it seriously.

In broad strokes, here is my alternative to the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) proposal:

• Ask the GAO, the federal agency with the most experience auditing other federal agencies, to prepare an estimate for:
• Cost/Time for preparing a program internal to the GAO to produce mappings of agency financial records to a common report form.
• Cost/Time to train GAO personnel on the mapping protocol.
• Cost/Time for additional GAO staff for the creation of the mapping protocol and permanent GAO staff as liaisons with particular agencies.
• Recommendations for incentives to promote assistance from agencies.
• Upon approval and funding of the GAO proposal, which should include at least two federal agencies as test cases, that:
• Test case agencies are granted additional funding for training and staff to cooperate with the GAO mapping team.
• Test case agencies are granted additional funding for training and staff to produce reports as specified by the GAO.
• Staff in test case agencies are granted incentives to assist in the initial mapping effort and maintenance of the same. (Positive incentives.)
• The program of mapping of accounts expand no more often than every two to three years and only if prior agencies have achieved and remain in conformance.

Some critical differences between my sketch of a proposal and the Digital
 Accountability and Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act):

1. Additional responsibilities and requirements will be funded for agencies, including additional training and personnel.
2. Agency staff will have incentives to learn the new skills and procedures necessary for exporting their data as required by the GAO.
3. Instead of trying to swallow the Federal whale, the project proceeds incrementally and with demonstrable results.

Topic maps can play an important role in such a project but we should be mindful that projects rarely succeed or fail because of technology.

Project fail because, like the DATA Act, they ignore basic human needs, experience in similar situations (9/11), and substitute abuse for legitimate incentives.

I started this series of posts in: Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) [The Details], where I concluded the Data Act had the following characteristics:

• Secretary of the Treasury has one (1) year to design a common data format for unknown financial data in Federal agencies.
• Federal agencies have one (1) year to comply with the common data format from the Secretary of the Treasure.
• No penalties or bonuses for the Secretary of the Treasury.
• No penalties or bonuses for Federal agencies failing to comply.
• No funding for the Secretary of the Treasury to carry out the assigned duties.
• No funding for Federal agencies to carry out the assigned duties.

As written, the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) will be DOA (Dead On Arrival) in the current or any future session of Congress.

There are three (3) main reasons why that is the case.

A Common Data Format

Let me ask a dumb question: Do you remember 9/11?

Of course you do. And the United States has been in a state of war on terrorism every since.

I point that out because intelligence sharing (read common data format) was identified as a reason why the 9/11 attacks weren’t stopped and has been a high priority to solve since then.

Think about that: Reason why the attacks weren’t stopped and a high priority to correct.

This next September 11th will be the twelfth anniversary of those attacks.

Progress on intelligence sharing: Progress Made and Challenges Remaining in Sharing Terrorism-Related Information which I gloss in Read’em and Weep, along with numerous other GAO reports on intelligence sharing.

The good news is that we are less than five (5) years away from some unknown level of intelligence sharing.

The bad news is that puts us sixteen (16) years after 9/11 with some unknown level of intelligence sharing.

And that is for a subset of the entire Federal government.

A smaller set than will be addressed by the Secretary of the Treasury.

Common data format in a year? Really?

To say nothing of the likelihood of agencies changing the multitude of systems they have in place in a year.

No penalties or bonuses

You can think of this as the proverbial carrot and stick if you like.

What incentive does either the Secretary of the Treasury and/or Federal agencies have to engage in this fool’s errand pursuing a common data format?

In case you have forgotten, both the Secretary of the Treasury and Federal agencies have obligations under their existing missions.

Missions which they are designed by legislation and habit to discharge before they turn to additional reporting duties.

And what happens if they discharge their primary mission but don’t do the reporting?

Oh, they get reported to Congress. And ranked in public.

As Ben Stein would say, “Wow.”

No Funding

To add insult to injury, there is no additional funding for either the Secretary of the Treasury or Federal agencies to engage in any of the activities specified by the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act).

