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In Brazil, federal, state and some local governments publish what is called "Diário Oficial". It's a daily ledger of official hirings, firings, payments, votes on legislative chambers and even criminal indictments. The Brazilian Congress also post all the laws and amendments proposed and approved on its website http://www2.camara.leg.br/. While AI is no solution for corruption, it could create a more transparent system with a lot more accountability highlighting the potential misuse of money. Actually, even without sophisticated technology, whoever decides to read the free and available content, will quickly find many things that jump the eyes. For instance, I remember seeing that my city, under the new mayor, was paying for school buses while the school was off, in the month of January and three times the amount the previous administration used to pay (while kids were in school).
My city also had even a helicopter for the local security force, which was not actually police and was not able to even carry guns. The helicopter was paid, faithfull, for many years. But seen in public only once, in a parade. At the time (many years ago), I tipped newspapers and nobody cared. A few years ago I created a simple script that to download all the public available law proposals from the Congress (https://github.com/pablomelo/baixa_camara) and downloaded 300GB of data. I wanted to create an app where voters could see where and what was the allegiance of their representatives (In Brazil there's no district division and a candidate for Congress can get votes from anywhere in the state. While it prevent's gerrymandering, it also allows politicians to have little commitment to their constituents). |