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The Pentagon Papers To Be Declassified
Steven Aftergood reports today that the Pentagon Paper are to be declassified:
- Declassifying the Pentagon Papers, Finally, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (February 15th, 2011).
The National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives will declassify the full text of the Pentagon Papers as well as the underlying documentation on which they are based, along with investigative material concerning the 1971 leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the NDC said yesterday.As we noted here recently, Steven recently pointed out that "every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material." One has to wonder if the Pentagon Papers had been released digitally and not on paper, if libraries had excluded then from their collections at the time of their release, if librarians had argued against their selection and acquisition and preservation, if they were not preserved in libraries 40 years ago, would we still have them? Would their declassification have happened today? Continue reading
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Launches Website
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced the launch of a 'beta' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website, ConsumerFinance.gov, a critical link to the American public for soliciting ideas on the bureau’s creation and priorities and for answering questions on its work.
The central mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans—whether they are applying for a mortgage, choosing among credit cards, or using any number of other consumer financial products.You can also follow CFPB on twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr. There is a video about the agency that describes "the origins of the financial crisis and what the consumer bureau will do to protect American families and improve financial services markets for consumers and providers alike—and ultimately strengthen the entire economy. The video is narrated by director, actor, and producer Ron Howard." Hat tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici! Continue reading
Judge rules that unsearchable PDFs are ‘not sufficient’
In an interesting court decision, a federal judge ruled last week that some federal agencies had wrongly turned over information in unsearchable PDF files. The judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, "is regarded as an expert on electronic discovery issues, having written three books on the subject." In addition, the judge ruled that the agency must produce requested requested metadata such as the date files were created and modified.
- Federal judge says unsearchable PDFs 'not sufficient disclosure', by Wendell Cochran, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication (Feb. 8, 2011)
“Breathtaking” USAF Claim that Accessing WikiLeaks Violates Espionage Act
"Americans who have accessed the WikiLeaks web site may have violated the Espionage Act, under an extreme interpretation of the law advanced by Air Force officials last week."
- Accessing WikiLeaks Violates Espionage Act, USAF Says, by Steven Aftergood Secrecy News (February 7th, 2011).
“If a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793.” This is a breathtaking claim that goes far beyond any previous reading of the espionage statutes. “That has to be one of the worst policy/legal interpretations I have seen in my entire career,” said William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, by email.Continue reading
How to set up your own server
Would you like to run your own server? Do you feel you need a computer science degree and a huge amount of money to do that? Think again! Dave Winer, who created RSS, has a new project called EC2 for Poets designed "to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2." Amazon's EC2 is its "Elastic Compute Cloud" which is "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers." You can read about Dave's project in this nice short piece on Wired magazine's "webmonkey" site:
- A DIY Data Manifesto, by Scott Gilbertson webmonkey (Feb. 3, 2011).
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