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GovernmentDocs.org provides enhanced access to FOIA documents
Back in November, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, along with Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation launched a new website, GovernmentDocs.org, which will house governmetn documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. From the press release:
The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind.
Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:
- Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.
- A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.
- Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
- Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.
- The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations' documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.
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FOIA Threat in Farm Bill, Act Now
None of us can keep track of everything by ourselves. It takes a community to maintain vigilence about creeping secrecy. So a HUGE tip of the FGI hat to Ian Campbell of The Gov Doc for bringing this item about an effort to gnaw at the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) via the federal farm bill, of all things:
If you toil in the fields of government information, you may be interested to know that an urgent campaign is underway to strike language from the Senate version of the Farm Bill which would create a substantial new FOIA exemption and severely restrict public access to important information about farm animal health under a National Animal Identification System (NAIS).
OpenTheGovernment.org has written a letter to Senators expressing opposition to the non-disclosure language in the Senate version of the bill, and the American Library Association, Special Libraries Association, and American Association of Law Libraries are among the 28 organizations to sign on. Please see the letter at:
http://www.openthegovernment.org/otg/farm_bill_letter.pdf
As the letter states, Section 10305 of the Livestock Title of the Farm Bill approved October 25 by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee gives the Secretary of Agriculture broad authority to restrict and control disclosure of NAIS information, and imposes "disproportionately harsh penalties for press activities protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution." The letter seeks to strike Section 10305 from the bill.
Thanks for the heads up Ian!
Continue readingInternational Right to know week!
This is International Right to Know Week, “dedicated to the promotion of freedom of information worldwide. The goal is to raise citizens’ awareness level about their right of access to information under the control of government institutions.†Around the world, September 28th is celebrated as International Right to Know Day. This began in Sofia, Bulgaria at an international meeting of access to information advocates who proposed that September 28th be dedicated to the promotion of freedom of information worldwide. FOIA Advocates has a nice map displaying as well as what's happening in each country to celebrate this week. How about submitting a FOIA request in honor of the week? Continue reading
Database of News Stories Based on FOIA
The Sunshine in Government Initiative has a new database of news articles and stories that are based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests:
Read more about the database and how to search it here:
- The FOIA Files: Stories that FOIA Made Possible
Countless media outlets, government watchdog groups and individual Americans have used the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain important information on how -- and how well -- their government operates, knowledge that is crucial to a well-functioning democracy.- Systemic failures keep two million veterans & widows from benefits owed them.
- Military tells next of kin one story about combat deaths, documents tell another.
- $1.2 billion & 6 years not enough to start up anti-terror data mining.
The Sunshine in Government Initiative is a coalition of media groups committed to promoting policies that ensure the government is accessible, accountable and open.
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