In a letter to AIG Chairman Ed Liddy (PDF), Cuomo requested a "list of individuals who are to receive payments under this retention plan, as well as their positions at the firm" and "a list of who negotiated these contracts and who developed this retention plan."

He goes on to write that "taxpayers of this country are now supporting AIG, and they deserve at the very least to know how their money is being spent."

The New York Times reports that the Attorney General said this in a conference call today: "I believe in transparency and disclosure. We believe taxpayers have a right to know."

I applaud the Attorney General for seeking such concrete data in his ongoing investigation into AIG compensation. Lists like this are essential in getting to the bottom of things and, as he notes, in seeing how and where government money is spent.

That's why, in June of last year, I attempted to get a complete list from the Attorney General about another one of his investigations. This one was centered on the sale of expired products in CVS and Rite Aid pharmacies in New York State.

On June 12, 2008, the Attorney General published a press release about his investigation, along with a list of locations where expired pharmacy products were found (PDF). Baby formula, Children's Tylenol, Gerber baby food, and other products were found on the shelves, ready for sale. He also held a press conference with expired products laid out like tommy guns or marijuana bricks pulled from panel vans. It was a good news day for the office.

The news coverage focused on aggregate numbers, regional interest, or sensational detail (the Wall Street Journal wrote that "we scanned the list and found plenty of items whose expiration was more like days or weeks in the rear-view mirror," and then goes on to list some instances of expired products in some locations.)

At EveryBlock, we decided to publish a special report listing every location in New York City on our website. As we prepared the report, I wrote to the Attorney General's office requesting a list of all of the pharmacies that investigators visited and where they found no expired products. The idea is that it's valuable to know that state government employees -- the people working on your behalf with your money -- are looking out for you by visiting your neighborhood pharmacy to check things out. The result of that visit -- whether it was positive or negative -- is news. Moreover, with a complete list, we may be able to detect patterns that are invisible with the publication of incomplete data.

We published the available data for expired items found within the city limits, and I spent weeks attempting to get a complete list of the 500 pharmacies that the Attorney General claims he sent his investigators. His office has refused to fulfill our request.

Here in March 2009 United States of America, it seems to be the simplest political shibboleth to proclaim one's support for transparency and accountability. But I've also noticed that actually living up to that is often less of a priority.

In the first memo, he writes that "the Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." He goes on to "direct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to update guidance to the agencies to increase and improve information dissemination to the public, including through the use of new technologies..."

And here's some real music:

"The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely."

The second memo is less wonky and more Constitution-like, making three broad statements about what government "should" be: transparent, participatory, and collaborative. On the last point, he writes:

"Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector."

The speed and the decisiveness with which the President acted on these issues is stunning. The policies that spring from these documents will directly benefit all Federal-level openness initiatives.

At EveryBlock, we focus on what's happening at the block level in cities across the country. Pretty much every day, we make specific requests to city agencies for basic information-- like what crimes have been committed, what restaurants have been inspected, what building permits have been issued, what holes in the ground are being fixed.

Most cities publish some (or even a lot) of this data as a matter of course. And we've been able to convince some agencies to publish some data in other cases. But the standards, formats, and policies for the publication of data vary widely from city to city. As for actual FOIA requests, we've heard all of the same stiff reasons for denial that have become cliche for open government advocates. The presumption is rejection, not disclosure.

To the mayors of every city in the United States, the message is clear: Nearly 67,000,000 people voted for Barack Obama on Election Day. Many of them are voting in your city, too. More than a million people went outside in Washington, DC to hear and see this President get inaugurated. Today, hundreds of thousands of them returned home to your cities, your neighborhoods, your tax bases. There's no reason to expect less of you than we've gotten from our President. Change is coming.

The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street.

From the Chicago Tribune story:

And the Chicago Sun-Times references specific, detailed pothole numbers:

"The city had a daily average of 300 to 400 potholes in the days before Christmas, but the number jumped to more than 1,100 Monday, city officials said."

