At yesterday's Change Congress event with Larry Lessig, Lessig presented the meme behind the campaign. Change Congress has four parts:
No PAC or lobbyist money
An End to Earmarks
Public financing of campaigns
Congressional Transparency
As with Creative Commons and copyright holders, Change Congress candidates and citizens can sign up for any and all of these pledges, matching their ideology with their pledge. It's a brilliant organizing structure. One suggestion I made was to bake national security into the dialogue upfront. Here's the question I asked Lessig, which Micah Sifry has kindly written up.
Q: From Matt Stoller, who discloses that he's done some consulting for the Sunlight Foundation. The hardest nut to crack is national security policy. Is it legitimate how secretive that is? What will you do when this movement bangs up into that wall? If everything else is transparent, then a lot of important decisions will be pushed into the national security arena.
I don't know. I do know that if earmarks were banned, that would remove some of the pressure for special deals, in the first place. I don't know how we'll deal with transparency in secret expenditures. I think there's a lot for me to learn, Lessig admits.
Several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from a new public database of government spending....
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) argued that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts could present an operational security vulnerability.
This is not classified information they are talking about. These departments are simply arguing that the public does not have a right to get unclassified public information. National security cannot be an absolute trump card against transparency, or else you'll get hugely ramped up spending on intelligence contractors where there is none. More fundamentally, every growing pot of money in the Federal government is basically in DHS or the Defense Department.
The Change Congress movement, and the progressive movement as a whole, needs to grapple with this question. When half of discretionary government income flows through the Pentagon, and black box budgets are growing on Capitol Hill, it's unavoidable.
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