From the Columbia Journalism Review's United States Project:
STOCK fraud?
Reporters miss a chance to expose Congress’s weak rationale for an ethics rule rollback
On Monday, President Obama quietly signed a bill repealing the major provisions of the much-touted ethics law known as the STOCK Act.
Passed in 2012 after a 60 Minutes report on insider trading practices in Congress, the STOCK Act banned members of Congress and senior executive and legislative branch officials from trading based on government knowledge. To give the ban teeth, the law directed that many of these officials’ financial disclosure forms be posted online and their contents placed into public databases. However, in March a report ordered by Congress found that airing this information on the Internet could put public servants and national security at risk. The report urged that the database, and the public disclosure for everyone but members of Congress and the highest-ranking executive branch officials—measures that had never been implemented—be thrown out.
The government sprang into action: last week, both chambers of Congress unanimously agreed to adopt the report’s recommendations. Days later, Obama signed the changes into law.
The STOCK Act’s partial repeal received workmanlike coverage from Beltway outlets like The Hill and Politico, prompted the expected howls of protest from transparency groups, and generated a few ripples in the mainstream media.
The meager coverage was a striking counterpoint to the waves of media attention that accompanied enactment of the STOCK Act in April 2012—310 articles in the two weeks surrounding its passage, according to a search of Lexis Nexis. Just as striking is that none of the reports on the partial repeal consulted experts who could answer the question at hand: did the disclosure rules in fact threaten individual or national security?
To address this question, CJR consulted four cybersecurity experts from leading think tanks and private security consultancies. Each came to the same conclusion: that Congress’s rationale for scrapping the financial disclosure rules was bogus.
“I don’t think there is any risk,” said James Lewis, the director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of posting federal disclosure forms online and in a database. “Only the risk of going to jail for their insider trading.”...MORE
