Free Government Information (FGI)

On May 9, this past Friday, the White House issued a memorandum doing away with the old category of "Sensitive But Unclassified" and replacing it with "Controlled Unclassified Information."

The memo is titled, "Memorandum For The Heads Of Executive Departments And Agencies - SUBJECT: Designation and Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)" and can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080509-6.html.

Here is how the memo defines CUI (bolding mine):

a. "Controlled Unclassified Information" is a categorical designation that refers to unclassified information that does not meet the standards for National Security Classification under Executive Order 12958, as amended, but is (i) pertinent to the national interests of the United States or to the important interests of entities outside the Federal Government, and (ii) under law or policy requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, special handling safeguards, or prescribed limits on exchange or dissemination. Henceforth, the designation CUI replaces "Sensitive But Unclassified" (SBU).

This is such a broad brush that it could be used to exempt anything from public disclosure. By definition, isn't anything the government produces at least somewhat pertinent to the national interests of the United States? Otherwise, why waste taxpayer dollars and government time creating the product?

Then there's the allowance for "policy." I'm sure that DoD's 2002 domestic propaganda program probably "required protection" from "unauthorized disclosure" for "policy" reasons.

This is a definition that appears to be designed to give the executive branch total control over what information is released by the US Government regardless of existing law. It is an order that should be challenged by Congress today with no funding permitted for its implementation. Assuming the President doesn't back down, it should be one of the first items revoked by the incoming President.

Government information items should be properly classified and protected, safeguarded when containing individuals personal data, or public record. No twilight zone of "It's unclassified, by I can't give it to you for reasons of government policy."

[cross-posted from Legalresearchplus.com]

As I wrote about earlier, I was having a fun, albeit geeky Saturday night following links hither and yon, and I ran across the fascinating PublicMarkup.org site.

PublicMarkup is a project of the Sunlight Foundation , and just like sunlight is the best of disinfectants, a bit of public scrutiny and participation should make legislation stronger and more viable. The folks at PublicMarkup drafted the Transparency in Government Act of 2008, and hope that the wonders of online collaboration will enhance and improve the legislation and will inspire lawmakers to carry it forward.

From the PublicMarkup site:
“The Sunlight Foundation has put together what we think can become model transparency legislation—the Transparency In Government Act of 2008—and we now need your help to further shape and refine it.”

Interesting? Inspired?
Well, you better move fast if you want contribute — You only have until May 19th before they close the site for comments and then try to re-craft/re-draft the legislation.
-Erika

A few weeks back, we posted a story about an Atlantic article from November, 1967 called, "The National Data Center and Personal Privacy" in which was discussed the idea of a National Data Center, the precursor to Total Information Awareness. It was such a hot topic of the day that Congress held a hearing on computers and the invasion of privacy of US citizens (The computer and invasion of privacy. Hearings, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session. July 26, 27, and 28, 1966. by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Operations. Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy.)

I started reading the hearing, and found that Yale Economics Professor Richard Ruggles (NYT obituary from 2001) had also testified before that hearing. So I started poking around about Ruggles, looking in WorldCat and Google Scholar. I found quite a few citations to a document entitled, Report of the Committee on the Preservation and Use of Economic Data submitted to the Social Science Research Council in 1965.

But for such a well-cited document that spawned a Congressional hearing and much worry in the mainstream press about computers and privacy, there were only 3 libraries in the whole country that held the report. Imagine that!

Well, I decided to liberate the report, so -- after much finagling! -- got a copy, scanned it, and uploaded it to the Internet Archive. Score one for the digital public domain!!

I hope to see more libraries listed as having a copy in WorldCat in the near future. And if you've got any fugitive documents laying around your hard drive, send them to us here at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. We'll make sure they get up on the open Web safe and secure in the Internet Archive!!

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence has posted the full text of one of its guidebooks, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis originally published in 1999. you can get it on the CIA site, but I also took the liberty of downloading it and then uploading it to the Internet Archive's government documents collection. That link is stable and would be appropriate for adding to the 856 field of your bib record. Wouldn't it be really cool if all of those 4412 govt documents in the IA's collection had downloadable MARC records?

Intelligence analysts, in seeking to make sound judgments, are always under challenge from the complexities of the issues they address and from the demands made on them for timeliness and volume of production…

How many times have we encountered situations in which completely plausible premises, based on solid expertise, have been used to construct a logically valid forecast–with virtually unanimous agreement–that turned out to be dead wrong?

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

The Government Printing Office has produced a draft marketing plan for the Federal Depository Library Program. The 22 page plan and a survey link can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/promotion/marketingplan.html.

