This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 11th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has faltered on transparency, but he still has an opportunity to give the public more and more useful

data about government and any administration before him.

So what hurdles lie in the way of more open access to that government data.

Jerry Brito, creator of Stimulus Watch.org, is a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center

at George Mason University.

He visited the Cato Institute yesterday.

The president when he was campaigning and when he came into offices has been promising to be the most

transparent administration in history and so far he's taking some pretty good steps in that direction. I think first

and foremost he changed the FOIA laws and he didn't change the law exactly but what

he did was is he rescinded a memo that the Bush administration had,

which said that if you received a FOIA request as an agency,

you had to interpret that in the most narrowest sense possible

to release as little information as possible.

And he changed that so that you actually interpreted broadly.

Then you have issues as far as how you bring in some of the new technology

into the federal government that would allow for

transparency to happen online.

And there he directed the chief technology officer, which is yet to be appointed, but he directed the CTO at OMB,

the Office of Management Budget, to draft a directive

for all the federal government about how

they should be more transparent, more collaborative with the public, etc.

...