Dragging a kicking-and-screaming government into the 21st century

T ribbon on the 104th Congress had barely been cut and newly anointed Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was already sounding a clarion call for a “wired” Congress. In those heady opening days of the Republican Revolution, Gingrich was reciting passages from Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave as if it were an addendum to the Constitution. To me it was a breath of fresh air. Finally, someone in Congress gets it. Despite an intense personal dislike of the Speaker’s politics, I figured the net community might just be able to ride this rhetoric like some god-send hobby horse. “Might as well make the best of a dismal political landscape,” I remember thinking. In that opening month of the 104th, Gingrich unveiled the Thomas online system to great fanfare. He vowed all congressional products would be online, available for downloading. This, he claimed, would allow “ordinary Americans” to “bypass” the “media elite” of the Washington press corps, enabling U.S. citizens to join in a great exercise in democracy. Thomas was, Gingrich admitted, a “work in progress.” And with that, he cut a red ribbon—literally—while adoring fans and a skeptical press corps snapped pictures at the ceremony held in the Library of Congress. But that’s where things stopped. The promise of Thomas has turned out to be more platitudes than product. That promise remains unfulfilled today and in some ways, Thomas is even less efficient than the day it was rolled out. For example, you can no longer ftp copies of actual bills as you once could, making it a chore to get a complete copy. I should have known better than to be sucked in by the cyberhype, but the fact is, I was reeled in like a trout. An unfulfilled Thomas was just an omen for a Congress that has become increasingly hostile to all things cyberspace. Adding insult to injury, the well-hyped, supposedly info-savvy Clinton administration, as it turns out, is sweetheart when it comes to cyberspace. A reality check of the first four years of the Clinton administration, with Congress as supporting cast, reveals a mind-numbing laundry list of wrong-headed and at times, openly hostile actions visà-vis cyberspace and its so-called netizens.