Looks like the power brokers in DC are squirming in the hot seat today. According to government rules Congress and some of their staffers are required to disclose their financial information publicly. This is an effort to make sure your elected officials and those they employ are not corrupt.

According to this article from The Hill -

Furious senior House aides are demanding committee action against a website that has posted their bank account numbers, signatures, home addresses and children’s names that are included in financial disclosure documents.

Some are demanding legal action against the website LegiStorm, which since February has been posting congressional documents online as a way to increase transparency in government. Aides have brought their complaints to the House Administration Committee and the clerk of the House.

But things don’t appear to be so dire when you read the response from Legistorm -

- The U.S. Congress wrote the law that requires disclosure of personal finances to aid in the fight against public corruption.

- Congressional staffers were the ones who voluntarily filed what they did in their personal financial disclosures. In a handful of disclosures, a tiny fraction of the total, staffers included unnecessary personal details like investment account numbers and children names. Their signature is the only detail that they now most complain about that is required.

- The Congress made these documents public. It did so after a one-month review process that concluded, apparently, that nothing was wrong with their disclosure.

- Neither the House nor the Senate require any form of identification to access this information. Anybody can access it without talking to a single person and by simply entering a fake name into a computer.

- We have voluntarily gone to significant lengths and costs already to scrub the most sensitive of information released due to staffer slipups and ethics committee oversight. This includes investment account numbers and Social Security numbers. We did so without delay.

- We have voluntarily provided various security measures such as user registration and authentication, a legal warning (one that is not present on two other heavily trafficked web sites that have for years provided member of Congress disclosures), and a human response system to make sure that automated bots cannot access the data.

So, instead of simply exposing the government documents to the world (which I would have no problems with) they have gone above and beyond what is required and attempted to clean up some of the mess which the Hill is complaining about.

Every time the government proposes new intrusions into its citizens private lives we hear the supporters repeat the mantra - “If you are innocent then you don’t have anything to hide”. It is high time that we turned the tables on the people who are behind the laws and regulations that infest our daily lives. They certainly seem to be doing alot of squirming and spreading alot of FUD about LegiStorm — I wonder what they are trying to hide from us?