As I noted above, the Secretary of the Treasury and Federal agencies already have full plates with their current missions.

Now they are to be asked to undertake unfamiliar tasks, creation of a chimerical “common data format” and submitting reports based upon it.

Without any addition staff, training, or other resources.

Directives without resources to fulfill them are directives that are going to fail. (full stop)

Tentative Conclusion

If you are asking yourself, “Why would anyone advocate the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act)?,” five points for your house!

I don’t know of anyone who understands:

1. the complexity of Federal data,
2. the need for incentives,
3. the need for resources to perform required tasks,

who thinks the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) is viable.

Why advocate non-viable legislation?

Its non-viability make it an attractive fund raising mechanism.

Advocates can email, fund raise, telethon, rant, etc., to their heart’s content.

Advocating non-viable transparency lines an organization’s pocket at no risk of losing its rationale for existence.

The third post in this series, suggesting a viable way forward, will appear tomorrow under: Transparency and the Digital Oil Drop.

The Data Transparency Coalition, the Sunlight Foundation and others are calling for reintroduction of the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) in order to make U.S. government spending more transparent.

Transparency in government spending is essential for an informed electorate. An electorate that can call attention to spending that is inconsistent with policies voted for by the electorate. Accountability as it were.

But saying “transparency” is easy. Achieving transparency, not so easy.

Let’s look at some of the details in the DATA Act.

(2) DATA STANDARDS-

‘(A) IN GENERAL- The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, and the heads of Federal agencies, shall establish Government-wide financial data standards for Federal funds, which may–

‘(i) include common data elements, such as codes, unique award identifiers, and fields, for financial and payment information required to be reported by Federal agencies;

‘(ii) to the extent reasonable and practicable, ensure interoperability and incorporate–

‘(I) common data elements developed and maintained by an international voluntary consensus standards body, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget, such as the International Organization for Standardization;

‘(II) common data elements developed and maintained by Federal agencies with authority over contracting and financial assistance, such as the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council; and

‘(III) common data elements developed and maintained by accounting standards organizations; and

‘(iii) include data reporting standards that, to the extent reasonable and practicable–

‘(I) incorporate a widely accepted, nonproprietary, searchable, platform-independent computer-readable format;

‘(II) be consistent with and implement applicable accounting principles;

‘(III) be capable of being continually upgraded as necessary; and

‘(IV) incorporate nonproprietary standards in effect on the date of enactment of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2012.

‘(B) DEADLINES-

‘(i) GUIDANCE- The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, shall issue guidance on the data standards established under subparagraph (A) to Federal agencies not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2012.

‘(ii) AGENCIES- Not later than 1 year after the date on which the guidance under clause (i) is issued, each Federal agency shall collect, report, and maintain data in accordance with the data standards established under subparagraph (A).

OK, I have a confession to make: I was a lawyer for ten years and reading this sort of thing is second nature to me. Haven’t practiced law in decades but I still read legal stuff for entertainment.

First, read section A and write down the types of data you would have to collect for each of those items.

Don’t list the agencies/organizations you would have to contact, you probably don’t have enough paper in your office for that task.

Second, read section B and notice that the Secretary of the Treasury has one (1) years to issue guidance for all the data you listed under Section A.

That means gathering, analyzing, testing and designing a standard for all that data, most of which is unknown. Even to the GAO.

And, if they meet that one (1) year deadline, the various agencies have only one (1) year to comply with the guidance from the Secretary of the Treasury.

Do I need to comment on the likelihood of success?

As far as the Secretary of the Treasury, what happens if they don’t meet the one year deadline? Do you see any penalties?

Assuming some guidance emerges, what happens to any Federal agency that does not comply? Any penalties for failure? Any incentives to comply?

