Simon Willison's Weblog: government

18f.org

2025-03-02T09:24:37+00:00

New site by members of 18F, the team within the US government that were doing some of the most effective work at improving government efficiency.

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

The entire team is now on "administrative leave" and locked out of their computers.

But these are not the kind of civil servants to abandon their mission without a fight:

We’re not done yet.

We’re still absorbing what has happened. We’re wrestling with what it will mean for ourselves and our families, as well as the impact on our partners and the American people.

But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.

More to come.

You can follow @team18f.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Tags: government, political-hacking, politics, bluesky

I Went To SQL Injection Court

2025-02-25T22:45:57+00:00

I Went To SQL Injection Court

Thomas Ptacek talks about his ongoing involvement as an expert witness in an Illinois legal battle lead by Matt Chapman over whether a SQL schema (e.g. for the CANVAS parking ticket database) should be accessible to Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests against the Illinois state government.

They eventually lost in the Illinois Supreme Court, but there's still hope in the shape of IL SB0226, a proposed bill that would amend the FOIA act to ensure "that the public body shall provide a sufficient description of the structures of all databases under the control of the public body to allow a requester to request the public body to perform specific database queries".

Thomas posted this comment on Hacker News:

Permit me a PSA about local politics: engaging in national politics is bleak and dispiriting, like being a gnat bouncing off the glass plate window of a skyscraper. Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed --- in my spare time and at practically no expense (drastically unlike national politics).

Via Hacker News

Tags: data-journalism, databases, government, law, politics, sql, sql-injection, thomas-ptacek

Reckoning

2024-08-18T16:37:41+00:00

Reckoning

Alex Russell is a self-confessed Cassandra - doomed to speak truth that the wider Web industry stubbornly ignores. With this latest series of posts he is spitting fire.

The series is an "investigation into JavaScript-first frontend culture and how it broke US public services", in four parts.

In Part 2 — Object Lesson Alex profiles BenefitsCal, the California state portal for accessing SNAP food benefits (aka "food stamps"). On a 9Mbps connection, as can be expected in rural parts of California with populations most likely to need these services, the site takes 29.5 seconds to become usefully interactive, fetching more than 20MB of JavaScript (which isn't even correctly compressed) for a giant SPA that incoroprates React, Vue, the AWS JavaScript SDK, six user-agent parsing libraries and a whole lot more.

It doesn't have to be like this! GetCalFresh.org, the Code for America alternative to BenefitsCal, becomes interactive after 4 seconds. Despite not being the "official" site it has driven nearly half of all signups for California benefits.

The fundamental problem here is the Web industry's obsession with SPAs and JavaScript-first development - techniques that make sense for a tiny fraction of applications (Alex calls out document editors, chat and videoconferencing and maps, geospatial, and BI visualisations as apppropriate applications) but massively increase the cost and complexity for the vast majority of sites - especially sites primarily used on mobile and that shouldn't expect lengthy session times or multiple repeat visits.

There's so much great, quotable content in here. Don't miss out on the footnotes, like this one:

The JavaScript community's omertà regarding the consistent failure of frontend frameworks to deliver reasonable results at acceptable cost is likely to be remembered as one of the most shameful aspects of frontend's lost decade.

Had the risks been prominently signposted, dozens of teams I've worked with personally could have avoided months of painful remediation, and hundreds more sites I've traced could have avoided material revenue losses.

Too many engineering leaders have found their teams beached and unproductive for no reason other than the JavaScript community's dedication to a marketing-over-results ethos of toxic positivity.

In Part 4 — The Way Out Alex recommends the gov.uk Service Manual as a guide for building civic Web services that avoid these traps, thanks to the policy described in their Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement document.

Tags: accessibility, alex-russell, government, html, javascript, progressive-enhancement, web-performance, gov-uk

NPM: modele-social

2024-01-02T17:55:59+00:00

NPM: modele-social

This is a fascinating open source package: it’s an NPM module containing an implementation of the rules for calculating social security contributions in France, maintained by a team at Urssaf, the not-quite-government organization in France that manages the collection of social security contributions there.

The rules themselves can be found in the associated GitHub repository, encoded in a YAML-like declarative language called Publicodes that was developed by the French government for this and similar purposes.

Via Hacker News comment

Tags: government, open-source, npm

Quoting Memo: Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles

2022-01-27T19:18:04+00:00

Consistent with the practices outlined in SP 800-63B, agencies must remove password policies that require special characters and regular password rotation from all systems within one year of the issuance of this memorandum. These requirements have long been known to lead to weaker passwords in real-world use and should not be employed by the Federal Government.

— Memo: Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles

Tags: government, passwords, security

GOV.UK Registers

2017-11-07T15:31:46+00:00

GOV.UK Registers

Canonical sources of “lists of information” intended for use by GDS teams building software for the UK government, but available for anyone. 17 registers are “ready for use”, 45 are “in progress”. Covers things like the FCO’s country list, the official list of prison estates, and DEFRA’s list of public bodies in England that manage drainage systems.

Via Terence Eden

Tags: datagov, government, open-data, gov-uk

Quoting Tom Steinberg

2008-10-21T22:29:18+00:00

Government in the UK once lead the world in it's own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire's worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

— Tom Steinberg

Tags: government, it, mysociety, tom-steinberg

Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com

2008-06-01T13:52:55+00:00

Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com

Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.

Tags: barcamplondon, barcamplondon4, government, matthew-somerville, mysociety, political-hacking, theyworkforyou, timestamping, video

WhatDoTheyKnow

2008-03-04T23:38:46+00:00

WhatDoTheyKnow

New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.

Via mySociety's Freedom of Information site goes live

Tags: foi, government, mysociety, political-hacking, whatdotheyknow

FixMySpine

2008-01-18T23:25:46+00:00

FixMySpine

JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.

Tags: consultancies, fixmyspine, fixmystreet, government, it, jp-stacey, mysociety

OPSI asks users to contribute to new web channel

2007-10-20T13:18:33+00:00

OPSI asks users to contribute to new web channel

The Office of Public Sector Information now has an online forum for people interested in reusing UK government information for commercial benefit, based on a recommendation in the “Power of Information” report by Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo.

Tags: edmayo, government, opsi, powerofinformation, tom-steinberg, uk