Depositories have been asking for marketing/promotion assistance for awhile and this plan seems to be in response to these requests. It's also quite good that it is a draft plan and that input is being solicited before being rolled out. It suggests a willingness to collaborate that is appreciated. It is our hope at FGI that GPO will get a good response rate to their call for comments because this will become a major way of marketing for the community. Better that stakeholders have input and suggestions BEFOREHAND instead of complaining about it afterwards.

The proposed slogan for the marketing campaign has stuck in my head every since I read it off the executive summary of the plan -- "As Easy as FDL - Free (information), Dedicated (service), Limitless (possibilities)" As slogans go I think that this is an excellent encapsulation of everyone's vision for the FDLP. I think it might even serve as a rough approximation for what the program is now.

Whether this slogan will strengthen an improving reality or degenerate into mere lip service depends greatly on how the electronic era will be implemented. If it becomes a centralized model with digital rights restrictions that means that info is only free within depository walls, then it won't be as easy as FDL. But if librarians successfully adapt the century old model of decentralized, freely reusable information to the electronic era, it will be as easy as FDL.

Today we welcomed a new state agency podcast to our government podcasts directory:

Outdoor Oklahoma - This is a video podcast of a weekly TV show produced by the Department of Wildlife Conservation. It appears to be archived on iTunes.

We're always on the lookout for new podcasts by government agencies. If you know of that isn't in our directory, let us know. Remember, to be a podcast, there must be a way to subscribe to the program. A pointer to a list of audio/video files that someone must visit to determine new content is *not* a podcast.

[Cross posted on LegalResearchPlus.com]

On a daily basis I visit various court and other government websites, often to locate recent opinions, regulations, or agency decisions. It is a common practice for law librarians and for any researcher who wants very recent sources or does not have access to commercial databases. Admittedly it is far less often that I consider whether the case I just downloaded is an authentic representation of the court’s decision.

But consider these two examples. The first from the California Courts website and the second from the website for the First Circuit Court of Appeals:

“The Official Reports page is primarily intended to provide effective public access to all of California's precedential appellate decisions; it is not intended to function as an alternative to commercial computer-based services and products for comprehensive legal research.”

“Although every effort is made to ensure that the information contained on this site is correct and timely, the First Circuit does not warrant its accuracy. Portions of the information may be incorrect or not current. The information contained on this site should not be cited as legal authority.”

In 2007 the American Association of Law Librarians completed a survey of states' online statutes, regulations and case law to determine which states, if any, were deeming their online material to be official and/or authentic. The survey, “State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources,” is available from the Washington Affairs Office of AALL. Survey authors Richard Matthews and Mary Alice Baish concluded that while many states considered the primary legal material that they put online to be official, no state had taken steps to authenticate those materials.

In a world where online research is becoming the norm, are courts (and other government websites) really keeping up with the needs of the people they serve by not offering official and authenticated versions of their opinions online?

-Kate Wilko

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has withdrawn a secret demand, issued as a national security letter (NSL), that the Internet Archive (IA) provide the agency with a user's personal information after Brewster Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the records request in court.

• FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional NSL Served on Internet Archive, ACLU. (Includes links to documents)

Since the Patriot Act was authorized in 2001, relaxing restrictions on the FBI's use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase. Reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General reveal that the FBI has issued nearly 200,000 NSL between 2003 and 2006. Multiple investigations have found serious FBI abuses of regulations and numerous potential violations of the law.

• Internet Archive Challenges F.B.I.’s Secret Records Demand, by Grant Gross, IDG News Service, New York Times, May 7, 2008 (or Internet Archive challenges FBI's secret records demand, by Grant Gross, in InfoWorld).

In each of the three court challenges to the NSL program, the FBI has withdrawn the information demands, ACLU's Goodman said. "I think that calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place and, frankly, whether the FBI needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power," she said.

Secret Laws are laws that citizens and even Congress do not know about or are forbidden from seeing.

A recent Senate hearing examines how these "laws" become law and why they are 'repugnant' and 'an abomination.'

The official page for the hearing with links to written testimony and a video of hearing: Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government, Hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, April 30, 2008.

A brief overview of the hearing by Steven Aftergood with links his and others' to testimony: Secret Law Debated in Senate Hearing, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, April 30, 2008.

A concise op-ed by Senator Russ Feingold about secret laws: Government in secret, By Russ Feingold, Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2008.

[I found this interesting news on the wonderful blog: BeSpacific -Erika]

Press Release
(from archives.gov)

May 7, 2008

Washington, DC. . . On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website: http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/publications.

In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, “We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words.”

The National Archives received suggestions from the editors of the papers of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, university publishers, and others in crafting a blueprint for providing access to the already completed print editions and the raw materials for the editions to come. If carried out, the plan ensures that interested readers worldwide can see the work in progress with the already complete editions accompanied by transcriptions of the papers yet to be published. To hasten the transition process, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission plans to invest $250,000 as a demonstration pilot project.

