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Chris Vein: Ethics.gov brings records and data from across the
government and puts it in a single site and makes it easy
for you, the citizen, to search through the data in that site to
make sure that we are holding ourselves accountable and
reaching the President's goal.
The goal here is to make it easier for you, the citizen,
to hold us accountable for our activities and
not for special interest.
It will, in essence, make government work better.
Now, you're probably saying, yeah, that make sense,
but does it really work?
Well, let me show you.
At a basic level, this is really just about making connections.
Because a number of data sets are in one place,
you can actually cross-reference the lists of registered
lobbyists and campaign donations.
You can even browse through the White House visitor records,
currently more than 2 million.
So when you go to the search box here at the top of the page,
what you do is you type in the name of a person,
or organization, or the agency you want to learn more about.
Since our fourth President James Madison has a birthday
next week, let's start with him.
So what we do is we type in Madison,
and the search engine crawls through the information found
in seven different databases.
What you'll see now is every Madison who is a registered
lobbyist or who has registered with the Department of Justice
as an agent of a foreign government.
Now, you'll see every Madison who has given money to a federal
candidate or political committee or received donations
as a federal candidate.
If an organization with Madison in its name has paid for a
federal employee to travel to a conference,
you'll see that information as well.
You'll even be able to see every Madison in the White
House visitor records.
You can also go into each of these databases and search it
individually, or you can download the entire data
set to build your own tool for application.
And we're going to expand Ethics.gov in the future by
adding even more data sets and more functionality.
And of course if you find a problem with the website,
or if there are bugs, or if there are more data sets that
you would like to see, we want to hear from you.
So let us know how we can make Ethics.gov even better.