Data disappeared from Obama administration site promoting transparency; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 22, 2017

Tracie Mauriello, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 

Data disappeared from Obama administration site promoting transparency

"If you wanted to know who visited the White House, how much the president’s secretary is paid, or which state has the most federally funded teaching positions, the information was just a few clicks away. With a bit more technical knowledge, you could explore public data sets to analyze the president’s budget, or look for trends in government spending.

No more.

Dozens of data sets disappeared last week from Open.WhiteHouse.gov, a website the Obama administration created to promote government transparency.

Visitors to the website now and find a message saying “check back for new data.” But it isn’t clear when any new data will be posted, and government watchdogs aren’t confident that it will ever happen.

“We are working to open up the new sites,” White House press aide Helen Ferre emailed in response to questions. She did not respond to follow-up questions about the content of the “new sites,” whether they will include visitor logs, why data sets were removed, and when aides will post new information...

The data the Obama administration provided hasn’t been deleted. Rather it’s been preserved by the National Archives in accordance with a law that prohibits federal data from being destroyed. Find it at https://open.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/...

The data is no longer in a user-friendly format. Users have to have the technical knowledge to unpack zipfiles and must have software that can handle large files with millions of rows of data."

White House expanding open data initiatives; FedScoop, 9/21/16

Samantha Ehlinger, FedScoop; White House expanding open data initiatives:

"The Obama administration has big plans to improve its open data — particularly around contracting data, data on foreign aid and data to aid development.

In a series of new commitments announced Tuesday to further expand its third Open Government National Action Plan, the administration calls for increased engagement with contracting officers to discuss data quality and accessibility, and directs the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department to "reach out to small business owners to better understand what types of contracting data are most useful to them.”"

Obama’s Secrecy Problem; Slate, 4/15/16

Fred Kaplan, Slate; Obama’s Secrecy Problem:

"Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told me Thursday, “This is a time of particularly promising ferment over secrecy policy. There is a recognition, even within the national-security apparatus, that the classification system has overreached and needs to be pruned back.” Yet by all measures, the bureaucracies persist in resisting this pruning, Congress won’t allocate the money for the shears, and the president hasn’t mustered the full attention and commitment that the task requires. Information may want to be free, but Washington has it wrapped in a tangle."

Obama claimed to want transparency. His actions suggest the opposite; Guardian, 3/9/16

Trevor Timm, Guardian; Obama claimed to want transparency. His actions suggest the opposite:

"The Obama administration has taken a lot of well-deserved criticism over the years for claiming to be the most transparent presidency ever while actually being remarkably opaque, but they’ve now reached a new low: newly released documents show they aggressively lobbied Congress to kill bipartisan transparency reform that was based on the administration’s own policy.

In a move open government advocates are calling “ludicrous”, the administration “strongly opposed” the passage of bipartisan Freedom of Information Act (Foia) reform behind closed doors in 2014. The bill was a modest and uncontroversial piece of legislation which attempted to modernize the law for the internet age and codify President Obama’s 2009 memo directing federal agencies to adopt a “presumption of openness”.

Through a Foia lawsuit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (the organization I work for) obtained a six-page talking points memo that the Justice Department distributed to House members protesting virtually every aspect of the proposed legislation in incredibly harsh language – despite the fact that some of the provisions were based almost word-for-word on the Justice Department’s own supposed policy (you can see a side-by-side comparison here).

Worse, Vice’s Jason Leopold is also reporting that the administration is conducting similar lobbying efforts around this year’s attempt to reform Foia in time for the law’s 50th anniversary this summer.

This is a shameful move by an administration that is constantly touting its open government and transparency bona fides despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary."

Is the White House trying to blow up an open data bill?; Washington Post, 1/29/14

Andrea Peterson, Washington Post; Is the White House trying to blow up an open data bill? :

"The White House has previously expressed support for open data -- even issuing an executive order and open data policy requiring that data generated by the government in the future be made available in open, machine-readable formats. But a group of for-profit and nonprofit organizations called the Data Transparency Coalition says a leaked Office of Management and Budget version of their biggest legislation initiative, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act or DATA Act, shows the administration trying to water down the legislation.

The DATA Act aims to standardize and publish a wide variety of U.S. government reports and data related to financial management, assistance and procurement. A version of the bill passed the House unanimously in 2012 and again on a vote of 388 to 1 in November 2013. But the bill did not make it to the floor in the Senate. Now Federal News Radio has leaked a document showing that the OMB wants to remove requirements for standardized formats, eliminate a mandate to make all data available from the same source and significantly delay implementation."

Obama admin: time to make radio pay for its music; Ars Technica, 4/2/10

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica; Obama admin: time to make radio pay for its music:

"The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its "strong support" for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.

This has been a dream of the recording industry for decades, but it has taken on new importance as the revenues from recorded music have plummeted over the last decade. The broadcasters refer to the idea as a new "tax" that will largely benefit foreign record companies such as Universal (France), Sony (Japan), and EMI (UK).

Taking sides

Today, a letter from the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron Kerry, makes clear which side has the administration's support: the recording industry. (We double-checked with Kerry's office; this is no April Fools' joke.)

"The Department has long endorsed amending the US copyright law to provide for an exclusive right of public performance of sound recordings," says the letter. It pledges "strong support" for the current bill and approves the idea that radio's payment exemption is nothing more than "an historical anomaly that does not have a strong policy justification."

A copy of the letter was sent to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the letter, Kerry says that making radio pay for music is really a matter of fairness—not just to artists, but to Internet webcasters and satellite radio, too.

