source: thedailybeast.com
Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz is tired of tussling with federal agencies over Freedom of Information Act requests, and he wants Obama's CTO to put public government data online for all to see. "We've had to do some crazy stuff to get data out of the government," says Swartz, who also runs Watchdog.net, a hub for political data and activism. "The average programmer, the first time they have to call up a government agency, [they find] it's not worth it.”

Swartz goes even further, proposing a national project to scan the millions of paper documents that live in the National Archives, Library of Congress, and other repositories"a massive program that would dwarf Google's effort to scan library books. "Imagine if we had a public process to take this and put it online"not just for one company, Google, but for the public at large," he says.