Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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CorpWatch’s New CrocTail and API
I’ve been out of Washington this week as you might have gathered from by tweeting but I did want to mention that this week, Sunlight supported CrocTail and CorpWatch API launched, aimed at providing easy access to SEC-derived corporate subsidiary data. Both are the handiwork of Corpwatch, a non-profit that employs investigative research and journalism to expose corporate malfeasance and to advocate for multinational corporate accountability and transparency. Here’s a link to CorpWatch’s press release announcing the launch.
CrocTail allows users to browse through information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their foreign and domestic subsidiaries. CorpWatch has parsed and annotated information from company SEC filings to highlight specific corporate accountability issues.
The goal is to make it easy for users to research the structure of corporations and pinpoint where they operate. For instance, CrocTail can help ferret out such corporate abuses as multinational tax-avoidance and the use of off-shore subsidiaries to evade responsibility for human rights abuses. Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch’s project director, gives two egregious examples of corporations using subsidiaries to hide their investments in dictatorial and violent regimes: Chevron in Burma and Marathon Oil in Equatorial Guinea, two of the most repressive governments on the planet.
The CorpWatch API provides a well-structured interface for Web programs to query and process subsidiary data, easing the use of SEC data, which is not standardized otherwise.
Check CorpWatch out! CrocTail and CorpWatch’s API are their latest efforts to expose war profiteering, fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses by multinationals, and to provide critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy. Sunlight supported CorpWatch’s new programs.
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Round and Round They Go
Earlier this week, CorpWatch published a fascinating article by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock on a new and rapidly growing side of the military-industrial complex: space-age, technology-driven intelligence capabilities. The article centers on Steven Cambone, a former high-raking official in the U.S. Department of Defense now turned defense contractor, and how he personifies the world of high tech intelligence gathering where the distinctions between private industry and government are increasingly virtual.
Cambone has been a longtime associate of Donald Rumsfeld , under whose tenure he served as the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer. In March 2003, he became the first Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. It was in this role that he and Rumsfeld succeeded at transforming the Pentagon’s acquisitions away from the traditional large weapon systems like aircraft carriers "and radically increased its purchases of space-age war technologies such as communication systems, sensors, robots, low-flying satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles," Shorrock writes. When Rumsfeld stepped down in late 2006, Cambone followed soon after. He landed as vice president for strategy with QinetiQ North America, a British-owned, defense-intelligence contractor that specializes in just the type of whiz-bang gadgets and systems he and Rumsfeld placed in the Pentagon’s shopping cart.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy and editor of the blog Secrecy News, calls Cambone’s hiring at QinetiQ the result of the "incestuous" relationship between former government officials and private intelligence contractors. "It’s unseemly, and what’s worse is that it has become normal," as quoted in the CorpWatch article. "The intelligence community and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical." And since QinetiQ is in the business of providing the tools Cambone placed the orders for, "this is a match made in heaven," Shorrock writes.
And last week we see that Cambone has already earned his salary. On January 7th, QinetiQ announced it had signed a $30 million contract to provide "security services" to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office. As the article says, Cambone "helped create the very office that issued the contract." QinetiQ’s website is headed by the statement "Aligning our expertise with government needs." That sounds backwards to me. "Aligning government needs to their expertise" is more like it.
Be sure to check out their illustrative cartoon.
Check out the QinetiQ Group profile in the Center for Responsive Politics’ Lobbying Database you’ll find that the corporation has dramatically increased its lobbying expenditures to meet the opportunity over the past couple of years.