That's because both webcasters and the satellite radio folks currently do have to pay a public performance right on the music they play; the exclusion granted to over-the-air broadcasters thus distorts the market and makes it difficult for new technologies to gain traction. "It would also provide a level playing field for all broadcasters to compete in the current environment of rapid technological change, including the Internet, satellite, and terrestrial broadcasters," says the letter.

In addition to rationalizing the performance rights scheme in the US, Commerce points out that the US is the only major industrialized country to have such an exemption for over-the-air radio. Making a change isn't just a case of bowing to peer pressure; real money is at stake, since many artists are unable to collect the public performance money due them in other countries because of "the lack of reciprocal protection under US copyright law.""

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/obama-admin-make-radio-pay-for-its-music.ars

Hollywood tells lawmakers to back U.S. efforts in copyright trade talks; Washington Post, 11/20/09

Cecilia King, Washington Post; Hollywood tells lawmakers to back U.S. efforts in copyright trade talks:

"Hollywood urged key lawmakers Thursday to support trade negotiations that would set rules for policing copyright laws.

The Motion Picture Association of America wrote a letter to several lawmakers including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Va.) and House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, asking them to support the Obama administration's efforts in the trade talks, which are being conducted behind closed doors in Seoul. Other countries participating in the negotiations include the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea, along with European Union members.

In its letter, the MPAA said that new global rules are needed to protect films from Internet piracy. As more people illegally trade content online, the movie studios businesses suffer."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2009/11/hollywood_tells_lawmakers_to_k.html

Pro-Stronger Copyright Propaganda Shows Up In Canadian Press; TechDirt, 10/21/09

Mike Masnick, TechDirt; Pro-Stronger Copyright Propaganda Shows Up In Canadian Press:

"Rob Hyndman points us to a column in Toronto's Globe & Mail by Barrie McKenna that is basically all of the recording industry's talking points on copyright, without even a nod to the views of the other side. It appears that most of the info is (surprise, surprise) based on a recording industry lawyer. It starts with a nice little moral panic about how file sharing sites are rushing to base themselves in Canada due to the country's supposedly lax copyright laws. Of course, that's ridiculous. Canada has very strong copyright laws already. What they don't have is a DMCA. That's what the industry wants. McKenna tries to bolster his claim that Canada has weak copyright laws with the following:

"Earlier this year, the Obama administration put Canada on its blacklist of shame - a "priority watch list" of intellectual property laggards, joining the likes of China, Russia and Venezuela."

Sounds nice, but incredibly misleading. The "blacklist of shame" that McKenna mentions, but does not explain, is actually the US Trade Rep's special "301 Report." Mention it to just about any policy maker (excluding those pushing for protectionist policies for a specific industry, of course), and you get an eye roll. It's not so much "the Obama administration" but industries with wishlists attempting to restrain trade in foreign countries by putting forth scary stories about what's happening in those countries. The USTR basically takes those industry-submitted reports and wraps them up into the 301 report. It's a joke. Most of the complaints in the report concern countries that actually are in perfect compliance with international treaties -- but which the industry still wants to go further.

Of course, given that McKenna's source is an industry lawyer, perhaps it's not surprising that such info wasn't shared. But, the next claims go from the just uninformed to the unbelievable:

"Canada, which has repeatedly promised but so far failed to deliver on copyright reform, isn't just out of step with the United States, but with much of the Western world."

This is simply untrue. Canada's copyright law is actually quite in line with most of the Western world, no matter what the entertainment industry suggests (and, you might think that McKenna would ask someone other than the person representing the industry that benefits from this). Furthermore, the line that Canada has "so far failed to deliver on copyright reform" is either blatantly misleading or simply ignorant of rather recent history. Canadian politicians have tried to push forth copyright reform, but due to a massive public outcry from people who actually understand how things like the DMCA cause all sorts of problems -- especially concerning free speech and consumer rights -- those politicians were forced to back down.

That's called informed democracy in action. Oh, McKenna also claims that the last time the Canadian government tried copyright reform was in 2007. According to his bio, McKenna is based in DC, not Canada, but even down here in the States plenty of us were aware that Jim Prentice introduced copyright reform in 2008.

So, McKenna makes it out like Canada has no strong copyright laws (false), that it's laws are different from most of the western world (false) and that it hasn't tried to add more draconian copyright laws (false again). From there, he comes up with this bizarre justification for more draconian copyright law:

"The world has gone digital. And there's now an explosion of legitimate download sites in the U.S. and Europe, including ground-breaking music sites Pandora.com and Lala.com. But you can't use them in Canada.

These and other businesses are choosing to bypass the market entirely, in part because of licensing problems.

And the creative industries that produce music, software and the like - industries that contribute significantly more to the economy than BitTorrent sites - may also shun Canada if nothing is done."

Actually, you have Canadian record labels like Nettwerk, that are doing quite well, even as its CEO has declared that copyright is obsolete and should be done away with entirely within a decade. And the reason that those services can't be used in Canada isn't because the law is too lax, but because the laws are too strict, in terms of figuring out special licensing setups in each country. It's such a pain to get them licensed in a single country that the services have been forced -- against their will in many cases -- to block access in other countries like Canada."

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091021/0252526618.shtml

Cracking Down, Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance; New York Times, 7/25/09

Stephen Labaton via New York Timesl; Cracking Down, Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance:

"President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.

The official, Christine A. Varney, the antitrust chief at the Justice Department, has begun examining complaints by the phone companies Verizon and AT&T that their rivals — major cable operators like Cablevision and Cox Communications — improperly prevent them from buying sports shows and other programs that the cable companies produce, industry lawyers said...

Ms. Varney has also challenged agreements that the Federal Trade Commission and consumer groups say discourage pharmaceutical companies from marketing more generic drugs. And she is examining a settlement between Google and book publishers and authors to make more books available online."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/business/26antitrust.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss