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Vice President Refuses to Disclose Classification Data
Vice President Refuses to Disclose Classification Data, OMB Watch, 06/13/2006
For the third consecutive year, the Office of the Vice President has refused to disclose information on its security classification practices, according to a report released last month. The refusal contradicts a presidential order to disclose data on classification and declassification, issued by President Clinton and amended by President Bush in 2003.... The Office of the Vice President asserts that the order does not apply to it, even though the office regularly complied with the order before 2003. The implementing directive for ISOO states, "Each agency that creates or handles classified information shall report annually to the Director of ISOO statistics related to its security classification program." An agency is defined as any "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information."Continue reading
Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining
Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining, By Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post, June 15, 2006; D03.
As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies.... Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data.Continue reading
Google to Launch Government Search Site
Google to Launch Government Search Site, By Kim Hart Washington Post, June 15, 2006; D01. http://usgov.google.com
The government search site joins similar engines that target the same audience. The five-year-old FirstGov.gov, a government-sponsored site powered by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, is geared to help citizens locate federal, state and local information without sifting through individual agency sites.... Other similar search engines include http://govspot.com , http://searchgov.com and http://govengine.com... More than 87 million unique visitors used Google's search engine in May, compared with 443,000 that searched FirstGov, according to Nielsen-NetRatings.Continue reading
Captured documents made available
ODNI News Release No. 7-06, March 16, 2006, Office of Director of National Intelligence.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announces the initial public release of documents and media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The materials have been posted to the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office websiteAudio, video and text files are available and searchable by keyword. The press release points to Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center at http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm which redirects to http://70.168.46.200/. New documents are being added every week.
The documents contained on this site were captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom and represent a dramatic departure from previous document release efforts which have historically taken place decades after the cessation of hostilities. ...The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available.There is a story about this here: Army puts files seized in Iraq on Web, by Alan Bjerga, (Jun. 12, 2006) SiliconValley.com.
The U.S. Army is the process of posting online 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language documents captured by U.S. troops during the war with Iraq.Continue reading
Warning of privatization of information from Humanities Scholars
The issue of privatization of information when it is digitized "struck the strongest chord" at a convocation on the Humanities held by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of American Universities.
- Speakers at Convocation on Humanities Warn About Privatization of Materials, by Richard Byrne, Chronicle of Higher Education Monday, May 15, 2006 (subscription required, but available for a short time without subscription here)
Ideas that struck the strongest chord at the convocation included a call from some speakers to resist the increasing privatization of the raw material of scholarship by corporations as such material is digitized. Changes in copyright law to extend the length of time that material remains in copyright and efforts by companies such as Google to digitize books into privately controlled databases have increasingly placed the source material that scholars in the humanities use in private control for longer periods of time.This is also an issue for government publications. We have seen that Google has treated post 1926 public domain government publications in the same way it treats copyrighted works -- making only snippets available. Continue reading
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