lobbying

So I completely forgot I needed to register for OKFN’s Open Interests Europe hackathon last weekend, which even had a lobbying track, and just round the corner from the office, too. I decided to have my own lobbying hackathon by eating pizza and caffeine pills and being misogynistic spending my weekend finishing the Lobster Project’s…

Read More A Project Lobster progress report!

So I picked a fight with Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs about why a rather good piece on whether the big spenders in US politics actually achieved anything with their money didn’t have any charts. Sunlight reckons campaign money was surprisingly ineffective, and Republicans had the most of it, in a post that surely does…

Read More The smart money and the dumb money in the US elections

Here’s something interesting. You may remember this story from back in November about the CIA spy network in Lebanon that met at a Pizza Hut they codenamed PIZZA, and which was rolled up by a joint Hezbollah-Lebanese military intelligence investigation. The key detail is as follows: U.S. officials also denied the source’s allegation that the…

Read More The intersection of electronic warfare and mall management

The question isn’t so much “did Eric Pickles eat all the pies?”, it’s “who paid for the pies, and how many did he declare in the register of members’ interests?”. TBIJ is on an absolute tear on Tory lobbying stories at the moment, and the combination of photo and caption for the Eric Pickles one…

Read More it flies! well, that’s what it was bloody well designed to do

So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions’ press offices are handing out “tokens” to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings…

Read More a restraining influence on the rate of retrogression

OK, I’ve added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We’re up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds. Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped…

Read More the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank…