audit

[Carl Malamud <xxxx@media.org>]

Lessig is pitching a significant infusion of funds for me to various  
lawyers.  May or may not happen.  But, I told him I'd want to do a sub  
to you if this happened.

There are two things I was thinking about:

1. pacer proxy ... people address pacer using their $0.08/page logins,  
but allow us to be man in the middle and thus capture the files, stamp  
them with metadata, recycle them.  I was thinking you do the software,  
we deploy it at places like justia.  This could be applied more  
generally across .gov for any pay barriers.   I think squid and some  
magic might be the answer to this problem, but it could be a really  
interesting little testbed (I bet we could get Duane Wessels and  
others interested in the issue).

2. systematic audit ... I'd like to crawl .gov, looking for a variety  
of metrics (broken links in html pages, nmap look for open ports,  
section 508 accessibility errors, number of servers with windows 2000  
as the os, broken dns zones, etc.) and do so at the major agency  
level, but also inside each agency at the department level.  That lets  
us create composite scores which can be used to do various kinds of  
rankings.  If we can automate that, I think we can have some  
significant leverage.

Do those sound interesting?

Nobody in the transition is talking to me, but I know about 50% of the  
names on the current masthead.  I think we're going to have some  
serious leverage if we also have some real code.

Carl