Love him or hate him, President Obama is no hypocrite: he’s
been as fiercely innovative at encouraging citizen input to improve
governance as he has been in secretly stealing Americans’ private
information. Transparent budget spending, crowdsourcing government
waste,
unprecedented spending on polls,
collecting school performance metrics, and rewarding civic app
designers have co-existed with a massive expansion in Internet snooping
and big-data spying.
In short, Obama is a philosophically consistent dataholic — a policy that other
innovative/civil liberty-ignoring political leaders, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have proudly championed.
(
Note to commenters: I’m not defending Obama’s massive
spying apparatus (I find it invasive). I am arguing that we’ll likely
have to choose between a civil libertarian and an open government
champion.)
Many were quick to label Obama a hypocrite after a string of expose’s detailing the
National Security Agency’s massive phone and Internet spying apparatus, “It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed,”
wrote The New York Times
editorial board in an uncharacteristically scathing OpEd. Or, in the
blogging equivalent of our Aol cousins at Huffington Post, “GEORGE W.
OBAMA”.
But, before we brand Obama as some power-hungry George W. look-alike,
it’s worth noting that Obama has given extraordinary resources to
so-called “open government”, building digital platforms that encourage
citizens to monitor, influence, and design public programs.
- During the multi-billion-dollar economic stimulus package, he took the risky route of allowing citizens to monitor
how the money was spent and track the progress of projects in the
groundbreaking transparency websites of Data.gov and Recovery.gov.
- The data-hungry prez crowdsourced waste monitoring
under the aptly titled “SAVE Award,” which recognizes government
employees who submit ideas on how to trim unnecessary spending.
- He oversaw the creation of petition platform, WeThePeople. The
widely popular direct democracy system has helped unearth all kinds of
latent political movements and helped empower the success grassroots movement to permit consumers to unlock their cell phones.
- His department of education pioneered an open government website to help parents know which colleges were the best fit and how public schools were performing.
- His first (failed) pick for a consumer protection agency chief, now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, was primarily tasked with making banking and credit card information more accessible to financially semi-literate citizens.
- One of the President’s first executive orders was the creation of a
Chief Technology Officer, charged with opening up warehouses of
government data, like GPS and weather data, so that civic hackers could
collaborative build new social services to accomplish the
Administration’s ambitious policy ends. For instance,
in a plan to reduce America’s glutenous thirst for energy, he released
household energy use data, which is now used by data-visualization
startups, such as Simple Energy, to help homeowners methodically reduce
their utility bills.
And, on the
Spying side
- The Federal government vastly ramped up its big-data, pattern-recognition spying program;
for the first time, security agencies combined all shorts of datasets
on every everything from flight records to the names of Americans
hosting foreign exchange students.
- As revealed this week, the National Security Agency is secretly
collecting phone records of every single U.S. call, and (reportedly)
has direct access to server data from Facebook, Google, Microsoft,
Skype, and many other major Internet firms.
And, for good measure, the amount his administration has spent on polling
has spiked 40% over his predecessor’s ($4.4M vs. $3.1M).
In short, Obama holds the quite philosophically consistent position
that more information is better; nor is he alone. New York City’s
Michael Bloomberg
has arguably
opened up more government data than any state in the union, turned
abandoned payphones into Wi-Fi-hotspots, and encouraged civic hackers to
design streamlined public services; he’s also
admitted he’s perfectly fine with greater drone spying.
In an information age, we’re witnessing a new information-hungry
politician. There is, apparently, a cost for those who love the
inspiring direct democracy of broad digital civic engagement. The
question we must ask ourselves is if an open government champion is
worth the cost of spying.
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