These quotes indicate that the city has relatively sophisticated technology for managing street defects. They are able to track the location of potholes from the data in their 311 system. With GPS on city trucks and in city worker cell phones, they can track equipment and personnel. As workers report back on filled potholes, the city has real-time data on the exact location of street defects.

To us at EveryBlock, that's what matters. It's nice to read in the paper that there's a lot of potholes outside, and that the city is working to fill them. But it's more useful to know exactly where the potholes are on your street, or on your way to work. And it would be great to know when these holes are filled, and to get all of this information on a daily basis. That might even help me make decisions on where to drive. In turn, this may reduce the number of pothole damage claims filed in Chicago.

Last summer -- long before pothole season -- I requested the following from CDOT:

"...a list of every pothole filled by the Department of Transportation in the City of Chicago. For each record, we would like the Department to publish the exact location of the pothole, the date the pothole came to the attention of CDOT, and the date the pothole was filled. We request that this information be refreshed on a daily basis."

CDOT rejected this request and all of the follow-up efforts we've made to get this data.

It's time to stop reading static stories about pothole data that are out of date before the day is out. The people of Chicago have paid for the Department's technology, and we deserve all the benefit from it. Today, as a blizzard bears down on the city and another deep freeze is on its way, we made a renewed inquiry to CDOT.

As far as I can tell, it's not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets of any of the mortgage security instruments that have been the subject of so much pop-culture sturm und drang. We all know that this is a big story, because the papers scream it and the numbers are enormous.

But we also know that it's a big story because it is a local story. Foreclosures are plainly visible all of us, all over the country. We all know people -- or are someone -- affected directly by failing mortgages, decreasing home prices, and the accompanying social problems like crime, blight, homelessness, downward mobility, and despair.

Large hedge funds and investment companies have gobbled up these mortgages -- pieces of paper with data on them -- again and again. They've resold them to each other, all the way into oblivion. You better believe that they know what the underlying mortgages are, but they are never published.

In July 2008, Benton J. Campbell, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, indicted Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin of the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Master Fund. This fund is a classic example of what we used to call the "Subprime Mortgage Crisis".

The indictment provides details on the scheme that the defendants allegedly perpetrated to trick people into thinking that their fund was in good shape -- to throw good money after bad. They knew the fund was collapsing, yet sought to conceal that:

CIOFFI talked about the extremely difficult month the Funds had experienced in February, stated that the Funds had averted disaster and led a vodka toast to celebrate surviving the month. Before ending the meeting, CIOFFI directed those present not to talk about the Funds' difficulties with others, including other members of the Funds' team.

And gloated at tricking people:

In an email message to another member of the portfolio management team at the end of March 2007, TANNIN expressed satisfaction at his success in convincing investors to add more capital to the Funds: "believe it or not - I've been able to convince people to add more money..."

Attorneys General love this stuff -- it makes for great headlines and is good for guttural voter outrage. So they direct their teams to mine email, wear wires, and otherwise use technology to get the goods on defendants.

What the indictment lacks-- and what I can't find anywhere-- is a simple list of the assets of the fund. What mortgages on what properties on what streets in what neighborhoods in what cities issued by what lenders for what amount of money. To be sure, this is a long list, but it is a knowable one.

Imagine what developers, journalists, activist lawyers, housing advocates, social workers, and researchers could do with such a list. The Charlotte Observer series, Sold A Nightmare, is a great example. They found disturbing patterns about particular builders, were able to pinpoint social problems that follow foreclosure, and publish a database of foreclosures in the area.

We need this data. We should have had it based on SEC rules on disclosure -- investors in these funds should be able to know what they are buying. Now that it looks like we're all going to be the buyers, there is an even more pressing imperative.

Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression.

The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the Chinese government. Their protests and harsh questioning of officials was seen as having a chance to grow into an opposition movement shortly after the earthquakes. The arrest of Huang and other steps taken by the Chinese government have quelled this movement ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

As the person at EveryBlock responsible for working with local government to get more public data, I couldn't help but feel small seeing someone go to jail for reporting on building code standards. Our work focuses, in part, on obtaining building permits, code inspection records, and other public data in United States cities. Huang Qi is a living legend for someone like me.