My reading is:

• Secretary of the Treasury has one (1) year to design a common data format for unknown financial data in Federal agencies.
• Federal agencies have one (1) year to comply with the common data format from the Secretary of the Treasure.
• No penalties or bonuses for the Secretary of the Treasury.
• No penalties or bonuses for Federal agencies failing to comply.
• No funding for the Secretary of the Treasury to carry out the assigned duties.
• No funding for Federal agencies to carry out the assigned duties.

Do you disagree with that reading of the Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act)?

My analysis of that starting point appears in Digital
 Accountability 
and
 Transparency 
Act
 (DATA
 Act) [DOA]

Sunlight Congress API

From the webpage:

A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress, provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

Features

Lots of features and data for members of Congress:

• Look up legislators by location or by zip code.
• Official Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
• Committees and subcommittees in Congress, including memberships and rankings.

We also provide Congress' daily work:

• All introduced bills in the House and Senate, and what occurs to them (updated daily).
• Full text search over bills, with powerful Lucene-based query syntax.
• Real time notice of votes, floor activity, and committee hearings, and when bills are scheduled for debate.

All data is served in JSON, and requires a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.

We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs. Bugs and feature requests can be made on Github Issues.

Important not to confuse this effort with transparency.

As the late Aaron Swartz remarked in the O’Reilly “Open Government” text:

…When you create a regulatory agency, you put together a group of people whose job is to solve some problem. They’re given the power to investigate who’s breaking the law and the authority to punish them. Transparency, on the other hand, simply shifts the work from the government to the average citizen, who has neither the time nor the ability to investigate these questions in any detail, let alone do anything about it. It’s a farce: a way for Congress to look like it has done something on some pressing issue without actually endangering its corporate sponsors.

Here is an interface that:

…shifts the work from the [Sunlight Foundation] to the average citizen, who has neither the time nor the ability to investigate these questions in any detail, let alone do anything about it. It’s a farce: a way for [Sunlight Foundation] to look like it has done something on some pressing issue without actually endangering its corporate sponsors. (O’Reilly’s Open Government book ["...more equal than others" pigs]

Suggestions for ending the farce?

I first saw this at the Legal Informatics Blog, Mill: Sunlight Foundation releases Congress API.

Docket Wrench: Exposing Trends in Regulatory Comments by Nicko Margolies.

From the post:

Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils Docket Wrench, an online research tool to dig into regulatory comments and uncover patterns among millions of documents. Docket Wrench offers a window into the rulemaking process where special interests and individuals can wield their influence without the level of scrutiny traditional lobbying activities receive.

Before an agency finalizes a proposed rule that Congress and the president have mandated that they enforce, there is a period of public commenting where the agency solicits feedback from those affected by the rule. The commenters can vary from company or industry representatives to citizens concerned about laws that impact their environment, schools, finances and much more. These comments and related documents are grouped into “dockets” where you can follow the actions related to each rule. Every rulemaking docket has its own page on Docket Wrench where you can get a graphical overview of the docket, drill down into the rules and notices it contains and read the comments on those rules. We’ve pulled all this information together into one spot so you can more easily research trends and extract interesting stories from the data. Sunlight’s Reporting Group has done just that, looking into regulatory comment trends and specific comments by the Chamber of Commerce and the NRA.

An “apparent” transparency offering from the Sunlight Foundation.

Imagine that you follow their advice and do discover “form letters,” horror, that have been submitted in a rule making process.

What are you going to do? Whistle up the agency’s former assistant director who is on your staff to call his buds at the agency to complain?

Get yourself a cardboard sign and march around your town square? Start a letter writing campaign of your own?

Rules are drafted, debated and approved in the dark recesses of agencies, former agency staff, lobbyists and law firms.

Want transparency? Real transparency?

That would require experts in law and policy who have equal access to the agency as its insiders and an obligation to report to the public who wins and who loses from particular rules.

An office like the public editor of the New York Times.

Might offend donors if you did that.

Best just to expose the public to a tiny part of the quagmire so you can claim people had an opportunity to participate.

Not a meaningful one, but an opportunity none the less.

