General Interest Review 00004

Against Transparency

Against Transparency is an essay by Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig appearing in the October 21, 2009, issue of the The New Republic. Lessig argues that the newly expanded availability of government data on the Internet-- specifically campaign contributions -- merely enables and reinforces cynicism about government. The intended goal, he says, should be to move beyond cynicism to actual government reform. He refers primarily to a project that will map campaign contributions distributed to members of Congress from special interests and corporations directly to votes that these parties would want to influence. Lessig argues that the gray area between the act of contributing to a campaign and allowing that money to influence the vote is too indecipherable to show in data without explanation.

He even goes so far as to suggest that the cynicism yoked to the overwhelming amount of corruption the data appears to reveal creates a "tyranny of transparency." That is to say, because the public will automatically link a vote that aligns with a campaign contribution to the campaign contribution no matter the truth of the Congressperson's motivation, cynicism will burden the public's view of the political process to the point of...well, he never really posits where it might take us. The idea is that if data releasers think about the effect their product will have, they can re-tool it to have a more positive effect on the public process of making laws and governing in general.

Lessig's consideration is crucial in the current media environment. The transparency that President Obama has promised has allowed full access to the location of his dates, the movement of his dog, and, this week, his devotion to his daughters' sports teams. Despite all this transparency, the New York Times still had to do a bit of digging this summer to discover the White House had inked a deal with former La. Rep. Billy Tauzin and the major pharmaceutical companies to hold back that industry's losses in the upcoming health care bill in exchange for support. That is to say, if the White House wants to suppress information, the age of transparency can suddenly become opaque. Simultaneously, a wave of corruption convictions have gripped Congress across party lines, lining up the makings for a repeat of the Nixon-era disillusionment (if we even ever really got over that one...). Lessig's worry about public cynicism reigning over are clearly based in reality.

But like the gray area between a campaign contribution and a vote, the gray area between the release of public data and the public's view of said data is equally vast. Much more vast than Lessig is willing to admit. Lessig is an academic, operating in the world of the abstract and theoretical. The data releasers he is discussing are involved in mundane work not vested with the creativity and intellectual rigor Lessig puts in, but it concerns collecting and organizing data -- not figuring out the story behind that data. The idea that a new system is required to release this data is laughable. This country has had a mechanism for releasing key government data and, shockingly, the story behind it, for some time now. This mechanism is often broadly referred to as the press, or the media.

It is true that the facts reported in the press often lead to public cynicism. Virtually all media outlets that pursue the types of stories that rely on documents and government data are accused of being too negative or trying to blow up a story that isn't there to gain viewers or readers. Journalists are forced to pursue documents because information is not readily provided to them about topics like corruption and conflict of interest. It would seem reasonable for Lessig or his colleagues to suggest that the new vehicles to release data take an approach geared more toward spotlighting positive developments as well as negative ones. But that, too, would require reading between the lines of the volumes of data. The data could also be organized in a way that does not directly connect campaign contributions and votes -- but then what is the point of releasing the data in the first place? The public interest becomes far lower if the data doesn't show anything interesting in the end.

The dilemma presented is not one of how to present information, but how that information is viewed. Since newspapers are dying and migrating to the Internet, the Internet generation assumes that the media can be remade on their principles. Organization of voluminous information, open and free access, and clearly focused intentions, and, ultimately, utility, will produce the best product, they say.

But to find the truth amongst all that data requires a willingness to wade into the sludge of human interaction and, occasionally, get caught up in the deceit, self-interest, and general gamesmanship that results when trying to publicize unethical or illegal actions by a person. This job has often been called reporting. It is undertaken by this press. The innovations of the digital revolution are a welcome help in this job, but ultimately represent no replacement for a capable fact finder that is willing to talk to actual human beings with a stake in the outcome in the course of doing their job.