Jonathan Werve's Blog

Iran's Internet Snooping is Made in America

2009-06-23T18:23:08Z

In the days following Iran's contested presidential Iran's internet speed slowed to a tenth of its normal speed. What's causing the slow-down? Western-developed technology that allows the Iranian government to analyze networks of information: who is transmitting, what exactly they are saying, and who is consuming it.

While Iran grabs headlines, the US Congress is quietly debating whether to continue use of the same technology against Americans. The US government has been intercepting and storing private emails and online reading habits of US citizens since at least 2001.

Iran's Online Spying...

This process is known as deep packet inspection, a technology developed and sold to the Iranian government by a joint venture of Siemens and Nokia. Deep packet inspection is also allegedly used by the Chinese government. But unlike the layered "Great Firewall" of China, the Iranian technology is centralized at one point. This means that all information trading must be analyzed at a single location, leading to sluggish internet speeds nationwide when monitoring increases.

Iran's internet slow-down has not yet meant an internet shut-down: a move that would crush foreign and domestic media's close-to real-time reporting on the election protests and vivid eyewitness accounts (although social networks and SMS have been blocked at times). For more analysis on Iran's use of deep packet inspection, see yesterday's Wall St. Journal.

As we have seen in other countries, Internet censorship is being coupled with the more traditional forms of media repression: Reporters Sans Frontieres describes Iran this week as "the world's biggest prison for journalists" with a total of 33 journalists and online activists in jail. RSF details individual cases here.

-- by Norah Mallaney

We're All Iranians Now: US Online Spying...

Deep packet inspection and similar techniques being used in Iran are also being employed aggressively by the United States government, ostensibly in its search for terrorists online.

The US National Security Agency has a legal charter to spy on foreigners online. Unfortunately Internet traffic is nearly impossible to sort by nationality of user, meaning the NSA is snooping on all US Web and email traffic and storing it, with the cooperation of US telecoms companies. This has been extensively documented in court cases filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including testimony from an AT&T cable technician who worked on dragnet hardware spliced into the Internet backbone cables routed through downtown San Francisco. The technician, Mark Klein, has testified in court that the hardware made copies of the website preferences and email traffic of all AT&T customers and sent them to the NSA. The government did not dispute this.

The NSA has portrayed the collection of domestic email as limited, inadvertent and unavoidable, but every new trickle of information shows a more robust and aggressive domestic spying capability. As covered by the New York Times, Congress is quietly debating what to do about this, but the frame of debate is not encouraging for fans of limited government. New York Times:

"For the Hill, the issue is a sense of scale, about how much domestic e-mail collection is acceptable," a former intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because N.S.A. operations are classified. "It's a question of how many mistakes they can allow."

While I might be comfortable classifying a massive government mail-reading system a "mistake," I dispute the suggestion that the creation of a secret, unaccountable system to intercept, sort and store records of all US email and online reading habits was somehow accidental. This is a matter of policy, and it's being conducted with little Congressional awareness, much less informed public debate. Not good.

For more on this topic, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation on spying; the Open Net Initiative on filtering; and Sesawe on countermeasures.

-- by Jonathan Eyler-Werve

-- image by Xeni Jardin (cc by/nc/sa)

Measuring Democracy: As Complicated As It Sounds

2009-06-17T20:22:03Z

If you follow the Global Integrity blog, then there's a good chance you have an interest in how to measure fuzzy concepts such as governance and corruption; it's an issue Global Integrity tracks closely. If so, then you should read Gerardo L. Munck's recently published Measuring Democracy. It's a hard-hitting critique of the conventional wisdom (and widely used data) used to measure democracy.

In Gerry's slim but powerful volume, he takes up many of the same questions we've been wrestling with in the context of "democracy" and democracy-promotion. Can we measure "democracy"? And if we can, what are best practices to guide such a measurement exercise?

The book is Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). We should disclose that we've worked with Gerry in the past and think highly of his work.

In Measuring Democracy, the author promotes a series of simple yet powerful best practices that should be the basis for any scholarly or practitioner-based assessment of democracy at the country level. Those best practices focus around a framework (developed with Jay Verkuilen) that emphasize three key attributes of any measurement tool or resultant data:

the precision around conceptualization of data (in other words, are you precise in developing a tool to measure the concept you're interested in?);
the consistency of actual measurement, especially the importance of clear and identifiable scoring criteria (or "coding," to use the social science parlance);
and the rationale behind the selection of an aggregation methodology to transform disparate and disaggregated data into accessible indices.

None of this is rocket science, but Measuring Democracy lays bare just how many of the most widely used democracy data are either poorly constructed and/or misused. It saves its most strident critiques for Freedom House's Freedom in the World data. Whether attacking Freedom House for its opaque and ill-designed aggregation methodology ("In short, the numerous conceptual and measurement problems that weaken the Freedom House indices are compounded by the blatant disregard of the challenge of aggregation."), or what Munck sees as the organization's simplistic conceptual approach to measuring democracy ("Freedom House includes so many attributes...and does so with such little thought about the relationships among such attributes...that it is hardly surprising that a large number of distinct or at least vaguely related aspects of democracy are lumped together."), Measuring Democracy pulls no punches. As I read the book, I couldn't help but compare Munck's take-down of Freedom House to the deconstruction of the World Bank Institute's Worldwide Governance Indicators offered in 2006 by Ardnt and Oman in their (also recommended) Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators. Ouch.

Why do these issues of measurement matter?

As Munck succinctly puts its:

Although this measurement movement is resulting in more and better data on politics, the limitations of current knowledge should be acknowledged. Such an acknowledgment is particularly critical because data on politics are increasingly used in the world of politics. NGOs use data for purposes of advocacy; a variety of actors regularly invoke statistical analyses on the causes and consequences of democracy to justify their support of, or opposition to, different policies; and governments, [intergovernmental organizations], and the [multilateral development banks] link data on politics to policy choices and governance-related conditionalities. Moreover, such an acknowledgment is key because information presented in quantitative form is generally accorded a special status. After all, one of the selling points of using data on politics is that they draw on the power of an association with science and hence are treated with considerable deference by public officials and the public. Yet this assumed scientific status verges on being a misrepresentation if the current state of knowledge regarding the measurement of political concepts.