I first saw this at the Legal Informatics Blog, Sunlight Foundation Releases Docket Wrench: Tool for Analyzing Comments to Proposed Regulations

You may have seen the news about the latest GAO report on auditing the U.S. government: U.S. Government’s Fiscal Years 2012 and 2011 Consolidated Financial Statements, GAO-13-271R, Jan 17, 2013, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-271R.

The reasons why the GAO can’t audit the U.S. government:

(1) serious financial management problems at DOD that have prevented its financial statements from being auditable,

(2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and

(3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.

Number 2 reminds me of: The 560+ $Billion Shell Game, where I provided data files based on the OMB Sequestration report, detailing that over 560 $billion in agency transfers could not be tracked.

That problem has now been confirmed by the GAO.

I am sure my analysis was not original and has been known to insiders at the GAO and others for years.

But did you know that I mailed that analysis to both of my U.S. Senators and got no response?

I did get a “bug letter” from my representative, Austin Scott:

Washington continues to spend at unsustainable levels. That is why I voted against H.R. 8, the American Taxpayer Relief Act when it passed Congress on January 1, 2013. This plan does not address the real driver of our debt – spending. President Obama’s unwillingness to address this continues to cripple our efforts to find a long-term solution. We cannot tax our way out of this fiscal situation.

The President himself has said on multiple occasions that spending cuts must be part of the solution. In fact, on April 13, 2011 he remarked, “So any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table, and take on excess spending wherever it exists in the budget.” However, his words have seldom matched his actions.

We owe it to our children and grandchildren to make the tough choices and devise a long-term solution that gets our economy back on track and reduces our deficits. I remain hopeful that the President will join us in this effort. Thank you for contacting me. It’s an honor to represent the Eighth Congressional District of Georgia.

Non-responsive would be a polite word for it.

My original point has been vindicated by the GAO but that brings no joy.

My request to the officials I have contacted was simple:

All released government financial data must be available in standard spreadsheet formats (Excel, CSV, ODF).

There are a whole host of other issues that will arise from such data but the first step is to get it in a crunchable format.

Freeing the Plum Book by Derek Willis.

From the post:

The federal government produces reams of publications, ranging from the useful to the esoteric. Pick a topic, and in most cases you’ll find a relevant government publication: for example, recent Times articles about presidential appointments draw on the Plum Book. Published annually by either the House or the Senate (the task alternates between committees), the Plum Book is a snapshot of appointments throughout the federal government.

The Plum Book is clearly a useful resource for reporters. But like many products of the Government Printing Office, its two main publication formats are print and PDF. That means the digital version isn’t particularly searchable, unless you count Ctrl-F as a legitimate search mechanism. And that’s a shame, because the Plum Book is basically a long list of names, positions and salary information. It’s data.

Derek describes freeing the Plum Book from less than useful formats.

It is now available in JSON and YAML formats at Github and in Excel.

Curious, what other public datasets would you want to match up to the Plum Book?

Center for Effective Government Announces Launch

The former OMB Watch is now the Center for Effective Government (www.foreffectivegov.org).

A change to reflect a broader expertise on government effectiveness in general.

From the post:

The Center for Effective Government will continue to offer expert analysis, in-depth reports, and news updates on the issues it has been known for in the past. Specifically, the organization will:

• Analyze federal tax and spending choices and advocate for progressive revenue options and transparency in federal spending;
• Defend and improve national standards and safeguards and the regulatory systems that produce and enforce them;
• Expose undue special interest influence in federal policymaking and advocate for open government reforms that ensure public officials put the public interest first; and
• Encourage more active citizen engagement in our democracy by ensuring people have access to easy-to-understand, contextualized, meaningful public information and understand how they can participate in public policy decision making processes.

If you have been running a topic map in this area, reflect the name change to the OMB Watch topic.

Beyond simple semantic impedance, which is always present, government is replete with examples of intentional impedance if not outright deception.

A fertile field for topic map practitioners!