Home Page - Open The Government

New OTG Report Finds Abuses Persist at DHS Fusion Centers

Open The Government today released a new report on state and local “fusion centers,” created to share counterterrorism intelligence across government agencies to prevent the communication and coordination failures that contributed to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. “The Cost of Fear: Long-Cited Abuses Persist at U.S. Government-Funded Post-9/11 Fusion Centers” report concludes that fusion centers

Coronavirus shutdown during Sunshine Week is solemn reminder of the need for greater transparency

Sunshine Week, the annual nationwide celebration of access to government information, ends tomorrow. Like almost everything else, the coronavirus pandemic affected the open government community and government entities’ plans to highlight the public’s right to know. Openness forums and events were moved online or in some cases, canceled. As Sunshine Week activities shut down, the pandemic is

Statement on ICE’s secretive facial recognition searches and Clearview AI Data Breach

Open The Government, in collaboration with MuckRock, uncovered that a secretive company, Clearview AI, was scraping billions of publicly available photos from social media accounts and selling them to law enforcement agencies. Shortly after Clearview reported its entire client list was stolen in a data breach, separate news reports revealed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Open Government “State of the Union” Honors Sunshine Week 2020

OTG’s Lisa Rosenberg will moderate an Open Government State of the Union in honor of Sunshine Week, the nation-wide celebration of access to public information that takes place every year around President James Madison’s birthday, who famously wrote that “a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Please join us

OTG in NYT Front Page Story on Facial Recognition

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says. Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos…

Congress Must Reassert Check on Executive Branch After Trump Airstrike Against Iran

Statement of Lisa Rosenberg, Executive Director, Open The Government. Note: The U.S. drone strike that recently killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Iraq stirred talk of war as Iran, vowing to retaliate, launched missile strikes against two Iraqi military bases that house U.S. forces. Iran had also announced it would no longer abide by the terms

LA Times Op-Ed: We need the full truth about the CIA’s torture program

The new movie “The Report” is a powerful telling of the story of the Senate investigation into the horrors of the CIA’s torture program and the fight to allow the public to see what the government had done in its name. Yet to this day, the full 6,700-page report produced by the Senate Select Committee

Open The Government is an inclusive, nonpartisan coalition that works to strengthen our democracy and empower the public by advancing policies that create a more open, accountable, and responsive government.