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Congress’ hands caught in the cookie jar
Congress' hands caught in the cookie jar, By Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache, CNET News.com, January 6, 2006. While no rule prohibits the use of Web monitoring techniques by Congress many members of Congress have promised not to monitor web use. Now, CNET reports that, "Dozens of U.S. senators are quietly tracking visits to their Web sites even though they have publicly pledged not to do so." Continue reading
Federal agencies are tracking visits to U.S. government Web sites
CNET news has done some innovative investigation of government web sites and reports their findings in a new story. "To detect which agencies engage in electronic tracking, CNET News.com wrote a computer program that connected to every agency listed in the official U.S. Government Manual, and then evaluated what monitoring techniques were used." Their findings:
Dozens of federal agencies are tracking visits to U.S. government Web sites in violation of long-standing rules designed to protect online privacy, a CNET News.com investigation shows.... The expiration dates of the cookies detected ranged from 2006 to 2038, with most of them marked as valid for at least a decade or two.
Update on Mass. Open Document Format Issue
An update on the issue of the plans by the state of Massachusetts to adopt OpenDocument-based productivity suites says that they will continue with the plan despite the resignation of their chief information officer.
Open Access to Government Information: 2005
One entry in Peter Suber's wrapup of Open Access in 2005 in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (issue #93 January 2, 2006) is on government information:
In 2005 we saw more profit-seeking (or "surplus"-seeking) businesses demand that the government stop providing public access to publicly-funded information. This is a demand to profit at the expense of taxpayers or a demand that taxpayers pay twice in order to guarantee a revenue stream for a private-sector organization. In support of their demand, the organizations argue that free information from the government is unfair competition, as if what they really wanted was a free market. The leading example was the American Chemical Society's attempt to shut down or scale back PubChem, the OA database launched by the NIH. Congress denied the ACS request to defund PubChem and now the ACS and NIH are working out the terms of their coexistence, with the NIH holding all the cards. Continue reading
Access to Government Information, pre and post 9/11
December 31, 2005 / Leave a comment
Access to Government Information, pre and post 9/11. By James A. Jacobs An examination and discussion of the impact the events of Sept. 11 have had on Government Publications and libraries. A presentation at the event Intellectual freedom in libraries post 9/11 April 9, 2002 Sponsored by Librarians Association of the University of California Riverside […]
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