Inside Tim Geithner's Fed Days
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 28 2009
The good folks at the New York Times digital division offer us a look at just what it was like to be Tim Geithner during his time as president of the New York Fed. And what it was like, it seems, was a rather Groundhog Day-like existence of endless meetings with Wall Street honchos, punctuated by the occasional round of tennis with Alan Greenspan and haircuts by a guy named Felix. We'll leave it to others to take the political measure of Geithner's comings and goings as the wheels came off the American economy, but there are a few things worth noting on the technical and open government fronts.
The first is that the Times has been consistently showing the rest of us the way when it comes to repurposing, if you will, huge chunks of records and files in the hopes that others outside the Times building will be able to make some use of them. Their Guantanamo Docket project is another example; both use the Times' rather awesome PDF viewer. But "hopes" is probably a fair term, because I haven't seen evidence that people have yet started taking up the Times on the implicit offer to take the information they fought to free and run with it. There are probably a handful of reasons we can come up with for that. One might be that there are just fewer political reporters now on the local level, and they're the ones that we might expect to take second stabs at the Times' data sets. Another is probably that the Times hasn't aggressively pushed the idea that they're eager for people to dig deeper into their data. They tend to present their stuff with a casual, Hey, maybe you'd like to do something with this... If there are lessons to be drawn by the open government community, it might be that it's going to take proactive salesmanship to turn freed information into useful and usable stuff.
And the second is also a lesson for good government folks. Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler picks up on a fascinating aspect, and that's that despite how the Times presents its trove, the revelation of 658 pages of Geithner's records wasn't the product of a Freedom of Information Act request. Sure, the Times' may have attempted to FOIA the New York Fed on this. But the Fed rightly noted that it's simply not susceptible to FOIA requests because it's not a government body. They complied out of their good graces. The bank notes that, "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is not an 'agency.' as that term is defined in the Act and is, therefore, not subject to its provisions. The Bank is a private corporation, whose stock is owned by the member banks within its district... None of the Bank's directors or employees are government officials or employees. Its employees are not within the Federal Civil Service laws." The lesson? Well, I'm not entirely sure yet. But it might have something to do with knowing who is and isn't a target of the law you want to wield, and knowing when wielding might just do the trick anyway.
(Photo courtesy of the British Government, under the rather wild Crown Copyright.)