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Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don’t work, analysis finds
A new study found many government web sites unreachable. It also discovered that more than one-tenth of the sites are unreachable without the "www" prefix.
- Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don't work, analysis finds, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (09/09/2011). An unofficial analysis of the roughly 1,800 top-level federal Web domains shows nearly a quarter of them are now unreachable. That may mean those sites have been shut down or that their content has been consolidated into larger sites in accordance with a White House plan to drastically cut the federal Web presence over the coming year, said Benjamin Balter, a new technology fellow at the Federal Communications Commission and graduate student at The George Washington University who designed the analysis tool as a personal project. ...For simple, run-of-the-mill websites, requiring the "www" prefix typically means the sites are extremely old or unsophisticated. In the case of higher traffic sites such as NASA.gov and FAA.gov it may mean the sites are a complex mesh of public and private information, which makes modernizing the addresses more complicated, Balter said.
Privacy then and now: Some history of the “Patriot” Act
Declan McCullagh describes how the pre-2001 "Enhancement of Privacy and Public Safety in Cyberspace Act," which was unacceptable to Congress, morphed into the "Combating Terrorism Act of 2001" and then into the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," which was rushed through Congress and passed without giving members time time to read the changes that had been incorporated in it.
- How 9/11 attacks reshaped U.S. privacy debate, by Declan McCullagh, cnet, (September 9, 2011). After the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, however, the sentiment in political circles quickly shifted from protecting electronic privacy to facilitating government surveillance. The privacy bill approved by the committee by such a lopsided margin disappeared. ..."Perhaps the biggest systemic change in the way the government conducts investigations since 9/11 is the transition from targeted surveillance--where the government picks a target and spies on that person--to untargeted wholesale surveillance, where masses of people are surveilled," says Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "And then the government decides who it wants to focus on."
- Poll: OK to trade some freedoms to fight terrorism, By Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press (Sept 6, 2011). Ten years after the 9/11 attacks led to amped-up government surveillance efforts, two-thirds of Americans say it's fitting to sacrifice some privacy and freedoms in the fight against terrorism, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. ...A slim majority -- 54 percent -- say that if they had to choose between preserving their rights and freedoms and protecting people from terrorists, they'd come down on the side of civil liberties. The public is particularly protective of the privacy of U.S. citizens, voicing sharp opposition to government surveillance of Americans' emails and phone calls.
Database Tracks States’ Health Reform Legislation
Federal Health Reform: State Legislative Tracking Database, National Conference of State Legislatures. Health Reform - 2011 State Legislative Tracking Database Overview.
Search 2011 legislation by state, topic, keyword, status, and/or primary sponsor. Database updates occur every other Tuesday, this also includes status updates. The database includes 2011 legislation, including pending, failed and enacted bills and resolutions. The database is intended to capture state actions related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care Education and Reconciliation Act, together referred to as the Affordable Care Act or federal health reform.Continue reading
Archiving the Web
A new article in Times Higher Education (THE), calls attention to the need for archiving the web and the difficulties of doing it.
- Memory failure detected, Times Higher Education, (Sept. 1, 2011). "We are taking it for granted that such material will be there, but we need to be attentive. We have a responsibility to future generations of researchers." ...While libraries are currently digitising 19th-century documents and making them available via the web, it is "deeply ironic" that websites from two years ago are being made less accessible, Meyer notes.
- Meyer, Eric T., Thomas, Arthur and Schroeder, Ralph, Web Archives: The Future(s) (June 30, 2011). In this report, the authors consider the possible future uses of web archives. This report is structured first, to engage in some speculative thought about the possible futures of the web as an exercise in prompting us to think about what we need to do now in order to make sure that we can reliably and fruitfully use archives of the web in the future. Next, we turn to considering the methods and tools being used to research the live web, as a pointer to the types of things that can be developed to help understand the archived web. Then, we turn to a series of topics and questions that researchers want or may want to address using the archived web. In this final section, we tentatively identify some of the short, medium and long term challenges individuals, organizations, and international bodies can target to increase our ability to explore these topics and answer these questions.
New book on Top Secret America
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have a new book, Top Secret America based on their series of stories that appeared in the Washington Post in July 2010. The book describes "the new American security state." Steven Aftergood has a brief overview of the book:
- A Spotlight on "Top Secret America", Secrecy News (September 1, 2011). Since 9/11 ... some 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the Washington DC area, the equivalent in size of nearly three Pentagons. More than 250,000 contractors are working on top secret programs. A bewildering number of agencies -- more than a thousand -- have been created to execute security policy, including at least 24 new organizations last year alone.... But the vast scale of this activity says nothing about its quality or utility. The authors, who are scrupulous in their presentation of the facts, are critical in their evaluation: "One of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction."
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