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Sunshine Week March 16-22
Sunshine Week has been mentioned in previous posts but it certainly deserves its own blog post too. This national initiative is set to take place March 16th through the 22nd. Its purpose is to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Anyone can take part, as long as you do something to engage discussion about open government. For example, you could write a letter to your local newspaper, host a panel discussion at your library, hold a debate on the FOIA in your political science class, etc. Visit the Sunshine Week website for more information on events and resources and ideas to help spread the word. Updates will be posted on the Sunshine Week blog. So...what will you be planning to do that week or maybe for next years Sunshine Week? Care to share your ideas? (Because I'm looking for some!) I think this year I will create a daily post on my depository's blog about open government and freedom of information resources, but next year I'd like to do something more interactive and on a larger scale with the community. Continue reading
Limits of Full Text Searching: Finding FOIA Docs
The federal government posts a fair amount of material requested by citizens under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online. They do this in part so they don't have to respond to multiple requests for the same material. An of example of this that I love to use to document the feds' disturbing tendency to surveil harmless people when looking for national security risks is the FBI electronic FOIA reading room. But if you don't know whether an agency has an electronic FOIA reading room, it can be confusing searching for FOIA related materials. One way that I started looking for this type of material was to toss the term "foia" into a usa.gov search along with my search term. In this way I was easily able to locate the CIA's 5,000 pages on the US involvement in overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala in 1954. But try this technique with other countries, like say Cameroon and while you get a lot of results, nothing seems quite on point. Why is this? Mostly because many federal pages quite rightly have a link to their FOIA information page. This page usually has information on how to contact the agency to make a FOIA request and sometimes has a link to an electronic FOIA reading room. In some cases, like that for the State department, the reading room is a little bare, consisting mostly of annual reports. If we had a government web with good metadata or could otherwise catalog FOIA related materials, then finding FOIA related documents would be a lot easier. But as it is, people are left with many results to sift through for a few nuggets of information. And if you're reading this and are thinking "Why doesn't he know about ______, which provides gov't wide access to documents released under FOIA?", then by all means let me know about in comments. Continue reading
What the candidates are saying about FOI
The Sunshine Week website created a page entitled: "What the Candidates Are Saying About Open Government and FOI" based on the the Sunshine Week survey responses and analysis of articles, speeches, and debate transcripts that give insight into the candidates' thoughts on government access to information. They state: "Only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards responded, and only Richardson answered all the questions. The remaining four leading major party candidates were re-surveyed following Super Tuesday in February. To date, none has replied". They mention Obama's Senate co-sponsorship of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which went into effect on New Years Day '08 with the launch of USAspending.gov, a site that "gives people access to information on government contracts, grants and other awards". Speaking of which, USAspending.gov is based on the software that runs Fedspending.org. I'm going to examine both these sites and see how the differ, but so far, the only difference I'm seeing is that USAspending.gov has a lengthy privacy policy which dotgovwatch.com claims is different from their previous warning! Continue reading
WV Tax Assessor sues to remove state tax maps from website
According to a story in Ars Technica, a tax assessor in Kanawha County, West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to stop a company called Seneca Technologies from publishing tax maps of the whole state of West Virginia online. The tax assessor is citing a state law that prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission and enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for $8 each. She asserts that the online maps constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.
Seneca Technologies has already battled with the state tax department about the project. Seneca got the maps through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The state tax department tried to force Seneca to pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488) and Seneca sued to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs. Seneca then made the maps freely available online so that they could be accessed by the general public on their website (called FOIAmaps). Seneca plans to use indexing technology to create a search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases.
New FOIA Law Already in Trouble
New FOIA Law Already in Trouble. OMBWatch, 02/05/2008.
Buried deep within an appendix of President Bush's $3.1 trillion budget proposal is an effort by the administration to rewrite the newly minted OPEN Government Act of 2007, which seeks to improve agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Despite clear language in the OPEN Government Act requiring that a new Office of Government Information be established at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Bush administration has proposed shifting the new office to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
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