Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post.

Here is Wednesday’s look at transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events.

News Roundup:

Relevant committee hearings scheduled for 2/8:

House:

• Legislative Proposals to Promote Accountability and Transparency at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 10:00 am. 2128 RHOB. Committee of Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.
• SBA Information Technology Mismanagement. 1:00 pm. 2360 RHOB. Committee on Small Business.
• Union Worker Forced Political Contributions. 10:00 am. 2154 RHOB. Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
• Interaction of Tax Policy and Financial Accounting Rules. 9:00 am. 1100 LHOB. Committee on Ways and Means.

Relevant bills introduced:

• None.

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Super PACs have been a hot topic in the news recently as reporters, advocacy groups, and the public try to follow the money flowing into the political system as the 2012 elections approach.

On January 31st MSNBC reported that Stephen Colbert’s super PAC, Americans for A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, was the first to submit its end-of-year report to the Federal Election Commission. The deadline for these reports was January 31st.

Colbert included his super PAC’s filing on his super PAC’s website, ColbertSuperPac.com, but this is not required. This kind of information can generally be found on the FEC website under Campaign Finance Reports and Data, but you have to know exactly what you are looking for.

The FEC portal includes a variety of search tools, including a searchable database of disclosure reports, downloadable copies of electronic filings, images of all financial reports, and other campaign finance data. However, these search tools suffer from a lack of a user-friendly interface. Several organizations, including the Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica, and the New York Times, have taken FEC data and put it in more user-friendly formats while focusing on information most relevant to the upcoming presidential election.

A search for Colbert’s super PAC using the FEC’s Disclosure Database search tool returns 13 filings, including the Year-End report displayed on Colbert’s super PAC website. This report indicates that the super PAC has raised $825,475.46 since July 2011 and spent $151,521.01 as of December 31, 2011.

TPM published an article as the FEC deadline approached as well that focused on Newt Gingrich’s campaign filing. The article cited several specifics regarding Gingrich’s campaign spending, all of which are publicly available using the same online FEC portal. A search for “Newt 2012,” the official name of Gingrich’s presidential election campaign, under the “View Images of All Financial Reports” tab returns a list of documents filed. Viewing the PDF of the Year-End report shows all the numbers used in the article mentioned above.

It is necessary to emphasize again that these tools can be extremely hard to use, and you have to be very precise in your search terms. For example, a search for “Gingrich” using either search tool will return many results for other organizations related to Gingrich, such as “Friends of Newt Gingrich,” but it will not return other better options.

The TPM article stated that the campaign had $2.1 million at the end of 2011 and owed over a million dollars in debt. The top level summary on page two of the Year-End report shows the $2.1 million the campaign has in cash and the $1.2 million it currently owes.

The article specified that the campaign’s debt includes $1,666.66 to Rick Tyler – a former Gingrich aide who currently manages a super PAC in support of his candidacy. A search for “Rick Tyler” shows the $1,666.66 the campaign owes this former Gingrich aide on page 5166.

The debt also includes $350,000 for private jet flights. A search for “Moby Dick Airways,” the private jet company that it has been reported Newt Gingrich uses, shows that the campaign began the quarter owing $451,946, incurred an additional $33,008 in charges this quarter, then made a payment of $133,008 to conclude 2011 with an outstanding balance of $351,946.

Lastly, the article says that the campaign paid $47,005 to Gingrich to buy a mailing list. A search for “Newt Gingrich” shows the campaign’s $47,005 disbursement to the candidate for the express purpose of “list purchase” on page 4954.

Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey helped with the research for this post.

‘Back to the Source’ takes a news article that makes good use of data and investigative techniques and tries to determine whether the underlying data that made the piece possible is publicly available. If you’d like to know where the data behind a particular piece can be found, please feel free to send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.

Sunlight Executive Director Ellen Miller responds to this guest post by Mike Godwin:

There is little in Mike Godwin’s response that we disagree with. As he writes, the debate over SOPA and PIPA was changed not by “politics as usual” or a late infusion of interest group lobbying cash, “but the participation of the online community, including Wikipedia, Reddit, and others, to let policymakers know about their unhappiness with the direction and process of the legislation.” Amen to that. Our blogger, Lee Drutman, did not argue that this was not grassroots or that it was solely organized by Google or other tech lobbies. What he did write was, “Facebook, Google, Wikipedia and tens of thousands of others changed the scope of conflict in a flash. Harnessing the unique megaphone they had built as content providers, the online companies generated as many as 3 million e-mails to Congress, 7 million signatures and 3.9 million tweets. It was enough to cause many in Congress to wonder whether they had unwittingly kicked a hive. [Emphasis added]

And Drutman took care to note that something indeed had changed in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA fight: internet content providers on their own had managed to mobilize public attention. Drutman wrote:

It used to be the case that for this to happen, the mainstream media had to be involved in calling attention to the travesty. Those days are disappearing, and this is generally a good thing. By lowering the barriers to entry, the Internet has the potential to make political activism more democratic than ever before, and the SOPA turnaround is proof that it can work politically to engage a broad crowd in short order.

Where perhaps there is some disagreement between us and Godwin, whose work with EFF and Wikimedia we greatly respect, is on which sy-LA-byll to put the em-PHA-sis. Godwin argues that the campaign contributions and lobbying spending by tech companies was a minor or unimportant factor in the contours of the SOPA/PIPA fight; Drutman wrote that it could not be ignored and that the reality of the dynamics of power in Washington hadn’t changed quite as much as some would hope. Indeed, consider this counterfactual: last year, when Google cut its deal with Verizon and the FCC over “net neutrality,” there was also a howl of online protest, but that time nothing changed. The big money players were aligned instead of being divided, and grassroots opposition alone was not enough to prevent the deal from happening.