Here's a real-life example: if you subscribe to Munck's critique of the Freedom House data and Arndt and Oman's critique of the WGI, then seven of the seventeen indicators used by the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation to make decisions on which countries to give large aid packages to are essentially bunk. This presents a bit of a challenge for an aid organization that defines itself by relying on third-party data for ostensibly objective and apolitical decision-making, noting that, "Before a country can become eligible to receive assistance, MCC looks at their performance on independent and transparent policy indicators." Houston, we have a problem.

You can grab a copy of Measuring Corruption on Amazon.com.

While you're shopping, check out Global Integrity's A Users' Guide to Measuring Corruption, which looks at issues specific to measuring corruption and governance.

-- by Nathaniel Heller for the Global Integrity Commons

How Limbaugh Wags the Dog on IG and Obama

2009-06-15T16:17:18Z

By Norah Mallaney and Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

On Friday, President Obama abruptly announced the replacement of Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General for Americorps. The reasons for this decision were not made clear, raising questions as to what motivated the firing. As a result, Rush Limbaugh and associated media are screaming cronyism.

The fired IG Walpin recently concluded an investigation of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a supporter of the President, which revealed mishandling of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Americorp grants. A recent settlement of the case required Johnson to personally pay back US$72,836 -- and now the investigator who busted him has been fired.

Obama's letter to Vice-President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi detailing Walpin's firing spoke in vague terms on the need for confidence in national integrity investigators. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, known as a protector of the IGs, has demanded better information on the firing in this letter (PDF).

Wagging the dog, basketball edition...

It is now conventional wisdom in right wing press (and has been repeated in major outlets) that Johnson and Obama are "basketball buddies", but characterizations of that relationship prior to Rush Limbaugh's comment on the issue do not seem to support this. Like most Democrats, Johnson supported Obama's presidential bid and was a donor to his campaign. Johnson attended a meeting with Obama along with other mayors while in town for the inauguration. Prior to this, the former NBA star turned mayor tried to get media attention by suggesting he would beat the President at hoops. There's no indication they ever played, and the group meeting at the inauguration appears to be the only time they have ever met. Johnson, like many local politicians has publicly described himself as "like Obama", but despite Obama's popularity, Johnson never suggested that the President was particularly aware of him. The former basketball player won his first election in November 2008.

But still...

Even so, Global Integrity reported extensively on the vulnerability of the Inspectors General to political pressure in the last Global Integrity Report: United States. Across the entire Global Integrity Report we find that political interference in accountability mechanisms is pervasive worldwide; clearly some close scrutiny of the firing is warranted. In the American context, this is especially relevant considering the recent failure in internal accountability processes in the Stevens' corruption case and the White House's ambitious transparency rhetoric (and some legitimate progress) around stimulus spending and other topics.

Public trust is won not through rhetoric alone, but through increase in public access. The decisions, reasoning and actions of state-run, internal accountability processes must be transparent and open to public oversight. This includes the hiring and firing of inspectors. The President's weak explanation for Walpin's firing is also disconcerting because of Walpin's proven track record investigating and recovering mishandled funds. Walpin should be a model for the Obama administration's accountability initiatives, but instead he was forced out of his position. Why?

The Project on Government Oversight is calling for the release of more concrete reasons for the decision. In order to keep Americans' trust in the leadership and functions of the government's integrity institutions, Obama needs to immediately explain the details of his decision.

-- Norah Mallaney and Jonathan Eyler-Werve

Victory? Obama Improves US Lobbying Disclosure

2009-06-01T21:16:29Z

By Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

A few weeks ago, Global Integrity joined Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica and others in calling for better disclosure around lobbying for US stimulus spending. Our suggestion was to skip the bans on lobbying and instead shine a big, bright spotlight on all correspondence between lawmakers and interested parties. This is pretty much what just happened.

I'll quote the key provisions of a new set of rules, summarized by White House ethics council Norm Eisen:

"First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program."

"Second, we will focus the restriction on oral communications to target the scenario where concerns about merit-based decision-making are greatest -after competitive grant applications are submitted and before awards are made. Once such applications are on file, the competition should be strictly on the merits. To that end, comments (unless initiated by an agency official) must be in writing and will be posted on the Internet for every American to see."

"Third, we will continue to require immediate internet disclosure of all other communications with registered lobbyists. If registered lobbyists have conversations or meetings before an application is filed, a form must be completed and posted to each agency's website documenting the contact."

A few thoughts on this: we thought the ban on talking to lobbyists seemed unworkable and likely to drive the process underground, which ProPublica reported was already happening.

While it's not phrased as such, the second point above can be read as a roll-back of that face-to-face meeting ban to cover only the period between project bids and bid decisions, and a simultaneous expansion of the scope of the ban to cover everyone. So before and after a decision, Recovery Act officials can get lots of input, but during the decision cycle, they're in lockdown regarding non-written communication. Written communication between government and interested parties -- all of them -- has to be published online, and quickly. This seems like a pretty good solution to me.

By way of caution, we should note that this is a rule change, and we haven't seen it working in the wild yet. However, groups like ProPublica are watching carefully as the new guidelines are implemented.

But here's the take-home message: a bunch of watchdog groups -- ably led by Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica -- raise some noise about an important but technical issue, and in a few weeks it gets swapped out for a better and incrementally more transparent process. It's been a while since I've seen things work that way in Washington.

-- Jonathan Eyler-Werve

Speaker of Commons Resigns over UK Expense Account Scandal

2009-05-19T22:00:36Z

By Norah Mallaney for the Global Integrity Commons

Public outrage over the abuse of expense accounts ("moat cleaning"?!) by an overwhelming number of British MPs has forced Britain's Speaker of the Commons to resign. When Michael Martin leaves his post in late June, he will be the first Speaker to be pushed out in 300 years.

The hard numbers surrounding legislators' use of public funds for TVs, hotel rentals, house redecoration projects and even groceries, were first uncovered by the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph's freedom of information act request to view the disclosures was fiercely opposed by Martin, a position that eventually cost him his political career. Justice Minister Shahid Malik has also been forced to step down as he awaits an investigation into allegations on preferential rent payments. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has insisted that no leader from within his Labor Party will be eligible to run for future office if he or she is found to have a faulty disclosure record.

