… or at least serious limitations, NextGov reports.

Something like the bill I discussed in a previous post may be included in the TSA Authorization Act. I wrote some about “strip search machines” back in February, too.

The Philadelphia Inquirer asks why the TSA didn’t catch Bonnie Sweeten absconding to Orlando at the airport after faking her own and her daughter’s abduction.

The TSA and FBI are right: it’s not airport security’s job to look for people like Bonnie Sweeten. But they will quickly agree to make it part of their mission when newspapers and Members of Congress start to say they should. This is how a nominal airline security program transmogrifies into a general law enforcement checkpoint, and the noose tightens on your right to travel.

Last week, I complained loudly that the “Speeches” section of the White​house​.gov Web site had only four speeches on it, the most recent coming at the end of February.

And, voila, today the site is transformed. A new “speeches and remarks” page at that location has a 28-page list of official utterances from President Obama since he took office.

Does it matter a lot that people can now more easily find what President Obama has said? It kinda does. Americans will go a little more often right to the source rather than relying on media interpretations of what the president is saying. In the aggregate, we’ll have a better informed, slightly more skeptical, and more empowered populace.

Kudos to the folks at the White House for making the change. In retrospect, it appears that some arcane difference between “speeches” and “remarks” kept many important things the president says off the “Speeches” page. For my part, a 6,500-hundred word oration on national security delivered from behind a lectern is a speech, but the White House calls such a thing “remarks.”

Showing off those pearly whites frustrates facial recognition software used by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, so DMV workers are instructing motorists not to smile for their driver license photos. It’s a story worthy of The Onion, but it’s apparently true.

Facial recognition is just another way that governments are looking to keep tabs on citizens and residents. The need for specific no-smiling instructions will recede over time as national ID systems facilitate government control and make life in America naturally unhappy.

On a post at the TechLiberationFront blog, I discuss the fluidity of important concepts in information policy — and catch a friendly organization disagreeing with itself.

The upshot? “Until more intellectual groundwork is laid, information policy arguments before regulators, lawmakers, and courts will not rest on solid footing.”

More than $1,000 per U.S. family in spending under the Recovery Act.

Last week was an interesting week for transparency, with some good news and some bad news.

On the “good” side of the ledger, the administration rolled out “Data​.gov,” a growing set of data feeds provided by U.S. government agencies. These will permit the public to do direct oversight of the kind I discussed at our “Just Give Us the Data!” policy forum back in December.

My metric of whether Data​.gov is a success will be when independent users and Web sites use government data to produce new and interesting information and applications. The Sunlight Foundation has a contest underway to promote just that. Get ready for really interesting, cool, direct public oversight of the government.

Also under the White House’s new “Open Government Initiative,” an Open Government Dialogue “brainstorming session” began last week. The public can submit ideas for making the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This is important stuff, an outgrowth of President Obama’s open government directive, issued on his first full day in office.

That directive called for the Office of Management and Budget to require specific actions of agencies “within 120 days,” which meant the final product was due last week. And that missed deadline is where we start to slide into the “bad” on the transparency ledger.

Last week, President Obama gave an important speech on national security (which I blogged about here and here). But you couldn’t find the speech in the “Speeches” section of the White​house​.gov Web site. It’s buried elsewhere. That’s “basic Web site malpractice,” I told NextGov​.com. And I cautioned my friends in the transparency community not to forget Government 1.0 for all the whiz-bang Gov 2.0 projects flashing before our eyes. White​house​.gov should be a useful, informative resource for average Americans.

The current top proposal on the “brainstorming” site referred to above is to require a 72-hour mandatory public review period on major spending bills. This is reminiscent of President Obama’s promise to hold bills five days before signing them. But, as Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times, the president signed several more bills last week without holding them the requisite time.

The White House protests that they posted links to bills on the Thomas Web site at the White​house​.gov blog. But that does not give the public meaningful review of the bills in their final form, as they have come to the president from Congress. “Posting a link from White​House​.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it,” says John Wonderlich at Sunlight.

President Obama signed nine new laws since we last reviewed his record on the “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. Alas, it’s been a case study in pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

Five of the bills were held by the White House more than five days before the president signed them, but they weren’t posted! Simply posting them on White​house​.gov in final form would have satisfied “Sunlight Before Signing.”

President Obama’s average drops to .043, and that’s crediting him one win for the DTV Delay Act, which was posted at White​house​.gov in its final form for five days after Congress passed it, but before presentment, which is the logical time to start the five-day clock.

Here is the latest tally of bills passed by Congress, including the date presented, date signed, whether they’ve been posted or linked to at White​house​.gov, and whether they’ve been posted for the full five days after presentment. (Corrections welcome — there is no uniform way that the White House is posting bills or links, so I may have missed something.)