Government pooh-bahs live by the credo Information is Power. Here are a few of the guerrillas working to overthrow the resulting dictatorship.
* Carl Malamud has posted 20 million pages of federal court filings online for free, undermining the government's fee-based PACER system and leveling the playing field between rich litigants and poor.
Malamud's Sebastopol, Calif.-based nonprofit, public.resource.org, has also posted administrative and building safety codes from all 50 states, defying their copyright claims (and their steep per-copy fees). He's also working to make court decisions widely available, challenging the commercial licenses granted to private companies like WestLaw and Lexis.
"We don't think any state has the right to assert copyright over the law or give a corporation exclusive right to that law," he told me.
* Ellen Miller is co-founder and executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, which makes grants to nonprofits that improve public access to government data. Sunlight's annual "Apps for America" contest recognizes the freelance software developers who have concocted the cleverest programs to slice and dice raw government data into digestible and edifying form.
This year's winner was Datamasher.org, which enables users to juxtapose, or mash up, state-level statistics to illuminate policy issues. For example, which states have the highest graduation rates measured against their low income? (Best: Arkansas. Worst: Nevada. California's rank: 47th.)
* Josh Tauberer started Govtrack.us as a college undergraduate. It's now a one-stop shop for mashed-up data about Congress, its members and its bills.
"It was clear that Congress had lots of information but was horribly underutilizing it," he says.
Fun fact: Which California member is the most successful at introducing bills later enacted? Sen. Dianne Feinstein, with 31. (She's also the highest-ranking Democrat.) Who has the largest number of bills that never got out of committee? Among Californians, the prolific Feinstein again, with 488 dead ducks.
The work of Malamud, Miller and Tauberer points to a sea change taking place in the transparency of government: Technology is making it harder than ever for elected representatives to conceal how they're spending our money (and making money -- the website Maplight.org tracks campaign donations and can match them, almost to the day, to votes by the recipient.)
