Yesterday, I announced the introduction of the Public Online Information Act (POIA).
The premise of the bill is simple. If government information is public, then it should also be online.
The Public Online Information Act will take public information produced by our government and bring it out of the dark warehouses and rusty file cabinets and into the sunlight of the Internet.
As I told Dylan Ratigan yesterday, no longer is it acceptable for our government to stamp something "public" and shove it in a drawer where no one will ever see it. That’s about as transparent as a nuclear missile silo.
My bill will require that all executive branch agencies publish their public information to the Internet in a timely fashion and in a user-friendly format. It will require them to establish a searchable catalog of all online public documents. And it will create an advisory committee that will bring together the branches of government and the private sector to develop government-wide Internet publication policies.
In the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark we see a vast, dark, cavernous warehouse where the government keeps all of its secrets. If my bill becomes law, that scene will be something you only see in movies.
People across the country, from scholars to school children, should be able to see any public government information from the convenience of their computer.