Clinamen

Via Aaron Swartz, all government agencies disbursing money for the stimulus package will be required to publish information about that disbursement in an RSS feed. There are very specific instructions about what information must be included and how that information should be formatted.

I assume that these feeds will be available at Recovery.gov. This is a fantastic idea, and it seems to be evidence that the current administration is trying to put its technology (and transparency) promises into practice.

This story about connections between "military analysts" (i.e. talking heads that defend war strategy) and military contractors is making the rounds. I've now seen it linked on Boing Boing, The Blogora, and a few other blogs. It turns out that those "explaining" U.S. war strategy in Iraq had financial interests linked with that war and also served as a kind of public relations staff for the White House:

“It was them [the Bush administration] saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Followers of Wikipedia know this tactic by the name of sockpuppetry. As Bevelacqua notes, a sockpuppet involves some other entity sticking their hands up another's...errr..."back" and putting out a particular message. On Wikipedia, this is used to hide identity and it's linked to whitewashing and other nefarious practices.

There have been some recent stories about the government trying out the wiki model, the most interesting being Intelipedia - an attempt by the U.S. government at a collaborative spying resource. Now, the U.S. Patent system is getting in on the act.

The problems with such a system seem to be the same as with Wikipedia: reliability and security:

“The ability of a user to add content to a site is troublesome,” said Paul Henry, vice president of Secure Computing Corp. of San Jose, Calif. “In allowing everyone to add content, integrity goes right out the window.”

Hmmm. I guess it's probably obvious that I want to question this assumption. Yes, integrity changes, but "out the window" seems off to me. Considering the "integrity" of some of the information that currently flies into and out of our government (see Iraq War), I'm not sure a wiki-style resource would be anymore "troublesome."