The head of the Liberal Democratic Party summed up the culture of entitlement: "I think this Parliament will go down in history as a rotten Parliament, and we do need it cleaned out, renewed, and the people and the procedures in it changed completely." Symbolism should not take precedence here, and the British public must hold Prime Minister Brown to his promise to clean up Parliament by investigating the legitimacy of each individual claim on the MP expense disclosures.

For more background on this story, see our previous Commons post on Brown's vow to increase the financial accountability of MPs.

-- Image CC/by Steve Punter

Online Vote Decides Which Anti-Corruption Projects Get Funded

2009-04-13T22:43:00Z

By Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

The Global Integrity Impact Challenge asked for ideas that fight corruption, and we got them: project ideas from 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. Our jury of Global Integrity staffers scored and discussed each proposed project; there were many worthwhile ideas here, and it was tough to pick our finalists. But we're confident these are solid projects, submitted by some impressive local organizations.

Each finalist project used Global Integrity's assessment tools to identify and prioritize potential anti-corruption reforms. They then applied our information to a locally relevant, bottom-up strategy to address that governance challenge. We believe that lasting change comes from empowered local stakeholders; these projects look like a pretty good start.

We'll introduce each of our finalists below, but first some housekeeping: three of these finalists will win this competition, receiving a prize of US$1000 and a chance to pitch the Partnership for Transparency Fund for funding to implement their ideas. You, dear readers, will decide who wins by rating the five projects here.

Global Integrity Impact Challenge: The Finalists

Click on the titles to read the full entries, then vote here:
http://tinyurl.com/impactvote

Bulgaria (LEVSKI)
A project to establish local citizen councils that invite diverse stakeholders to discuss governance issues, and directly question local officials on corruption concerns. The project aims to scale up a partial implementation of these councils that had successfully increased citizen participation.

What we liked: Wide range of stakeholders invited to contribute; potential to transform citizen relationship with government.

Cameroon (Voies Nouvelles)
A project to enable citizen dialogue and oversight of government development projects funded by the Budget d'Investissement Public. Voies Nouvelles will train local civil society groups to monitor this new government agency and facilitate engagement with government by citizens.

What we liked: Bottom-up approach empowers citizens to speak for themselves; specific, well-defined objectives.

Lithuania (Transparency International - Lithuania)
A project to protect whistleblowers who report corruption. TI-L aims to publicize existing whistleblower protection mechanisms via mass media partners, and provide concrete guidance to citizens who want to report corruption.

What we liked: Increasing effectiveness of existing governance mechanisms directly addresses the "implementation gap" identified in the Global Integrity Report: Lithuania.

Philippines (Transparency International - Philippines)
A project to engage with government watchdogs to improve integrity systems. TI-P will coordinate directly with the Presidential Commission on Good Government to increase access to information and address governance weaknesses identified in the Global Integrity Report and other metrics.

What we liked: Builds on existing collaborative relationship with government; focus on measuring outcomes.

Romania (Romanian Academic Society)
A project to monitor and publicize the actions of two agencies regulating energy and procurement. The project aims to narrow the "implementation gap" between written law and actual practice (as highlighted in the Global Integrity Report: Romania) by making citizen oversight of government agencies the rule rather than the exception.

What we liked: Narrow, carefully targeted project can be scaled up to other agencies if successful.

Click on the titles to read the full entries, then vote here:
http://tinyurl.com/impactvote

Notable project:

Macedonia (Informal group of journalists)
A project to reform campaign finance laws to bring campaigns into compliance with existing law and close loopholes that allow "black donors" to push hidden money and influence into the election process.

What we liked: This project doesn't meet the requirements for follow up funding from PTF, so we didn't make it a finalist. But we feel it is worthy of recognition here for being the only project taking on campaign financing, which our work has identified as a crucial governance challenge worldwide for three years running. It's a tough, neglected issue that impact rich and poor countries alike. Global Integrity hopes to provide advice and introductions to the applicants if they develop this idea further.

We want to thank all of our applicants for their efforts, and our friends at PTF for encouraging this contest. This contest is sponsored by Global Integrity, an independent nonprofit monitor of corruption and governance issues. To learn more about the Global Integrity Report findings that provide the research backbone of these projects, click here.

If you'd like to hear about Global Integrity's work in the future, please join our email list.

-- Jonathan Eyler-Werve and Global Integrity

The Quiet Coup: Reviewed

2009-04-01T05:37:11Z

By Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund offers a sweeping and articulate indictment of the US financial system. Simon Johnson argues that blaming favorite policies of the right or left misses the larger point: that the financial sector grew so large that oligarchs dictated policy to government, most of which passed without a blink. It's a pattern, he says, that looks a lot like a financial collapse in an emerging market, but will be, in the end, much much worse.

It's a long essay, but absolutely worth reading: The Quiet Coup, published in The Atlantic.

I'll pull some key passages here:

Typically, these countries [seeking IMF assistance] are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason--the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit--and, most of the time, genteel--oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon--correctly, in most cases--that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

Johnson argues -- convincingly -- that the United States was no different, noting that at its peak, the finance sector accounted for a staggering 40 percent of corporate profits, a fortune built on hidden and unsurvivable risks. And when Depression era rules put the brakes on this growth, they had them cast aside. Global Integrity reported on the clash of corporate titans and the SEC in 2007 (spoiler: the titans win). Johnson says that the limp performance of the SEC is only part of the story, noting the massive flow of campaign contributions, but pointing out that the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington and the pure mystique of all that wealth may have had greater influence.

Here's what it got them:

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

Johnson notes, as we have on many occasions, that mustering political will to confront this corruption of the policy process is the central challenge. The technical work to set up effective rules and boundaries are a relatively minor issue.

Will the IMF even timidly suggest the sweeping interventions that former-IMF economist Johnson thinks are desperately needed? If the upcoming G20 meeting looks to be any indication, no way. Once again, we run into the issue of powerful international organizations that are effectively prohibited from critiquing their national government sponsors.

