A super interesting controversy has been brewing over LegiStorm, the transparency-obsessed site devoted to bringing public — but buried — documents and data to light.

They’ve been hit with a hailstorm of criticism since they started posting Hill staffers’ personal and financial information online.

Here’s a good summary from the Washington Posts’ Paul Kane:

For several years, LegiStorm has published salary and expenditure reports that are released regularly by the House and Senate. The reports, released quarterly by the House and semiannually by the Senate, provide detailed information on how much each lawmaker spends, along with the names, titles and salaries of every employee.

In late February, however, LegiStorm expanded the data it provides by putting the staffers’ personal financial disclosure forms online. Those documents, which must be filed by senior aides, contain explicit detail on aides’ finances — including bank accounts and investment portfolios — as well as some home addresses and signatures.

“Under federal law,” writes Kane, “staffers who earn more than $110,000 a year must file financial disclosure forms.”

There were about 20 cases in which staffers’ bank accounts or Social Security numbers were released; LegiStorm’s president Jock Friedly immediately removed them and apologized. Staffers also asked that he remove home addresses, but Friedly asked for $10,000 from Congress to do that.

Staffers are obviously upset that their information is being made public, but as Salon’s Farhad Manjoo points out, the information has already been public thanks to Congress, not Legistorm. Legistorm just makes the information more accessible to regular folks on the web.

While Hill staffers are up in arms, public opinion appears to be on Friedly’s side. “Staffers should get used to this level of scrutiny,” wrote the Washington Times in an editorial. “Those who require private-sector levels of anonymity should decamp to the private sector.” The Legistorm blog also links to stories about the incident on NPR’s All Things Considered and American Public Media’s Marketplace.

It’s important to be sympathetic to breaches of privacy when they occur; but it’s equally important to remind ourselves that, as the Washington Times puts it, ”this is the people’s branch, and it conducts the people’s business.”

Legistorm | transparency
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