A bunch of very smart, mostly young men and women have come together under the banner of the Sunlight Foundation. Their mission is to expose corruption and foster transparency in government. They have created some unique internet tools for collecting and displaying information that, by law, is supposed to be accessible to the public. Not an easy task because those who maintain such information generally do not see it in their interest for it to be made public.
Example: TV stations make lots of money, huge amounts of money, from political campaign commercials. By law, they have to maintain records of who bought commercials and how much they paid. It"s curious that, when accounting has become a largely digital exercise, that TV stations would chose to maintain records about campaign commercials haphazardly, sometimes on easily misplaced, individual slips of paper.
Sunlight sends people out to individual broadcast outlets to collect that kind of political campaign finance records. Then they put them into easily digestible form, and publish them on their website, Sunlight is doing what the government should be doing as part of it mandate for regulatory oversite. Unfortunately, with the broadcastr industry, like so many others, the regulatory process has been captured by those very people who are subject to regulation. You know, 'the fox is in charge of the henhouse.' The antidote comes in the form of groups like Sunlight.
Here is a link to Sunlight's webpage. http://sunlightfoundation.com/
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