How about presidential signing statements?

I was very pleased to read in Federal Computer Week this morning that the Office of Management and Budget will begin tracking earmark requests next year for the fiscal 2011 budget cycle.

OMB makes available some years’ approved earmarks, but not the earmark requests put forward by members of Congress. Tracking and publishing requests will shed light on the whole ecosystem of congressional earmarks—the favor factory, if you will.

OMB’s move follows a project Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com has conducted this summer: asking the public to plug earmark disclosures into a database. The site now maps over 20,000 earmarks. (Well, technically, that much data breaks the mapping tool, but you can see state-by-state earmark maps.)

Earlier this year, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees required their members to disclose earmark requests. These disclosures—published as Web pages and PDF documents—were not useful, but public interest in this area is strong, and the public made them useful by entering them into WashingtonWatch.com’s database.

The project isn’t over, by the way, and the current focus is collecting earmarks requested by Appropriations Committee members.

It’s great news that next year the Obama Administration will track and disclose earmarks, from request all the way through to enactment. Given his struggle in the area lately, this is a chance to score some transparency points. President Obama campaigned against earmarks, promising reform, and this is an important step toward delivering on that promise.

In her Washington Post column today, Ruth Marcus doesn’t mention President Obama’s 1‑for-46 record on posting bills online for five days before signing them. But she does single out a similar promise: “When the details of health reform were being hammered out, he vowed, ‘We’ll have the negotiations televised on C‑SPAN so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.’ ”

According to Marcus, dealmaking with the drug industry “underscores the dangerously wide gap between Obama’s idealistic campaign-trail promises and the gritty realities of governing. ”

Observers will continue to note peeling paint and growing rust spots on the “Change” icon that swept President Obama into office. He set high standards by which his lawmaking practices will be judged, and he’s not meeting them.

That’s not a personal knock on the president. He would if he could. But even a president can’t single-handedly undo the power dynamics that have accrued in and around Washington, D.C. for most of the last century — especially not one who believes that exercising government power is good.

Well, not actually. Instead, the Washington Post’s headline says “U.S. Web-Tracking Plan Stirs Privacy Fears.” The story is about the reversal of an ill-conceived policy adopted nine years ago to limit the use of cookies on federal Web sites.

A cookie is a short string of text that a server sends a browser when the browser accesses a Web page. Cookies allow servers to recognize returning users so they can serve up customized, relevant content, including tailored ads. Think of a cookie as an eyeball — who do you want to be able to see that you visited a Web site?

Your browser lets you control what happens with the cookies offered by the sites you visit. You can issue a blanket refusal of all cookies, you can accept all cookies, and you can decide which cookies to accept based on who is offering them. Here’s how:

• Internet Explorer: Tools > Internet Options > “Privacy” tab > “Advanced” button: Select “Override automatic cookie handling” and choose among the options, then hit “OK,” and next “Apply.”

I recommend accepting first-party cookies — offered by the sites you visit — and blocking third-party cookies — offered by the content embedded in those sites, like ad networks. Or ask to be prompted about third-party cookies just to see how many there are on the sites you visit. If you want to block or allow specific sites, select the “Sites” button to do so. If you selected “Prompt” in cookie handling, your choices will populate the “Sites” list.

• Firefox: Tools > Options > “Privacy” tab: In the “cookies” box, choose among the options, then hit “OK.”

I recommend checking “Accept cookies from sites” and leaving unchecked “Accept third party cookies.” Click the “Exceptions” button to give site-by-site instructions.

Because you can control cookies, a government regulation restricting cookies is needless nannying. It may marginally protect you from government tracking — they have plenty of other methods, both legitimate and illegitimate — but it won’t protect you from tracking by others, including entities who may share data with the government.

The answer to the cookie problem is personal responsibility. Did you skip over the instructions above? The nation’s cookie problem is your fault.

If society lacks awareness of cookies, Microsoft (Internet Explorer), the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), and producers of other browsers (Apple/​Safari, Google/​Chrome) might consider building cookie education into new browser downloads and updates. Perhaps they should set privacy-protective defaults. That’s all up to the community of Internet users, publishers, and programmers to decide, using their influence in the marketplace.

Artificially restricting cookies on federal Web sites needlessly hamstrings federal Web sites. When the policy was instituted it threatened to set a precedent for broader regulation of cookie use on the Web. Hopefully, the debate about whether to regulate cookies is over, but further ‘Net nannying is a constant offering of the federal government (and other elitists).