Back in 2007 while at the IMF, Johnson was quietly pointing out "risky loans, relaxed lending standards and high leverage" that have since blown up the US economy. He resigned after 14 months on the job, despite telling colleagues he intended to stay several years. No one likes to hear bad news all the time, even if it's right.

The link again: The Quiet Coup

-- by Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

-- Image by Nathan Seimers (cc by/sa)

Is the UK aid agency propping up autocrats, or merely wasting money?

2009-03-30T23:01:15Z

By Norah Mallaney and Global Integrity for the Global Integrity Commons

William Easterly and Laura Freschi, writing for AidWatch, kick the aid anthill by claiming European aid agencies (particularly the UK's DiFD) are supporting autocratic governments instead of people by pumping money directly into national budgets, rather than development programs. A flurry of blog posts follow; we're wading in.

Easterly and Freschi's argument is essentially this: direct support to governments is intended to give more domestic control over how aid money is spent -- a worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the governments receiving said aid money are fundamentally unaccountable to their citizens. So much for local control.

Response 1

In the DiFD camp, Owen Barder responds to Easterly et al. by arguing that:

A) The government of Ethiopia isn't that bad.
B) DiFD is giving money to local government, not the national government.

(These points were promptly shredded by a reader.)

Barder wraps up by saying the authors "need to do some proper analysis of the costs and benefits of different choices for aid delivery in different contexts, rather than simply asserting that it is wrong to give aid to and through governments of which they disapprove."

Response 2

Our friends at Open Budget Partnerships (OBP) follow up with some actual evidence of whether the governments in question are indeed that bad.

Citing the Open Budget Index scores in Rwanda and Malawi, OBP argues that domestic accountability mechanisms are comprehensively lacking and must be enhanced if we expect foreign aid to effectively reach poor citizens.

So, which comes first: foreign budgetary aid to build institutions or the institutional mechanisms to support the aid?

In an unsigned blog post, OBP argues that money is not a cure-all:

While aid can be a useful carrot, the debate should focus on how to create domestic accountability, not on how and where to apply donor funding. In practice we know that domestic accountability institutions in poor countries are as weak as they ever were. Domestic accountability will not 'emerge' where budget support is provided. It must be built by the very same donors that adhere to the budget support approach.

That sounds right to us.

Our contribution: Ethiopia is indeed unaccountable.

In their 2008 index, OBP did not conduct fieldwork in Ethiopia. But Global Integrity did.

The 2008 findings of the Global Integrity Report: Ethiopia solidly supports Easterly's claims that domestic accountability is virtually non-existent in Ethiopia. This can be seen in the huge implementation gap between the legal framework and the actual implementation of anti-corruption reforms. Our researcher explains this saying: "rather than a question of regulations to promote accountability, the problem in Ethiopia is that the party and the state are virtually the same."

In terms of the budget, our data suggest the Ethiopian legislature lacks the expertise to provide a detailed budgetary review and does not have the power to suggest changes that refute the wishes of the executive branch. In addition, substantial budget debate occurs behind closed doors. While citizens theoretically have access to itemized budgets, in actuality, access is limited. This reflects a broader trend of weak communication and information flow between government and citizens.

These realities in Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda prevent citizens from providing meaningful input in the allocation of aid money. As we have noted on this blog in a different context, transfer of large sums of money directly to governments with weak accountability mechanisms is unlikely to end well.

Aid donors can use their financial resources to leverage the political will needed to increase domestic budget accountability practices. Supporting these governance reforms must be a first step to any international aid program.

[Disclosure: There are some aid agencies among Global Integrity's donors.]

-- Norah Mallaney and Global Integrity

Freedom of Information: A Comparative Study

2009-03-20T17:00:22Z

By Norah Mallaney for the Global Integrity Commons

The open and convenient access to government information is essential to democracy. However, our data from the Global Integrity Report shows that the legislation and practice of this right vary greatly across the globe. Here we look at the best and worst in 57 countries.

Access to information is a core component in Global Integrity's research toolkit, the Integrity Indicators, a series of questions that measure the performance of key anti-corruption frameworks at the national level. Every year, we ask local research teams to assess whether citizens have a legal right to access to information, and whether citizens can in practice use these rights to get information about their government.

Low Scores: Africa and the Middle East

In 2008, three of the 57 countries we studied did not have a freedom of information (FOI) law: Nigeria, Ghana and Iraq. Our researcher in Nigeria noted that the FOI bill has been sitting in the Nigerian congress since it was first proposed in 1999. We found a similar situation in Ghana, where an article exists in the Ghanaian constitution to ensure citizen rights to information, but this article had not yet been brought before Parliament for approval.

One of our Key Findings for the Global Integrity Report: 2008, was that public access to information is the most serious transparency issue facing many Middle Eastern and North African nations. Privacy International's map on National Freedom of Information Laws, Regulations and Bills 2008 only confirms our assessment of the region. In regional terms, the Middle East and North Africa are the worst in the world at FOI, which we discussed at length in a previous analysis.

Even in countries with weak legal frameworks guaranteeing access, citizens can sometimes gain access to government documents, but only on a case-by base basis. Our researcher in Ghana notes: "Although there is no access to information legislation, citizens can obtain information from government agencies depending on the approach and the agency's goodwill." And, in Iraq, "There is no established mechanism [for citizen access to information]. But some government offices, such as the Board of Supreme Auditing, publish reports on their websites." Without the proper institutions, citizens can easily be dissuaded with long and ineffective application processes or by the need to massage the process with bribes.

Best Scores: Europe, Japan and... Jordan?

On the other side of this issue, we have the all-star team of access to information. This list includes: Italy, Japan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Jordan, Hungary and Lithuania. In these nations, FOI laws ensure the right to information and functioning institutions exist where citizens can claim that right.

Jordan is notable standout here, doing much better than it's regional peers, which we discussed in a previous analysis.

Considering that the European Union emphasis on "openness" as a guiding principal for its member-states, it is not surprising that the Eastern-European nations of Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungary and Lithuania would have strong FOI credentials to coincide with their recent or ongoing applications for EU membership. Lithuania's 1996 Law on the Provision of Information to the Public even directly states its secondary purpose as "ensuring the application of European Union legal acts."

