Let the Sunshine In

Congresspedia.com, “the citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress,” is a new clearinghouse for everything you want to know—and want everyone else to know— about our elected officials. Built with Wiki software, it allows users to collaboratively add and remove information, and includes oversight from an editor.

Congresspedia’s users can update policymaker’s profiles, contact information and bios, and contribute to such sections as “Meet the Cash Constituents” and “Controversy.” It launched on April 26, the same day that its sponsor, the Sunlight Foundation, opened its doors. The foundation’s mission is to give citizens “the power to root out corruption in Congress.” As of mid-May, the top pages for visitors have included—hold your breath—Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, as well as potential presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

The nonpartisan Wiki is housed at SourceWatch.org, which is sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy. SourceWatch similarly allows citizens to create and update its directory of people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda, including public relations firms, think tanks and more. The number of daily visitors to the site has jumped to 48,000—up from the 28,000 daily visitors before the launch of Congresspedia.

Military Malarkey

“The American public will need to accept that certain information warfare tactics may not seem, on the surface, to be consistent with a global free press,” according to Simon Worden, the former head of the Pentagon’s controversial and short-lived Office of Strategic Influence.

Worden is a key character in “Mind Games,” the cover story of the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. In it, Assistant Editor Daniel Schulman outlines a series of recent efforts to foster “information warriors” in Iraq. One telling directive from 2003, the Information Operations Roadmap, called for “greater synergy” between public affairs, military information operations and psyops. As a result of this blurring, Shulman reports, misinformation designed to affect combat conditions now also regularly makes its way into news outlets.

“Increasingly,” Schulman writes, “the information environment has become the battlefield in a war that knows no boundaries.”