Two weeks ago I used LittleSis to look into the NYS Education Department’s shadow government, the Regents Research Fund. The Fund’s interlocks show a clear pattern among the fellows: 13 (out of seventeen researched) had worked at Teach for America, New Leaders, College Board or the NYC Department of Education before joining the Fund. Some …
Tag: transparency
Mapping Shadow Government: Regents Research Fund
Back in August we set up a Shadow Gov Working Group on LittleSis, inspired by Obama’s Open Government Working Group established in 2009 and his administration’s hot pursuit of Edward Snowden, who worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The research group investigates corporations that tend to profit from the privatization of government, first focusing …
Who’s spying on nonprofits for corporate America?
The Center for Corporate Policy recently released a report demonstrating how large corporations hire former law enforcement officials to spy on nonprofit organizations considered to be a threat to them. We added all of the firms in the report to a list in LittleSis–Corporate Espionage Firms–to take a closer look at some of the people …
SUNY kickback controversy prompts changes in presidential pay scheme
Last week, the Albany Times-Union reported that the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY) system unanimously approved a proposal to reform the current compensation structure for the Chancellor, campus presidents, and senior SUNY officials. The reforms, proposed by Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, were presumably prompted by a recent scandal at SUNY …
Dudley’s daybook goes dark
In the wake of a report from ProPublica that the New York Fed fired a senior bank examiner for challenging inadequacies in Goldman Sachs’ management of conflict of interests, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the daily schedules of the New York Fed’s president, William Dudley, a Goldman alum. Dudley …
The White House’s Google Calendar
The White House’s most recent monthly release of visitor records was extraordinary in that it included a comprehensive dump of records for the second half of September 2009. Previous releases were limited to records for names specifically requested by reporters and other watchdogs; this one includes every single visitor record. Kudos to the White House …
Wall Street’s tunnel to the White House
Are Treasury officials and their friends able to avoid appearing on the White House’s newly-released visitor logs? I raise this question because there is a tunnel between the White House and the Treasury Department, and it appears to be used quite frequently by members of the administration’s economic team. See this New York Times article …
Welcoming the Posse
A big welcome to friends of the Sunlight Foundation! Today’s Sunlight post marks LittleSis’s first real steps out into the wide world of the internet. We’re very happy that transparency’s posse is getting a first peek at the site, because we designed it for people like you: people focused on breaking through the information barriers …