In a recent post to the Global Integrity Commons blog, Daniela Araujo discusses how governance reforms in Eastern European nations can be directly tied to the region's drive for EU membership. While the perks of EU status have undoubtedly factored into the recent FOI legislation in Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria, there are other internal factors at work.

Canada and the Unites States (studied in 2007) both miss the best-of list with moderate scores. In both countries, researchers noted long delays in government replies to information requests.

Secret Police Files

The secrecy and paranoia of the communist era have left deep imprints on the former-Soviet republics and the USSR satellite countries. Government permeated every-day life, with agents literally listening into kitchen-table conversations through wire-taps. While these regimes had seemingly total access to the lives of their citizens, an impenetrable wall was drawn around national leadership, blocking citizen access to the decision-making process.

Data from the Global Integrity Report shows that with the development of effective institutions, such as a freedom of information acts, the lack of transparency found in Soviet-style governance structures is disappearing in the region. As these nations open citizen access to government documents, public curiosities surrounding secret police files from the Cold War-era have raised tough societal dilemmas. Previously heavily guarded, these files expose the degree to which individuals were monitored by the government and implicate those involved, both as police agents and as collaborators from ordinary society.

Slowly, each of the former Soviet sphere nations has allowed for varying degrees of citizen access to these surveillance records:

- In Bulgaria, files from the infamous Darzhavna Sigurnost communist-era police agency were opened in 2006. A Files Commission was created in 2007 and the group has slowly released names of former communist police collaborators in small batches, like the names printed in Novintine, a Sophia news agency, in October 2008. As another part of the reopening of these secret files, citizens are able to access their personal records as created by the Darzhavna Sigurnost agency.

- Hungary has an even more open policy with its communist-era secret police files. Beginning in 2003, all Hungarians can request to see their personal records and victim can receive the names of their government informants.

- Poland (which still scored well in the 2008 Report, despite missing the top-tier mark) opened its Communist-era secret files were opened in 2006, allowing citizens to request access to their personal files and to have their names cleared through the courts, in cases of misrepresentation. In 2007, Poland increased the scope of its political vetting process, requiring that lower-level public servant such as teachers, judges and heads of state-owned-enterprises (as well as more prominent public officials) declare their involvement with the secret police. These statements were then checked against the secret files, not necessarily to detect conspiracy, but to verify that officials were not lying about their past. However, the inaccuracies and sketchy recording practices of these files have caused many cases where individuals have been wrongfully identified as collaborators.

- In 2006, Lithuania opened its files to unlimited public access. This decision defies the trend within the former USSR countries, where many have made the choice to keep these documents hidden.

As each of these Eastern European nations works towards more transparent governance structures, they are being forced to confront their collective and individual memories of the Cold War era. Policies of access to information have forced these memories of intimidation, paranoia and disappearances into the public spectrum, creating internal dissonance in many of these former Soviet satellites. However, the existence of the right to access to information and the corresponding mechanisms are essential steps to building more open and transparent societies that engage with government rather than fearing it.

-- Norah Mallaney for the Global Integrity Commons

-- Image: a US DoD staffer's notes from 9/11/01 notes that attack plans were to include things "related and not". Obtained via FOI by Thad Anderson.

Tim Geithner's Misguided Foreign Bailout Plan

2009-03-16T17:24:38Z

By Nathaniel Heller, for the Global Integrity Commons

With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner now calling on U.S. lawmakers for at least US$100 billion in fresh taxpayer cash to support increased IMF bailouts to foreign countries, a hard look needs to be taken at governments that lack the internal controls to manage the huge inflows of capital being proposed as panaceas to the global downturn.

To ignore the fact that many foreign governments lack the ability to adequately protect taxpayer and aid donor funds from corruption and leakage is a dangerous approach that may lead to greater, not less, financial instability at the end of the day. The Obama administration's eagerness to race ahead with hundreds of billions of new dollars for shaky (and sometimes shady) foreign economies smacks eerily of the naiveté the Bush administration displayed when it blindly dumped the original US$350 billion into the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) with little to no oversight.

While the Obama administration has indeed made a commitment to ensuring that American taxpayers can follow their stimulus money (most visibly through its www.recovery.gov website), most taxpayers around the world are not as lucky. If Geithner's proposal is implemented, the question is not if, but rather when, significant chunks of that money will go missing.

Regardless of one's views of the merits of the U.S. stimulus package, the American government is relatively well-equipped to provide some basic oversight to the process. Internal audit agencies such as the Government Accountability Office and the inspectors general are professional and well-staffed; the legislative branch benefits from thousands of professional committee staffers; and civil society groups and the media in the U.S. are sophisticated actors capable of bringing malfeasance to light and holding government accountable. The situation is far different abroad, however.

Overseas, Oversight is Weak

Two new reports issued by international non-governmental organizations in February 2008 highlight the very real dangers facing policymakers and citizens in developing countries where billions of dollars are similarly being poured into opaque and poorly understood financial systems. The Open Budget Index 2008, published by the International Budget Partnership, and the Global Integrity Report: 2008, published by Global Integrity, raise serious red flags.

China has announced plans for a massive stimulus package of around US$600 billion. Who's going to follow the money in China? It's hard to tell.

The Open Budget Index for China, which assesses the transparency and availability of key budget and auditing documents, notes, "...though China makes its audit report public and provides information on whether the audit report's recommendations are successfully implemented, the scope of audit coverage is fairly limited." Global Integrity's latest assessment of China's anti-corruption and accountability safeguards confirms that, "...many of the [audit report] findings are shelved." The likelihood of effective legislative oversight over the Chinese government's bailout plans is slim; Global Integrity warns, "There is very little that [the Chinese legislature] can do to revise a budget. The budget is brief, there is not sufficient information and the process is short. The review has never been a meaningful process."

The situation is arguably worse elsewhere, where conflicts of interest abound. In December, one of Montenegro's largest banks won a 44 million euro bailout from the government; the bank is partially owned by the Prime Minister, his brother, and his sister.

