Idea: checksums or digital signatures for statute text

[dogweather]

I'm kicking around ideas for enabling the end user to verify a website's text against the official API content. E.g., I pull from the API to create this page:

https://newyork.public.law/laws/n.y._insurance_law_section_3217-d

Now, how can I help site visitors verify that the text is unchanged and up to date? Currently I do two things:

1. I link to the equivalent page at nysenate.gov:

2. I wrote this explainer-style page:

https://newyork.public.law/laws/information-about-updates

I'd like to take this further

Somehow - maybe a browser plugin - that'd check the text after loading the page. My current best idea is to reduce the two texts to a normalized whitespace and then do a diff. It'd reflect the result to the user, and on demand show how it arrived at that result.

Now, if the API included e.g. a SHA checksum or public key-based signature, that could enable more scenarios.

[KevinCaseiras]

Hi @dogweather,

We actually have an api endpoint for getting a list of updates to a specific law sub document (looks like this is missing from our documentation though).
i.e. https://legislation.nysenate.gov/api/3/laws/ISC/3217-D/updates

Does this help?

[dogweather]

Thanks, that sounds very useful, I'll check it out. I'm also getting pretty good results doing this on-the-fly diff. Here, it's showing that on my site, I've removed the redundant (?) title from the body text that some statutes have.

The real challenge IMO is how to provide anything of meaning to the end user. I.e., if you're wanting confirmation that a site is accurate, it doesn't help much for the site to tell you, "Yep, I'm accurate!" :-)

So I'm thinking about a "show me" page where the plugin walks through how it arrived at its conclusion. Kind of like some AI's do.

[KevinCaseiras]

hmm, yeah that's an interesting problem. The text diff sounds like a reasonable solution, we actually do something similar internally to check bill text accuracy.

Let me know how it goes.

That website looks amazing btw, well done!

[dogweather]

That website looks amazing btw, well done!

Thanks, I really appreciate it.