Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times on President Obama’s Executive Order and Presidential Memorandum that  “overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.”
Highlights of the President’s actions include:

Requiring agency heads to comprehensively review that agency’s classification guidance periodically — looking at present circumstances and whether information no longer needs [...]

Yesterday, the FEC released a fascinating press release on congressional candidate receipts and expenditures during the 2007-2008 election cycle. What makes this information particularly helpful is that the FEC put its data into context: it released PDFs and spreadsheets with the numbers it used to derive summaries of candidate fund-raising and expenditures, including historical trends.
Suppose, [...]

There’s a discussion now on RedState and Volokh Conspiracy about whether the Senate healthcare bill contains an unconstitutional provision.
The section (3403) of the bill in question (HR 3590) sets up an independent medicare advisory board to make certain determinations about medicare.
That section of the bill also purports to create significant constraints on how the House [...]

A revolving door story in Roll Call ($) yesterday reported that lobbying firm interest in hiring Capitol Hill staffers has not been sated by the weakened economy. What caught my attention, however, were these paragraphs on salaries:
Democrats are still garnering higher salaries than their Republican counterparts. In particular, Senate Democratic leadership staff, high-ranking committee staff [...]

Jon Stewart gets into the Open Government Directive game in this segment last night. It’s not so bad been called the Indian George Clooney on national TV. (Well, cable).

Norm Eisen and Beth Noveck explain why an open government matters in this blogpost. They explain how they think the Obama administration is advancing that goal.

The Supreme Court did not release its opinion in Citizens United today, despite speculation to the contrary. Citizens United is a campaign finance case that could have major transparency implications. See here for more.

There is much speculation that the Supreme Court will issue an opinion in a major election and transparency case tomorrow. In one sense, that case, Citizen’s United, concerns whether the FEC can regulate a 90-minute, video-on-demand film, “Hillary: The Movie,” which criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. However, the ruling may affect two Court decisions that [...]

Roll Call has a great article today ($) that looks at House staff pay levels to see whether some salaries are set so as to get around a law preventing former “senior” staffers from lobbying their old bosses for one year. It certainly looks like it.
According to Roll Call, only 3 percent of the people [...]

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 12/7/09
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21633

Releasing data can and must unleash the innovation and entrepreneurship at which Britain excels – one of the most powerful forces of change we can harness.