In Serbia, where the government announced a nearly US$2 billion stimulus package in January, Global Integrity warns of a lack of conflicts of interest regulations for senior government officials, while the Open Budget Partnership observes that, "Serbia does not make its audit report public and does not provide any information on whether the audit report's recommendations are successfully implemented."

A month later, Lithuania's government announced that it was preparing a US$2 billion stimulus package. Unfortunately, as Global Integrity notes in its latest assessment of the country, Lithuanian state-owned enterprises, which are likely to benefit from the increased government spending, operate with little effective controls or oversight. "No clear rules exist [for accessing state-owned companies' financial records], and in practice financial records of state-owned companies are treated as commercial secrets," the assessment notes.

All of this is grim news for those working towards stabilizing emerging and frontier markets in the midst of a global financial meltdown. The bottom line is that pouring billions of dollars into fiscal and budgetary systems that struggle to keep track of their normal budgetary expenditures, never mind these new mass infusions of capital, is a recipe for leakage, theft, and diversion of resources. In some cases, there may even be broader political fallout should these stimulus and bailout funds be perceived as favoring a country's elite rather than trickling down to the average citizen.

As China watchers have noted, a least part of the motivation behind Beijing's stimulus is to tamp down growing civil unrest as unemployment rises. Should a serious scandal erupt involving Chinese stimulus funds gone missing, one wonders whether the stimulus will ultimately have hurt, rather than have helped, the government's attempts to quell social protests.

What should be done?

What should be done in light of these challenges? Policymakers in both developing countries and multilateral institutions considering additional bailout programs should adopt at least two common-sense approaches to mitigating the risks associated with the potential for diverted capital.

First, a Hippocratic "do no harm" approach must be the starting point for any discussion. If fiscal, budgetary, and oversight mechanisms are so weak as to virtually guarantee that bailout and stimulus funds will go missing, alternatives should be explored, such as directly funding social safety net programs in lieu of attempting to jump start an economy through increased government spending at the macro level.

Second, transparency and accountability must be the watchwords of any bailout or stimulus program. Despite the underdeveloped public financial management systems in many developing countries, there are ways to monitor the flow of funds from national governments to localities through alternative approaches such as "citizen audits" and other grassroots expenditure tracking programs. At a minimum, both governments and aid donors must err on the side of transparency when it comes to identifying how, when, and where bailout funds are flowing, and both must be held accountable if and when those funds go missing. The early lessons from the U.S., especially as they relate to TARP's lackadaisical approach to oversight, suggest that it is never too early to demand that sort of basic transparency.

-- Nathaniel Heller

Nathaniel Heller is Managing Director of Global Integrity, an international non-governmental organization that tracks corruption and governance trends around the world.

Global Integrity content is free to repost in full, with attribution (CC BY).

Banks and Corruption: Citibank Fueled Africa's Wars

2009-03-11T21:14:43Z

Jonathan Eyler-Werve reporting for the Global Integrity Commons

An unpleasant truth of corruption rankings (including Global Integrity's index) is that they tend to shift focus toward poor governments and away from rich (but private) institutions that are actively participating in the looting of the worlds poorest people. UK resource watchdog Global Witness pushes back with a spotlight on the banking sector. They find banks are all too willing to deal with the worst offenders.

How willingly did the world's most famous banks participate in obviously illegal practices? In 2000, Citibank processed a US$2 million dollar transaction from a timber company paying for logging rights to a Liberian account described in bank records as registered to "Taylor, Charles G." and described as "US dollar checking accounts - personal." Yes, that's right: Citibank was processing a payment of government timber revenues to a personal checking account in President Charles Taylor's name (Undue Diligence, page 70). It's not just that Taylor is stealing from very poor people -- that money perpetuated one of the ugliest wars in recent history. (Taylor is now on trial for war crimes, but things are better in Liberia today).

While Citigroup, Citibank's holding company, is now 36 percent US government owned, this is not an exclusively American problem. Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Bank of East Asia all get called out as well.

Global Witness work has a flair for storytelling, and the Undue Diligence site fits the form. If you prefer to skip to the PDF, the text is here.

To our friends at Global Witness: This is a very nice piece of work. Well done.

-- Jonathan Eyler-Werve

-----

GLOBAL WITNESS PRESS RELEASE
LONDON: 11 March 2009

Major banks facilitate corruption in world's poorest countries; government regulation is not working

As G20 finance ministers meet in London to discuss how to rescue the global financial system and prevent the next disaster, a new report by anti-corruption NGO Global Witness shows how some of the world's biggest banks have been dealing with some of the world's most corrupt regimes.

By doing so they have facilitated corruption and looting of natural resource revenues, denying some of the world's poorest people a chance to escape poverty.

'The same lax regulation that created the credit crunch has let some of the world's biggest banks facilitate the looting of natural resource wealth from poor countries,' said Gavin Hayman, Global Witness Campaigns Director. 'If resources like oil, gas and minerals are to truly help lift Africa and other poor regions out of poverty, then governments must take responsibility to stop banks doing business with corrupt dictators and their families.'

The facts

Global Witness's report, Undue Diligence: How banks do business with corrupt regimes, presents evidence that:

• Barclays kept open an account for the son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea long after clear evidence emerged that his family were heavily involved in substantial looting of state oil revenues.

• A British tax haven and a Hong Kong bank helped the son of the president of Republic of Congo, another oil-rich African country, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of his country's oil revenues on designer shopping sprees.

• Citibank facilitated the funding of two vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia by enabling the warlord Charles Taylor, now on trial for war crimes in the Hague, to loot timber revenues.

• HSBC and Banco Santander hid behind bank secrecy laws in Luxembourg and Spain to frustrate US efforts to find out if Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues had been looted and laundered.

• Deutsche Bank assisted the late president Niyazov of Turkmenistan, a notorious human rights abuser, to keep billions of dollars of state gas revenues under his personal control and off the national budget.

• Dozens of British, European and Chinese banks have provided Angola's opaque national oil company, Sonangol, with billions of dollars of oil backed loans, though there is no transparency or democratic oversight about how these advances on the country's oil revenues are used, and they have a recent history mired in corruption and secret arms deals.

