Tag: transparent_society

100000x RFID sensitivity

So much for the corny notion that RFID tags can only be read from a few cm away

Customs Search

Whether you are looking to keep tabs on your competitors with Supply Spy, identify suppliers with ImportScan our easy to use online software makes it easy. You get access to records on nearly every container that entered the United States from 2006 to the present. You can search by the importer’s name, supplier’s name, product type and more.

Public Health Records

I went to Google Health last night and completed my profile and then I looked for the link to make it public. It wasn’t there. So I twittered that I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make my personal health record public. People thought I was joking, so I twittered back that I was serious.

someone needs to write some papers on the economics of transparency.

Tax Transparency

Italians were surprised, and in some cases outraged, to discover their income levels were available for public viewing on an Internet site. As part of a crack-down on tax evasion, the outgoing center-left government made public every citizen’s declared taxable income on the state’s tax website

Now this is one area of privacy that is way overrated. good for them.

Structured Bills

we would like Bills (and related instruments such as amendment lists and Public Bill Committee debates) to be published in a structured data format, with all relevant metadata, as soon as is possible. This doesn’t just mean “publishing bills online” as is currently done – it means publishing them online in such a way that each bit can be referred to and, more importantly, contains the data necessary to join things up – e.g. when an amendment paper says a particular amendment is going to change from halfway through line 15 to line 18 of page 3, that amendment has its own ID, and contains the means to point out what ID or IDs in the Bill are going to be changed by this amendment. When a Public Bill committee votes on a particular clause of a Bill, that reference is linked to the ID, so it can be cross-referenced to what is being voted on. This would be of use not just to the public, but to MPs, drafters, and everyone involved in the process.

calls for an XML format for bills introduced in the UK parliament.

Beyond FOIA

Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. Turn it inside-out. Why should we be asking for information about and from our government? The government should have to ask to keep things from us. Government information — every act of government on our behalf — should be free by default. We must insist on an aggressive ethic of openness. The exceptions should be rare: the personal business of citizens, national security, ongoing criminal investigations and court cases (while they are ongoing), and little else.

argues that all gov data should be public by default, and all gov meetings videoed. now this would be a reasonable policy.

Blinding CCTV

bright infrared LED devices that overwhelm the CCDs in security cameras, allowing you to move through modern society in relative privacy.

here we go. the cat and mouse game begins

USASpending.gov

now you can query government waste via an API. they forgot &include_black_programs=true

Obama Tech platform

use technological tools to make government less beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists and promote citizen participation in government decision-making.

his trade policy may be misguided, but this could offset that and have many positive effects

UAV image processing

how to do DIY UAV image drones. i think within 5 years most interesting places will have real-time feeds.