Against Transparency

But that is not the whole transparency story. There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?

With respect to data about campaign contributions, the history of transparency is long. Disclosure requirements for federal elections are a century old next year. For more than three decades, we have known the names of everyone who gives significant amounts to a federal campaign. Or at least we have "known" them in the sense that if you hustled yourself to a government file cabinet, you could discover who contributed what--often months after the election, and often with the cabinet located far from any convenient place. To this day, practical matters work against practical access. In the Senate, for example, those names are reported to the FEC the old-fashioned way--on paper. Staffers for senators collect the data in sophisticated computer programs that make it simple to manage efficiently the most valuable data for any political campaign. When it comes time to report the data that they have collected, however, they print the data on paper, forcing FEC staffers to re-enter it into FEC databases. This process takes time, giving senators a comfortable window at the end of any campaign to secure last- minute funding to avoid defeat with minimal scrutiny.

The hope of the naked transparency movement is to change this. Through better code--in better legislative rules and in better technology--its aim is to make it trivially easy to get access to records suggesting influence, and then link those records automatically to the possible influence that they suggest. Consider, for example, an early instance of this work, presented in a recent report by Maplight.org, analyzing the House vote on the cap-and-trade bill. Titled "How Money Watered Down the Climate Bill," the report enumerates a long list of correlations between money given and results produced. In a section labeled "Amendment to gut the whole bill," for example, the report states: "Each legislator voting Yes … received an average of $37,700 from the Oil & Gas, Coal Mining and Nuclear Energy industries between 2003 and 2008, more than three times as much as the $11,304 received by each legislator voting No." In a section labeled "Oil and gas giveaway," describing an amendment to "increase eligibility for industrial polluters like oil and gas refiners to receive carbon allowances," the report states that "the Oil & Gas industry gave an average of $72,119 to Energy & Commerce Committee members from 2003 [to] 2008." And in a section labeled "Redefining renewable biomass," the report describes an amendment "to broaden the definition of renewable biomass [which the League of Conservation Voters said] would have removed critical safeguards that prevent habitat on our nation’s public and private forests from being plowed up": "Energy & Commerce Committee members who voted Yes on the Walden amendment received an average of $25,745 each from the Forestry and Paper Products industry, ten times as much as the $2,541 received, on average, by each member voting No."

This is a crude but powerful beginning. It points to an obvious future. Even this clarity took an enormous effort to produce, and there are obviously a million other ways in which the data might be inspired to speak. As Congress complies with the clear demands of transparency, and as coders devise better and more efficient ways to mash-up the data that Congress provides, we will see a future more and more inundated with claims about the links between money and results. Every step will have a plausible tie to troubling influence. Every tie will be reported. We will know everything there is to know about at least the publicly recordable events that might be influencing those who regulate us. The panopticon will have been turned upon the rulers.

What could possibly be wrong with such civic omniscience? How could any democracy live without it? Finally America can really know just who squeezed the sausage and when, and hold accountable anyone with an improper touch. Imagine how much Brandeis, the lover of sunlight, would have loved a server rack crunching terabytes of data. As a political disinfectant, silicon beats sunlight hands down.