What needs to be done

No bank should be, or should want to be, involved in business such as this, whose real costs are borne by the people of some of the world's poorest countries.

Anti-money laundering laws require banks to do due diligence to identify their customer and turn down illicitly-acquired funds, but these laws need tightening to make them globally effective. The following four reforms to the financial regulatory system are essential:

• Banks must change their culture of 'due diligence' - the process by which they check that a customer is legitimate. This isn't about box ticking. Banks should only take the business if they have identified an ultimate beneficiary who does not pose a corruption risk. Other business should be turned away.

• Governments must ensure that anti-money laundering laws in each jurisdiction are absolutely explicit that banks must do this due diligence properly, and financial regulators must actively enforce these laws.

• Cooperation between governments has to improve to ensure that national bank regulations become globally compatible, accountable and transparent, and are not hindered by bank secrecy laws. This must begin with reforms to the inter-governmental body that oversees the anti-money laundering regime, the Financial Action Task Force.

• Governments must ensure that new global rules are put in place to help banks avoid corrupt funds. The most important change is to ensure that every country produces full public online registers of the ultimate beneficial ownership of all companies and trusts under its jurisdiction, to help banks identify and avoid business with a corruption risk.

'The G20 leaders must act on their promises to help the world's poor. A key element of making poverty history is to stop the money being stolen or kept off-budget in the first place. Ducking this issue now leaves the global financial system open not only to further corrupt money flows, but to the destabilising influences that have caused such damage to the developed world's economies,' said Hayman. 'The developing world cannot afford a return to business as usual.'

Copies of the report can be downloaded from www.undue-diligence.org. For copies, more information and interviews, call:

In the UK
+44 (0)20 7561 6382, +44 (0)20 7561 6360 or +44 (0)7872 620 855

In the US
+1 202 380 3583 or +1 202 725 8705

Argentinian Media Face Harassment, Threats and Financial Pressure

2009-03-09T21:41:58Z

A slap and a death threat on a public sidewalk; a radio antenna expertly sabotaged; overt warnings that some names must never be mentioned in print. Reporting on corruption in Argentina is dangerous work, and local journalists say it is getting worse.

While coming out of a store last December, Argentinian reporter Rigoberto Carrigall was confronted by two individuals who slapped him and threatened to kill him. They also ordered him to stop writing about a lawyer who until very recently was in public office and is now the executive director of a radio station.

According to Carrigall, the lawyer watched the aggression from a black BMW parked outside the store.

In February, a regional politician of the ruling party involved in a scandal told journalist Mario Otero that he´s going to rip his head off if he writes anything about his sons. When asked about it, the politician said the reporter had provoked him with an ironic comment but reiterated the threat. He added that it is also valid for any other reporter who mentions the involvement of his sons in the scandal.

Radio Goya, a small cooperative of 20 independent reporters, suffered the loss of its antennae one January night, when three of its steel wires where cut and made it fall down. The station´s representative said the type of cuts proves the attack was perpetrated by individuals who used special machinery and knew exactly which wires would affect the structure. The price of the antennae will stop the station from broadcasting for many months and, for the time being, is forcing it to broadcast from another station that reaches a far smaller audience.

These and similar cases are the first thing one notices when visiting the Argentinian Journalism Forum´s website (in Spanish) and help explain why Argentina dropped from the Moderate tier in 2007 to the Weak tier in the Global Integrity Report: 2008.

The country´s scorecard on media issues paints an ugly picture, where not only regional politicians try to restrict freedom of the press but the national government is also openly using public resources to manipulate publications.

In the Global Integrity Report: 2007, one of our peer reviewers gave the voice of alarm that in the last few years the use of cancellation of official advertising as a tool to punish or reward publications "increased tremendously".

According to the report, under President Nestor Kirchner´s term (2003-2007) there was more self-imposed censorship than under Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who is currently on trial on arm-smuggling charges.

Menem's legal process started after a journalistic investigation revealed that he approved the illegal sell of weapons to Croatia and Ecuador, in violation of U.N. and Organization of American States bans. He denies the charges.

There were expectations that in 2008, under new President Cristina Fernández, Kirchner´s wife, things would get better, but the Global Integrity Report: Argentina shows the opposite has happened. According to our lead researcher, the Government not only continues to utilize official advertising but has given a step forward and now even puts pressure on companies to make them advertise on certain media organizations only.

Reporters and opposition leaders point out there´s also a proliferation of private companies that sympathize with the Government and are dedicated to pursue millions in public advertising, by creating or buying media organizations.

While there is no pre-publication censorship in Argentina, "in some cases there are phone calls or verbal threats to stop the publication of information that may affect the Government´s public image". This blog previously covered Argentina's use of "soft censorship" via government advertising.

The tactic of punishing media by withdrawing advertising is so evident that in at least one recent case the Supreme Court ruled against that practice and more similar rulings are expected soon. However, the fight could be decided in Congress.

President Fernandez expects congressmen to start debating soon a Government-sponsored bill intended to regulate the work of the media, while the opposition is preparing on a bill to regulate the distribution of public advertising.

May freedom of the press win.

-- Hazel Feigenblatt for the Global Integrity Commons

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Sen. Lieberman Calls for Release of CRS Library

2009-03-06T19:14:33Z

Jonathan Eyler-Werve reporting for the Global Integrity Commons

This week, US Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) calls for the release of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports to the public.

These are taxpayer funded research studies used in Congressional debate. The reports are secret by Congressional tradition because, let's face it, facts disrupt spin. Our friends at the Project on Government Oversight have the story. Many have tried to publish these documents by law, but this may be the year it finally happens. We covered the recent leak and publication of the entire CRS library on the Commons last month.

The CRS reports currently top a list of "Most Wanted Federal Government Documents." You can vote for your favorites at the link, and frankly all of them should be public. Rounding out the top three:

CRS Reports
Bailout money recipiants
Patriot Act usage by Department of Justice

The site is brought to you by the good folks at OpenTheGovernment.org, Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Premier/Diebold Voting Machines Deleted Ballots

2009-03-05T17:24:18Z

This week, the State of California completed its investigation into why their electronic voting machines quietly deleted 197 ballots in the November 2008 election in Humboldt County. The loss was discovered only after discrepancies in the vote count were found by the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, a local watchdog.

