Hacking Congress

[BigBison]

New column on xml.com:

No matter where you fall in debates over free software or DRM, there's one type of information that is unarguably meant to be free, and that's information about our government. The more knowledge citizens have about government the better. So how can we use XML and the Semantic Web to make it easier to get that knowledge, and to foster civic participation?

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/02/08/govtrack-us-public-data-semantic-web.html
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/04/12/query-census-data-rdf-python-rdflib.html

[the_pm]

I'm thinking you're referring to the notion of hacking as chopping up in an ugly manner, not actually bypassing security in order to obtain something, right?

It seems to me this would be a very easy debate to end if congress simply databased its content and allows connections to it. Ok, so it would be a bit resource-intensive, but NSA is right down the street. They have the most powerful technology infrastructure in the free world - they can hook all that up, right?