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Pending Transparency Legislation
Here’s a list of pending legislation relevant to government openness and transparency maintained by The Open House Project..
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Book scanning projects
Two recent items that look more closely at book scanning projects:
- The Race to the Shelf Continues The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com by Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University & Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries. Searcher, Vol. 16 No. 1 — January 2008.
"So, why would a librarian choose to go with the OCA over the other partners currently available? Two words: open access. If the goal is to support open access principles and to get scanned copies of out of copyright books indexed in as many search engines as possible, then OCA is the right choice. With minimum requirements such as attribution and maximum requirements of no re-hosting, OCA leaves the greatest number of opportunities for users to discover and re-use the text that they find, making it ideal for those interested in data mining."
- Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale, by Luc Vincent, Google, Inc.
Lorcan Dempsey notes of the Google paper, "The paper outlines presentation options based on copyright status and also discusses how Google supports the document understanding community through the release of software and data sets. I was interested that there was no discussion of social features."
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When government information is not government information
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new service that allows you to "instantly compare what 500 of of the largest American companies are paying their top executives."
- Chairman Cox Unveils New Internet Tool With Instant Comparisons of Executive Pay (press release) Washington, D.C., Dec. 21, 2007
The announcement says that The Executive Compensation Reader is "available today on the SEC's Web site at http://www.sec.gov/xbrl."
When you go to that web site, you'll find "Interactive Financial Reports", "Executive Compensation", and (coming soon) "Financial Explorer" and "Investment Management Risk Return Summary".
But...A big, boldface disclaimer is on the bottom of the page:
These applications are on servers not controlled by the SEC. The SEC does not endorse these sites, their sponsors, or any policy, activity, product, data, or service they offer. These sites may be removed from the Internet with little or no warning. The purpose of the data reported is to test XBRL technology. The data is largely unaudited and unreviewed. It is not an official SEC filing. Use these applications at your own risk. Do not rely on the reported data, or documents rendered from the data, to make investment decisions.
The Interactive Financial Reports is a link to "http://216.241.101.197/viewer" which is run by viawest.net which describes itself as a "provider of colocation, managed hosting and business continuity solutions ViaWest has become a production partner to thousands of companies. We can design, implement and support your critical data and infrastructure – allowing you to focus on your core business."
The Executive Compensation link points to "http://216.12.130.224/" which is run by servervault.com which is also a hosting company. It's home page says it provides "secure, robust IT infrastructure management and hosting services, specifically engineered to help federal agencies and commercial entities achieve the most stringent security posture as well as comply with a wide range of IT security regulations, including FISMA, DITSCAP, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA."
Both sites sport an SEC logo and a numeric url that obscures the fact that you are looking at a .net or .com site, not a .gov site.
Is this a temporary situation and will these sites become .gov? is the SEC simply outsourcing the hosting? Or will these sites become commercial after a trial period with the companies or the SEC charging for services?
At minimum, this kind of outsourcing obscures the authenticity of and provenance of the information and makes the job of GPO, libraries, web-archivists, and citizens more difficult.
Continue readingUnclassified defense information withheld from public database
Recently the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the launching USASpending.gov, which is a relaunch of www.FederalSpending.gov, to provide citizens with easy access to government contract, grant, and other award data (See New OMB Federal Spending Database). But now, Secrecy News says that several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from USASpending.gov.
- Intel Agencies to Withhold Contract Info from Public Database by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, December 18, 2007.
Several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from a new public database of government spending.
The new database at USAspending.gov is intended to provide increased transparency regarding most government contracts.
But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld.
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Secret Army Field Manual on Map Reading
Secrecy News has made available a PDF of a A U.S. Army Field Manual that explains the rudiments of map reading. Distribution of the manual is restricted, and it has not been approved for public release. Maps and Legends Secrecy News, December 28, 2007.
- MAP READING AND LAND NAVIGATION. FM 3-25.26 January 2005 HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY Washington, DC, 30 August 2006
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