The nature of this particular case -- involving building standards after a disaster -- also reminds me of the work of Stephen Doig and dozens of others at the Miami Herald after Hurricane Andrew. Their What Went Wrong series was a data-oriented look at building permits, wind speed, and damage reports. They won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that year "for coverage that not only helped readers cope with Hurricane Andrew's devastation but also showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the destruction".

It's good for me to take a break from whining about this or that city official not calling me back, or some municipal department that turned down my Freedom of Information Act request, or some agency that provides partial data rather than every field I requested. I've got it made. For some, it really is life or death, captivity of freedom, torture or awards. And there are legends of this business that still live and breathe. Let's try to keep them free, and appreciated, and keep working as hard as we can, wherever we are.

1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate.
2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to build interfaces around municipal government data. Technical issues such as harvesting techniques and presentation techniques will be covered, as will social issues such as negotiating for the release of public data.
3. Government and Copyright Issues (Working Group Chair: Fred Von Lohmann, fred at eff dot org). This working group will focus on assertion of copyright by government groups.

See more information at the Independent Government Observers Task Force Web site.

EveryBlock is the local host of IGOTF, and most of the team will be there to take part in workshops. I'm excited about this event because it is going to bring together people from a wide variety of areas. People working inside and outside government, people working on their blocks and working on web applications, people who have been at this for years and people who are just getting started. We're looking forward to it.

The two objectives:

• Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site
• Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us

can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have two dominant templates of interaction for a project like ours, and neither of them fit very well.

First and foremost, we're a journalism project. The template for government dealings with media usually revolves around a particular document or dataset that is frozen in time. The data will most often lead to a single exclusive article or series of articles for a single publication or media company. When I tell them that we want all of the data, everyday, forevermore -- preferably published somewhere over the Web so that others can use the data as well -- this message just doesn't compute.

The other template that governments bring to EveryBlock is that of a technology vendor. They see our site and immediately grasp its utility. They naturally begin to think in terms of EveryBlock serving whatever technology or public communications goals they're currently working. When they start applying this template to us, I have to steer them back to our fundamental nature -- that we're journalists executing on a long-term project, not software vendors looking to lock them into a long-term contract.

This is a lot of heavy lifting, so it's a good thing EveryBlock is just one of many projects that seek to make government data more available, useful and usable. Here's a few of the efforts we've made recently with others:

• In December of last year, we met with a couple dozen other organizations to brainstorm the 8 Principles of Open Government Data. The principles attempt to define "open" in the context of the principles and lay down some fundamental definitions for primary terms like "public" and "data". I've been able to use this set of principles in my work with municipalities as we seek to get more data for EveryBlock. It's a very powerful message to tell them that I am not there just as an EveryBlock person. I tell them that it's not about us, it's about the data
• Last month, I participated in a panel for the Open the Government and Sunshine Week called, Citizen Self-Help: Finding the Information You Need. We shared a number of tips & tricks on gathering information and talked about the challenges in presenting large data sets in ways that make sense. Sheila Krumholz (Center for Responsive Politics/OpenSecrets.org), David Moore (OpenCongress.org), and Sean Moulton (FedSpending.org) were the other panelists. One of the best questions asked by moderator Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs was, "what if all government data was suddenly made open? would your work be done?" See the entire panel discussion here.
• EveryBlock is the local host for the Independent Government Observer's Task Force, a "non-conference" structured around 3 sets of working group activities: Case Law, Municipal Governments, and Government and Copyright Issues. We're looking forward to having a wide mix of people inside and outside government who want to make civic data more useful. I am helping organize the Municipal Government Working Group, so if you have some ideas and want to attend, let me know at at danx at everyblock.com or 773-321-8146.

More on the IGOTF as the summer wears on.