May 6, 2010

Contact:
Gabriela Schneider
Communications Director
The Sunlight Foundation
gschneider@sunlightfoundation.com
202-742-1520 ext 236

SENATOR JOHN TESTER INTRODUCES PUBLIC ONLINE INFORMATION ACT

Joins House in Calling for Better Online Access to Public Information

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator John Tester (D-MT) introduced legislation today that would
revolutionize how the public accesses government information. The Public Online Information
Act (POIA) requires all government-held information that is already required to be publicly
available to be posted online, subject to common-sense exceptions. Representative Steve
Israel (D-NY) authored companion legislation (HR 4858) in the House of Representatives.

“The Sunlight Foundation applauds Senator Tester’s leadership and commitment to

government transparency,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight
Foundation. “Senator Tester has put down an important transparency marker: In today’s
world, for information to be truly public, it must be made available online.”

The legislation addresses the problem that although significant amounts of government
information are required to be publicly available, in actuality much of that information is hard
to find and difficult to use. POIA ensures that government information from across all
executive branch agencies will be available to everyone with a few keystrokes on a computer.

POIA contains commonsense limitations. Within three years after enactment, it requires
executive branch agencies to publish all publicly available information online in a timely
fashion and in user-friendly formats. It facilitates inter-branch cooperation by creating an
advisory board that brings together all 3 branches of government to create guidelines for
information sharing. Finally, POIA gives the American people the right to petition the
government for online access to certain information, much like the Freedom of Information
Act does.

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Examples of information that is required by law to be public but is not available spans issues
ranging from pensions, to ethics information, to government contracts. For example, POIA
would reach:

• Pension plan annual filings with the Secretary of Labor on how their plans are funded, and
the underlying assumptions behind their investment strategies.
• Reports disclosing lobbying activities (SF-LLLs) by government contractors and grantees
made in connection with winning a grant.
• Filings by high-level government officials of their personal financial interests.
• Reports of when executive branch officials travel is paid for by third-parties, and not the
government.

POIA only applies to information created after its enactment, not old archives. It gives
government agencies three years to build the capacity and regulations needed to comply with
POIA. And POIA allows certain commonsense exceptions for disclosure such as national
security concerns.

Further information on POIA can be found at http://thePOIA.org. An animation of explaining

why POIA is necessary and how it works is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wD8dT236aS4 and embeddable using this code:

<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie"

value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wD8dT236aS4&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><para
m name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess"
value="always"></param><embed
src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wD8dT236aS4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-
shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640"
height="385"></embed></object>

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make
government transparent and accountable. Visit http://SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about
Sunlight’s projects, including http://PoliticalPartyTime.org and http://TransparencyData.com

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