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Public Officials Sue for Right to Be Secret
,----[ Quote ]
| I make no bones about my ferocity in support
| of open government. I believe religiously in
| the time-honored words spoken in 1933 by
| Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis,
| "Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant." I
| write about open meetings and public records
| issues at my Media Law blog and lobby around
| them on behalf of my state's newspaper
| association.
|
| [...]
|
| Thus, it should surprise no one that I
| consider it outrageous that a coalition of
| Texas municipalities and elected officials
| have filed a federal lawsuit claiming they
| have a First Amendment right to conduct the
| public's business in secret. The lawsuit,
| filed Monday in federal court in Pecos, by
| four Texas cities and 15 elected officials,
| alleges that the Texas Open Meetings Act
| violates officials' free speech rights by
| preventing them from speaking in private on
| issues facing the public. No, I'm not making
| this up.
`----
http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2009/12/public-officials-sue-for-right-to-be-secret.html
Recent:
Senior civil servants fight off transparency, lobbying industry score huge victory
,----[ Quote ]
| A good day for the establishment, a bad day
| for transparency.
|
| The Cabinet Office has comprehensively
| squashed any attempt to better regulate
| lobbying and lobbyists.
`----
http://timesonline.typepad.com/politics/2009/10/senior-civil-servants-fight-off-transparency-lobbying-industry-score-huge-victory.html
Goldman Lobbies Senate, Says Full Transparency Sucks
,----[ Quote ]
| Instead, the bank argues that an over-the-
| counter market in which big traders like
| Goldman get to do deals in the shadows in
| âdark poolsâ without the retail investor
| having any knowledge of what the hell is
| going on is somehow better for everybody,
| that this somehow produces better prices. Of
| course the reality is that the two-tiered
| system creates one pool of fools whose every
| movement is visible to every animal on the
| Serengeti, and another pool of giant
| bloodthirsty carnivores who get to walk
| around invisible, picking off the dik-diks
| one by one.
`----
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/10/27/goldman-lobbies-senate-says-full-transparency-sucks/
AIG Only Wanted to Give Goldman Sachs 40 60 Cents on the Dollar, Then Geithner Stepped In
,----[ Quote ]
| Thanks to Bloomberg News, we now have a good
| idea how much of that $13 billion pass-
| through bailout Goldman Sachs got from AIG
| last year was pure taxpayer-financed gravy:
| $5.2 billion, courtesy Tim Geithner.
|
| AIG collapsed last year in part because it
| had written insurance policies on billions
| of dollars in stupid bets made by Goldman,
| Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and others.
| Since it was functionally bankrupt, last
| September AIG thought it would be able to
| convince those banks to accept significantly
| less than face value on the credit default
| swaps it had sold them. How much less?
`----
http://gawker.com/5391174/aig-only-wanted-to-give-goldman-sachs-40-60-cents-on-the-dollar-then-geithner-stepped-in
Transparency against malpractic
,----[ Quote ]
| As a result of my new enthusiasm to 'get out more' I found myself listening
| to a detailed and balanced 'non-advocacy' presentation from a respected OSS
| Watch staffer.
|
| He explained patiently how open source licencing worked and how it differed
| from proprietary licences. But what he did say whilst looking for an everyday
| resonance to make his points accessible to a non-geek audience, and which
| really sharpened every-one's attention, was that proprietary software was
| built on secret code whereas open source software had transparent code.
|
| Proprietary software IS composed of secret code. You can't read it, you don't
| know what it does (other than what you can see it do), you don't know how it
| does it and you can't change it.
`----
http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/secret-code-and-the-damage-it-does-to-our-society.html
Of Open Source and Open Government
,----[ Quote ]
| One of the key figures in the open government
| in Australia - and indeed globally, given the
| paucity of such people - is Kate Lundy. She's
| been speaking at the Free and Open Source
| Software for Geospatial Conference 2009.
| Understandably, her talk was mostly about
| geospatial data, but there was also this nice
| section:
|
| FOSS is like a living blueprint â a map if
| you will â for trust, sustainability and
| interoperability in the implementation of
| Gov 2.0 principles.
`----
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/10/of-open-source-and-open-government.html
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