California campaign database is back online
After an embarrassing, month-long outage, California’s online database of campaign contributions and lobbying went back online in the final hours of 2011, once again allowing residents of the state that houses Silicon Valley to easily find out what corporations and unions are spending money to influence their elected officials.
The state’s tottering Cal-Access database crashed Nov. 30 and remained offline for most of the month. In the meantime, staff at the secretary of state’s office posted PDFs of new campaign contributions and responded to requests for historical data by hand-searching old files.
-- Nicholas Riccardi in Sacramento, Los Angeles Times