By moving away from the stultifying limitation on federal cookies, the federal government acknowledges that American grown-ups can and should look out for their own privacy.

David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Obama, emailed me yesterday (along with perhaps several million others) to tell me about a new effort on White​house​.gov to dispel “rumors and scare tactics” from people opposing even more government regulation of the health sector. I think the opponents of expanded regulation have the better arguments on the merits.

I was struck, though, by the effort that has gone into creating an entirely new section of White​house​.gov for a “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check,” complete with fancy graphics and videos. (I have modified one of those graphics to illustrate this post. Fun!) Meanwhile, the White House still hasn’t brought itself to do something that President Obama promised on the campaign trail: post bills online for five days before signing them.

Since I last updated the chart, President Obama has signed seven more bills. None of them were posted online for five days, though two were held at the White House for that long before they got the president’s signature.

It’s the president’s prerogative to use White​house​.gov for PR, of course. The site and the PR on it would have more legitimacy, though, if it were also a basic resource for information about the legislative business the president conducts — as he promised.

Because the White House has established no uniform location for posting bills, there’s always a chance that I missed postings. I welcome corrections.

In my search for posted bills I did find this blog post, which says “The President believes that a piece of legislation as important as the Recovery Act must be implemented with an unprecedented degree of transparency.” But as you can see below, he denied the public a chance to review the Recovery Act as he promised, making it Public Law 111–5 within a day of its presentment.

Several people today have sent me the article in the Daily Mail (UK) discussing the twelve-minute hack on a UK identity card. Security consultant/​hacker Adam Laurie was apparently able to rewrite the data on the card in very short order.

This would imply that making a more secure card is an improvement. But more security in a national ID card almost inevitably means less security for the individual in terms of privacy and autonomy.

We don’t want a highly secure national ID card. We want a diverse and competitive identity and credentialing system. In such a system, governments may serve as identity providers. But that is not necessary and, given their powers, not desirable.

After a morning workout and attending Mass this Sunday, I read El Mercurio (Chile’s paper of record) online. Although I seldom read Chilean newspapers blogs (too many attacks and too much dirt), I did so that morning because I was impressed by the indignation expressed by my friend Luis Larraín in his Sunday blog (titled “Canallas” – Shameless). I had named Larraín Superintendent of Social Security when he was 25 years old. At that time I was 30 and Secretary of Labor and Social Security.

With astonishment I discovered that a certain “Mr. Murillo”, in the comment number 10 on the blog (which I copied immediately, and backed up electronically), explicitly attacked another commenter, Mr. José Fregoso Edelstein, by saying that his previous comment was due to the fact that he is from a “bad race” because he is Jewish.

I immediately logged in to Twitter and posted a ‘tweet’ demanding El Mercurio delete the blog comment, because it is a terrible insult directed at a group of people that have suffered indescribable horrors, not only in the 20th Century, but throughout history. I would have done the same thing if the insult was directed at Palestinians, Lebanese, Croatians, or any other racial/​religious/​national group.

However, I found an unexpected surprise. Instead of receiving immediate support for an action I thought just and reasonable, several people on Twitter attacked Jews, and me for defending them (one wrote, “You have used your enormous prestige in Chile to become “a shield for the Jews”). They also accused me of “encouraging censorship”, suggesting a “media dictatorship”, etc.… I replied inmediately in Twitter to the least offensive ones. Fifteen minutes later I received a ‘tweet’ from an editor at El Mercurio, saying that they had seen my complaint in Twitter and that they were studying the situation. With another tweet I insisted on immediate deletion of the comment. Twenty minutes later the newspaper editors deleted the offensive comment number 10. I want to emphasize that the editorial mistake, even this grievous one, does not compromise the newspaper El Mercurio as a whole, and its fast action in regard to the issue speaks to the newspaper’s chief editor’s integrity. It was an extraordinary triumph of the fast boat Twitter over the “media carrier” in Chile, another demonstration of the liberating potential of the wonderful new technologies being developed in the land of the free and the brave.

What left me very worried, and the reason I wrote this, is having detected a worrisome anti-Semitic sentiment among my fellow countrymen. Is this unjust anti-Semitic sentiment widespread, though hidden, in Chile, or was this only a “black swan?” I declare myself in a state of alert. We are building a free and good country. There should be no place whatsoever for the language of hate and the discrimination of minorities. As the great Albert Einstein said: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”