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Improved transparency is not a threat to public trust; it is the very basis for restoring that trust.

Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently.

Without a doubt, the vast majority of these transparency projects make sense. In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works. And making government data available for others to build upon has historically produced enormous value--from weather data, which produces more than $800 billion in economic value to the United States, to GPS data, liberated originally by Ronald Reagan, which now allows cell phones to instantly report (among other essential facts) whether Peets or Starbucks is closer.

The hope of the naked transparency movement is to change this. Through better code--in better legislative rules and in better technology--its aim is to make it trivially easy to get access to records suggesting influence, and then link those records automatically to the possible influence that they suggest. Consider, for example, an early instance of this work, presented in a recent report by Maplight.org, analyzing the House vote on the cap-and-trade bill. Titled "How Money Watered Down the Climate Bill," the report enumerates a long list of correlations between money given and results produced. In a section labeled "Amendment to gut the whole bill," for example, the report states: "Each legislator voting Yes … received an average of $37,700 from the Oil & Gas, Coal Mining and Nuclear Energy industries between 2003 and 2008, more than three times as much as the $11,304 received by each legislator voting No." In a section labeled "Oil and gas giveaway," describing an amendment to "increase eligibility for industrial polluters like oil and gas refiners to receive carbon allowances," the report states that "the Oil & Gas industry gave an average of $72,119 to Energy & Commerce Committee members from 2003 [to] 2008." And in a section labeled "Redefining renewable biomass," the report describes an amendment "to broaden the definition of renewable biomass [which the League of Conservation Voters said] would have removed critical safeguards that prevent habitat on our nation’s public and private forests from being plowed up": "Energy & Commerce Committee members who voted Yes on the Walden amendment received an average of $25,745 each from the Forestry and Paper Products industry, ten times as much as the $2,541 received, on average, by each member voting No."

targeted transparency "represents a distinctive category of public policies that, at their most basic level, mandate disclosure ... of standardized, comparable, and disaggregated information regarding specific products or practices to a broad audience in order to achieve a public policy purpose."

give the consumer data he or she can use, and he or she will use it to "regulate" the market better.

"More information," as Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient."

Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response."

The most we could say--though this is still a very significant thing to say--is that the contributions are corrupting the reputation of Congress, because they raise the question of whether the member acted to track good sense or campaign dollars.

This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something--an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence-- requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding--at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.

Both dynamics--together they are the consequence of what we might call the "free content movement"--have had a predictable effect. First on the chopping block is investigative journalism, with its risky return, and even when successful, a return not measured in cash. Less than 10 percent of large daily newspapers in America have four investigative journalists or more. More than 40 percent have no investigative journalists at all. One need not hate the Internet to be deeply worried about the repercussions of this development for democracy.

In the context of public officials, however, the solutions are obvious, and old, and eminently tractable. If the problem with transparency is what might be called its structural insinuations--its constant suggestions of a sin that is present sometimes but not always--then the obvious solution is to eliminate those insinuations and those suggestions. A system of publicly funded elections would make it impossible to suggest that the reason some member of Congress voted the way he voted was because of money. Perhaps it was because he was stupid. Perhaps it was because he was liberal, or conservative. Perhaps it was because he failed to pay attention to the issues at stake. Whatever the reason, each of these reasons is democracy-enhancing. They give the democrat a reason to get involved, if only to throw the bum out. And by removing what is understood to be an irrelevant factor--money--the desire to get involved is not stanched by the cynicism that stifles so much in the current system.

But if the transparency movement could be tied to this movement for reform--if every step for more transparency were attended by a reform that would disabuse us of the illusion that this technology is just a big simple blessing, and set out to make transparency both good and harmless--then its consequence could be salutary and constructive. When transparency and democracy are considered in this way, we may even permit ourselves to imagine a way out of this cycle of cynicism.

Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.