That said, we agree with Godwin that something else is also going on here that ought to cheer all fans of small-d democracy, of which we count ourselves. Because of the open, two-way nature of the Internet, as well as its large non-commercial sector, the SOPA/PIPA fight may mark the emergence of the networked public sphere as its own interest group. While some big tech companies joined the fight against the bills on their own, internet users rallied themselves too, and then pushed the bigger companies to join in, or risk losing their users’ allegiance and business. In that case the story is not the traditional clash of narrow private interests, but the rise of a networked public sphere that has its own “lobby” that isn’t just a business interest but more of a real public interest.

A Sunlight analysis of the fight on Capitol Hill over SOPA is generating some pushback in the online community from activists who think we overstated the role of money and corporate lobbying in the debate. In the interest of broadening and deepening the conversation, we asked one of our critics, Mike Godwin, a former counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wikimedia, for permission to print his counterpoint:

I believe that Sunlight (and one of its primary sources, OpenSecrets.org) missed the story. Just as I would not write an Occupy movement story grounded in how much money was spent for food, medical care, and tents, I wouldn’t write about a “net-roots” popular movement focusing on the convenient fact that money was spent inside the Beltway during the time that the popular movement seems, temporarily, to have given some tech companies some traction on one issue.

It’s well-established that Google’s estimable DC presence — their many dollars and their top-notch personnel — had little effect on the ETAs of the SOPA and PIPA legislation before the holiday break. What changed the debate was not “politics as usual” or an infusion of cash, but the participation of the online community, including Wikipedia, Reddit, and others, to let policymakers know about their unhappiness with the direction and process of the legislation. This response was not organized by Google or any tech money at all (except perhaps the meager salaries that tech-policy writers tend to receive).

Response: Sunlight Executive Director Ellen Miller replies.

One thing I did notice as a close observer of the blackout and abrupt opposition to SOPA and PIPA was how quickly the Motion Picture Association of America  and other content-company spokespersons adopted and propagated the narrative that the net-roots opposition was of Google’s making. “Google owns the platform,” I heard more than once from people who may be unclear on what “own” and “platform” might mean in the Internet context. It disappointments me greatly to see how smoothly Sunlight adopted and promoted a version of the narrative that this is just one set of industrial interests competing with another.

I spent more than a decade in Washington dealing both with content-company lobbies and with tech company lobbies, and a proper comparison needs allocation breakdowns, not rough totals (and not even broad totals over time). The range and substance of issues on which MPAA maintains a lobbying presence are not the same as the ones that tech companies invest in. They are not even the same as the ones that Google invests in.

To give you a comparison: the pharmaceutical lobby, the American Medical Association, the American Library Association, and the agricultural lobby may speak from time to time on the same issue, but we would be cautious before saying that the raw numbers they spend tell us anything about about comparative influence, or whether the outcome of a policy dispute is a function of investment of dollars (or, as we are perhaps too fond of saying,
“politics as usual”).

Now, nothing here should be taken as opposing discussion or criticisms of how money is spent in Washington — quite the contrary. I believe citizens are actually capable of more finely tuned, granular analysis of where the money and influence is applied. I do not see that granularity or skepticism in Sunlight’s article. I want breakdowns, names of lobbyists, how many visits took place, who visited whom, what was discussed, and so on. (From my own DC days, I know that most if not all of this is documentable.)

Now, once the the blackouts and other responses were being prepared and were implemented, certainly this enabled well-moneyed and well-established  interests to say to policymakers, “Hey, this non-controversial stuff you’ve fast-tracked may not be so uncontroversial after all.”  And the fast and furious backtracking by supporters underscored what the policymakers were hearing. So you should not read me as saying that Google et al. simply got out of the way of the disgruntled public. There was synergy there, as there generally is in multifactorial human political events. The public protest enabled tech companies to say that the issue was a real one for individuals.

But the reductive treatment of the money issue by Sunlight obscures this. The blackouts would have occurred regardless of what checks the tech companies were writing and in what amounts. It is hugely important, because we believe (as we suppose Sunlight does) in the potential for democratic activism, and that it does us no service to reduce this policy disagreement to a question of who employed more lawyers. (Besides, as a lawyer who practiced both on Capitol Hill and at the Federal Communications Commission before moving West, I can assure you I know who sends these places more lawyer-lobbyists per week on media-related or copyright-related matters, and it’s not Google or Microsoft or Apple or Intel or Cisco.)

And I can assure that the final outcome of this fight has yet to be determined. We may reasonably expect versions of SOPA and PIPA to return, only more felicitously named, and less transparently, once we’re past this political year.

Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post.

Here is Tuesday’s take on transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events.

News Roundup:

Relevant committee hearings scheduled for 2/7:

House:

• Budget Hearing- Library of Congress, U.S. Government Accountability Office, U.S. Government Printing Office, Congressional Budget Office.  9:30 am. HT-2 Capitol. Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Appropriations.
• Solutions needed: Improper Payments Total $115 Billion in Federal Misspending. 2318 RHOB. Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Organization, Efficiency, and Financial Management.

Relevant bills introduced:

• None.

Do you want to track transparency news? You can add our feed to your Google Reader, or view it on our Netvibes page.