The plan outlines three basic steps that remain:

* Digitizing the existing 217 volumes and publishing the Papers on a single website to allow for research and inquiry across America’s Founding Era collections;

* Transcribing and otherwise preparing for publishing on the web the remaining papers (approximately 90,000 documents) and replacing these raw materials with authoritative annotated versions as these are completed; and

* Creating an independent oversight process to ensure that rigorous performance goals are established and met by the parties carrying out all aspects of the work.

Our report on our experiment in using del.icio.us to tag EPA documents originally harvested by GPO is now completed and available for your review and comment at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

For more information about this project, including a list of tags assigned to documents by project participants, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging.

Our thanks to the project participants!

Cross-posted from LegalResearchPlus.com
(written by our newest teammate, Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian.)

U.S. international agreements on Dept. of State’s Case Act Databases

An often overlooked free source for recent U.S. treaties and other international agreements is the Department of State’s Reporting International Agreements to Congress under Case Act database.

Selected bilateral and multilateral agreements in full-text are available from 1982 through 2008. Unfortunately, the site does not include a keyword search function. The database consists of agreements submitted to Congress by the Dept. of State as required by the Case-Zablocki Act, P.L. 92-403, 86 Stat. 619, 1 U.S.C. 112b. (1972). The agreements appear on this site before they are published in the official compilations of Treaties and Other International Acts Series (T.I.A.S.) and United States Treaties and Other International Agreements (U.S.T.).

Agreements from 2006 through 2008 are available here.

Agreements from 1982 through 2006 are located at the Department of State’s FOIA site.

Former staff writer for the Washington Post and Time Magazine Ted Gup has written a book on secrecy worth our attention:

• Nation of secrets : the threat to democracy and the American way of life, by Ted Gup, New York : Doubleday, c 2007.

In it he describes the problems of "secretocracy," which, in our "post-9/11" society, has made information that citizens need off-limits to citizens. So, despite the fact that is "more likely for a bridge to collapse than for it to [be] struck by terrorists" Homeland Security instructed state governments to take bridge maintenance reports off their Websites. (Our Great 'Secretocracy' by Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet, May 6, 2008).

And court records are not just unavailable but "the software system used in all federal courts is designed to spit out 'No Such Case Exists' when anyone queries cases that have been sealed" because they were settled through "alternative dispute resolutions." (Calling for a secrecy beat, Commentary, By Ted Gup, Nieman Watchdog, April 29, 2008).

See also: Secrets and the Press By Walter Pincus, Nieman Reports, Spring 2008.

During the period between March 2003 and October 2005, at least 5 million e-mails may have been sent but not preserved.

• White House Backups are Incomplete, May Not Contain Some Missing E-mails, National Security Archive, May 6, 2008.

The White House yesterday admitted to a federal magistrate judge that it has no computer back-up tapes with data written before May 23, 2003, and that it cannot track the history of individual hard drives within the White House system that may contain missing e-mails.

The sheer volume of election coverage can be daunting to follow for even the most hard-core election junkie, let alone the casual observer. A few sites do everyone the favor of breaking campaign reports and statements down to the facts, attempting to separate the truth from the truthiness.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. It is essentially a multimedia blog that responds to the factual assertions and allusions made in politics at the federal, state, and local levels. FactCheck.org's staff elegantly analyzes candidates' statements on such issues as a potential gas price fix for factual consistency. They dutifully list their reference sources and, for contextual emphasis, they frequently provide audio and video links to the candidates' actual comments.

PolitiFact, mentioned previously on FreeGovInfo, is a service of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly Inc. PolitiFact's trademark is its Truth-O-Meter, which measures political statements on a scale of "True" to "Pants on fire." It's handy for those who want bottom-line analysis straight away. Like FactCheck.org, PolitiFact does have full articles with which it provides sources and multimedia links, although the analysis is not quite as deep. But PolitiFact does a better job of organizing and integrating its content: you can browse statements by Truth-O-Meter rating, by subject, by the person who said it, by whom it was said against, and even by where it was said (TV ad, blog post, speech, etc.).

Other interesting fact-checking sites include:

The Center for Public Integrity - A "nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization" that uses investigative journalism to examine political and campaign issues in depth. Of particular note is the Buying of the President site which looks at how money influences the presidential campaigns.

Opensecrets.org - Tracks money in politics and distills it into graphs, charts, and brief summaries. It is run by the non-partisan, non-profit Center for Responsive Politics.

The Fact Checker - A Washington Post blog that analyzes campaign statements in a similar way to FactCheck.org and PolitiFact. The difference here is that topics are prompted by user suggestions. It employs a "Pinocchio Test" similar to PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter.

-Brian