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White House homepage “upgraded”
Upgrading the White House Homepage, by Macon Phillips, Whitehouse.gov This morning I'm pleased to announce something you may have already noticed: an improved homepage for WhiteHouse.gov. We're always working to make WhiteHouse.gov easier to use and provide clearer paths to key information. Continue reading
Spammers Using Shortened .gov URLs
Spammers Using Shortened .gov URLs, by Ravi Mandalia, Parity News (20 October 2012).
Cyber-scammers have started using the 1.usa.gov links in their spam campaigns in a bid to fool gullible users into thinking that the links they see on a website or have received in their mail or newsletter are legitimate US Government website. Spammers have achieved these shortened URLs through a loophole in the URL shortening service provided by bit.ly. USA.gov and Bit.ly have collaborated thus enabling anyone to shorten a .gov or .mil URL into a trustworthy 1.USA.gov URL.Continue reading
New Presidential Documents App
The Government Printing Office (GPO) and the National Archives' Office of the Federal Register (OFR) have released a mobile Web application (app) on the daily public activities of President of the United States. Here is the announcement:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 10, 2012 No. 12-40 GPO AND NATIONAL ARCHIVES RELEASE PRESIDENTIAL DOCUMENTS APP WASHINGTON-The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the National Archives' Office of the Federal Register (OFR) have released a mobile Web application (app) on the daily public activities of President of the United States. The app is part of both agencies efforts to support The White House digital strategy for the Federal Government by ensuring the American people have access to Government information on any device. The Presidential Documents app includes the President's: * Executive orders * Speeches * Statements * Communications to Congress and Federal agencies * Approved acts * Nominations submitted to the Senate * White House announcements * White House press releases The app has user-friendly search capabilities allowing users to access content about the President by searching by date, category, subject, or location, which includes a map feature. This is the first time GPO has enabled an app with a geolocation feature providing users with access to the most recent content near their location. The public can take advantage of the free mobile Web app on most major mobile device platforms. GPO and OFR also make available the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents on GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys). Link to app: http://m.gpo.gov/dcpd "GPO continues to build upon its reputation as the digital information platform for the Federal Government with the development and release of the Presidential Documents app," said Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks. "GPO and OFR have enjoyed a successful partnership for more than 75 years to make Federal Government information available in print, online and now on mobile devices." "OFR continues to push the envelope on public access to critical government information. Innovation is a key component to the NARA strategy and providing access via mobile apps is a great example of how OFR is embracing technology. I am very excited and proud of NARA's relationship with GPO on this communication achievement," said Archivist David Ferriero. The Presidential Documents app is the third app released by GPO; other apps include the FY 2013 Budget app and the Mobile Member Guide, which provides users with official biographical information about Members of the 112th Congress. GPO has also supported the Library of Congress in creating an iPad app for the Congressional Record. The Presidential Documents app represents the first app for the OFR and the third app for the National Archives....Continue reading
THOMAS bulk download!
Eric Mill announced today on the openhouseproject mailing list that he and Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us) and Derek Willis have completed a milestone in their project to produce a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov. Here is the text of his message with links:
Hi all, I've been working for the last month or two with Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us http://govtrack.us/) and Derek Willis on a project to produce a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov http://thomas.gov/, the official source for legislative information for the US Congress. It's a reasonably well documented set of Python scripts, which you can find here: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress We just hit a great milestone - it gets everything important that THOMAS has on bills, back to the year THOMAS starts (1973). We've published and documented https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki all of this data in bulk, and I've worked it into Sunlight's pipeline, so that searches for bills in Scout https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/search/federal_bills/freedom%20of%20information use data collected directly from this effort. The data and code are all hosted on Github on a "unitedstates https://github.com/unitedstates/" organization, which is right now co-owned by me, Josh, and Derek - the intent is to have this all exist in a common space. To the extent that the code needs a license at all, I'm using a public domain "unlicense https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/blob/master/LICENSE" that should at least be sufficient for the US (other suggestions welcome). There's other great stuff in this organization, too - Josh made an amazing donation of his legislator dataset https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators, and converted it to YAML for easy reuse. I've worked that dataset into Sunlight's products already as well. I've also moved my legal citation extractor https://github.com/unitedstates/citation into this organization -- and my colleague Thom Neale has an in-progress parser for the US Code https://github.com/unitedstates/uscode, to convert it from binary typesetting codes into JSON. Github's organization structure actually makes possible a very neat commons. I'm hoping this model proves useful, both for us and for the public. -- Eric -- Developer | sunlightfoundation.comContinue reading
New Declassification Portal at the National Archives
Steven Aftergood reviews a new National Archives portal for declassified information:
- New Declassification Portal at the National Archives, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (October 4th, 2012). The National Archives has set up a new online portal that provides an overview of declassification activity in and around the Arvhices, with input from the National Declassification Center, the Public Interest Declassification Board, the Presidential Libraries, and the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP). The new section on ISCAP declassification decisions is of particular interest, since it provides links to the documents that have been newly declassified at the direction of the ISCAP, which receives appeals from the public for release of documents that agencies have declined to declassify.
- NARA and Declassification, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
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