Re: audit

[Carl Malamud <xxxx@media.org>]

On Nov 7, 2008, at 4:42 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> > what is your corporate form these days?  are you incorporated?   
> > filed for c4
> > or c3?  are you under official "fiscal sponsorship" of Sunlight?
>
> we incorporated in MA and filed for c4. no fiscal sponsorship.

ok.  I can work with that.  I'm going to make a $25k contribution to  
Watchdog.  my thinking is you write the general auditing software/ 
scripts and I apply them to .gov (these scripts could easily be used  
on state governments as well).  please don't start yet ... I want a  
few days to put together some thoughts on this.  I ran some dry runs  
of this audit concept a couple of years ago and there are some things  
I learned I want to transmit before you get started.  I also want to  
make sure we stay very clearly on the above-board side of this thing  
(e.g., we'll run nmap to look for open ports and fingerprint os's, but  
we're *not* going to crack their password files.  :)).

Anyway, let's talk Monday.

BTW, good progress on my irs project.  I've got the 12-dvd loader up  
and running (finder screendump attached) and today I got the program  
working that scarfs a dozen dvds, reads an index file to figure out  
which tiff's go with which return (they are one page per tiff in semi- 
random order), use tiffcp to concatenate them together, use tiff2pdf  
to create a pdf,. use exiftool to stamp the metadata into the pdf  
header.  I still need to automate running them through OCR, looking  
for SSNs (there are a bunch), and doing a few other housekeeping  
tasks.  This is definitely a big project, but this is certainly  
progress.

For the CFR, I'm now able to go from their broken sgml to well-formed  
xml.  Now, I need to figure out how to lay it out as xhtml, convert  
the eps files to png and pdf, and automate the laying it all into svn  
so you can do diffs.

Carl