The investigation report (also: background docs) throws the blame solidly on junk software provided by Premier Election Systems, a company so widely ridiculed that it abandoned it old name, Diebold, in 2007.

The fundamental problem with the systems used in Humboldt County is that the software creates no permanent records of votes cast (i.e. paper receipts).

Instead everything is tossed in a database, which as this case ably demonstrates, is only as good as its software. When Premier/Diebold found a flaw that could lead to a user unknowingly erasing a stack of votes, they sent an ambiguous email warning to election officials... in 2004. They didn't however, correct the software in the counties where it was deployed.

The problems don't stop there. The investigation also noted that the Premier/Diebold software has, nestled between the "Print", "Save As" and "Close" buttons, a button labeled "Clear". This button deletes the permanent audit logs which record (in theory) everything that happens on the machine. There is no "Are you sure?" confirmation or notification of what has happened after the button is pressed. It just wipes out, with one stray click, the federally mandated log files. According to California's report, a 2001 internal email discussing the addition of the button noted that "there are too many reasons why doing that is a bad idea." They did it anyway.

The report concludes:

GEMS version 1.18.19 [the software running the election] contains a serious software error that caused the omission of 197 ballots from the official results... Key audit trail logs in GEMS version 1.18.19 do not record important operator interventions such as deletion of decks of ballots, assign inaccurate date and time stamps to events that are recorded, and can be deleted by the operator. The number of votes erroneously deleted from the election results reported by GEMS in this case greatly exceeds the maximum allowable error rate established by HAVA [Help America Vote Act of 2002].

It's logging inaccurate dates? How sloppy is this product?

The Global Integrity Commons covered Premier/Diebold before the election, citing "serious doubts" on Premier/Diebold voting machines.

They aren't doubts anymore: it's public record that these things are zapping votes into the ether, and without attentive watchdog groups, there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. How many times has this happened without getting noticed? What happens when someone wants to delete votes?

We can only hope that more states using these systems will follow California's lead and hold public hearings on whether to decertify the Premier/Diebold systems in use.

I'll say it again: if buying a medium nonfat latte merits a paper receipt, so does the ballot.

-- Jonathan Eyler-Werve, reporting for the Global Integrity Commons

Obama Adminstration Expands DOD Budget Secrecy. Wait, what?

2009-02-27T22:40:32Z

First reported for the Global Integrity Commons

Two developments illustrate the Pentagon's ongoing efforts to control the media conversation on war and war spending. First, the leak of the NATO "master narrative" on the war in Afghanistan details exactly how and where military commanders are instructed to shade the truth.

On the other side of the ledger, the Obama administration is requiring that Pentagon officials sign non-disclosure agreements before discussing the upcoming Pentagon budget, an expansion of Bush era secrecy rules. Wait, what?

First, the spin...

Encrypted on a NATO server with the Orwellian but not-very-secure password "progress", an unclassified document intended to lay out the thematic content of military messages to the media, regardless of the details of the story at hand. Whistleblowing portal Wikileaks.org posted the document, a link to the original server and the password on their website. The entire server (http://oneteam.centcom.mil) has since been taken offline.

It begins:

NATO IN AFGHANISTAN
MASTER NARRATIVE AS AT 6 October 2008

This guidance document is designed to assist all those who play a part in explaining the situation in Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, but especially those who deal with the media.

The document is full of pithy nuggets of military PR speak intended to keep the multinational coalition singing the same message to the media:

"Opposing Militant Forces is the correct term but is not suitable for use with the media. Depending on the audience and the group being referred to, the phrases militants/insurgents/extremists/Taleban extremists/enemies of Afghanistan may be used, see also para 36."

"ISAF is aware of differing assessments on the number of civilian casualties from different stakeholders. We have had constructive meetings with UNAMA with an aim to reconcile differing methodologies and set up firmer basis for cooperation.

"NATO does not use body counts as a measure of success."

"Any talk of stationing or deploying Russian military assets in Afghanistan is out of the question and has never been the subject of any considerations."

"NOTE for PAO: Jordan has requested not to be mentioned as an ISAF member state in the public domain."

The Master Narrative document and others encrypted under the same password are available at wikileaks.org.

And then the muzzle...

Reuters reports that US "Defense Secretary Robert Gates took the unusual step of requiring nondisclosure agreements of all senior officials who wanted to participate in the fiscal debate, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

The Obama budget requests an increase in defense spending by 4 percent, a number lower than the US$581 billion forecast by the outgoing Bush administration.

By way of explanation, Reuters quotes DOD press secretary Geoff Morrell: "This is highly sensitive stuff involving programs costing tens of billions of dollars, employing hundreds of thousands of people and go to the heart of national security."

Or as quoted in Stars and Stripes, Morrell says, "If, indeed, not all the materials that this gang is working with are marked secret, or are classified, and therefore For Official Use Only, all the more reason for a nondisclosure agreement, so that those matters cannot be discussed as well."

What? Does that make sense to anyone?

I can almost buy the implied rational for this: the big five defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics) employ a lot of people, and leaks suggesting big cuts to marquee programs could send their stocks into a (bigger) tailspin. No one wants that.

On the other hand, excessive sentimentality and discretion toward the corporate titans is pretty much how the defense budget got so larded up to begin with. Back in 2004 I worked at the Center for Public Integrity reporting on defense contractors. We found that from 1998 to 2003, "the 10 biggest defense contractors all spent heavily on both campaign contributions (a combined $35.7 million) and lobbying ($414.6 million). But the return on their investment was staggering: $340 billion in contracts."

Perhaps Secretary Gates thinks that closed door sessions will make it easier to hack away this bloat, given the industry's pervasive reach in Washington. But it rarely, if ever, works that way. Global Integrity's research has found time and again that corrupting influence thrives on quiet and the inequitable control of information.

Wikileaks.org gets that. Does President Obama?

-- Jonathan Eyler-Werve, first reported for the Global Integrity Commons
-- Image: Zoriah (cc by/nc)