Home » Posts tagged 'less_access' (Page 30)
Tag Archives: less_access
Constitution Superseded and Web Sites Scrubbed of Public Documents to Hide It
An article about the Navy's brig in Hanahan, South Carolina reveals details about "one of the most secretive installations in the government's anti-terrorism effort." Among other revelations is that the brig believes that "higher guidance" and "accepted prison practice" can supersede the Constitution:
"In detaining American citizens, full constitutional rights are afforded except where curtailed by higher guidance or accepted prison practice," the report said. [emphasis added]
- Navy' s secret brig by Tony Bartelme, Charleston Post and Courier (February 23, 2007)
The Navy developed elaborate plans to dodge public scrutiny of its operations to detain enemy combatants, plans that include destroying "critical info," and scrubbing public Web sites.
Continue readingNARA for adults only at .com partner
National Archives Announces New "Service" According to this posting, the contract between the National Archives and a private contractor for digitization of materials at NARA has terms of service that limits access to adults-only. "You have to be 18 to get an account and under no circumstances may anybody under 13 be allowed to look at archival documents." Also, access to the images at http://www.footnote.com/nara.php requires a paid membership or you can purchase documents at $1.99 per page.
The National Archives receives a copy of all the digital media for their archives, but the contract prohibits the Internet Archive (or anybody else for that matter) from having a copy of that data. It is amazing to me how often the government goes down the road of trying to privatize public information.Also see: Press Release January 10, 2007 National Archives and Footnote Launch Project to Digitize Historic Documents. Continue reading
Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public
This is truly mind-boggling. According to the National Security Archive, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the agency charged with assuring public access to government records, "secretly agreed to a covert effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf archival records and reclassify them while disguising the results so that researchers would not complain." FGI originally reported on this story here and here. Scott Shanes at the New York Times, who's been following this story, wrote a piece yesterday entitled "Why the Secrecy? Only the Bureaucrats Know" (registration may be required). There's also more background, as well as copies of the CIA and USAF mou's, at Secrecy News.
"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Secrecy is a source of power, nothing is so fanatically defended." --Max Weber "Economy and Society." 1914Continue reading
Secret reclassification of US documents
As part of a secret operation in place for over seven years, over 55,000 documents have been removed from the National Archives by various intelligence agencies. Historians are baffled as to why some of these documents would be reclassified. Others, for sure, are meant to expunge embarrassing moments. Here's a sampling of removed documents from an article in the New York Times, "U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review" :
* a memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996. * a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program. * the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.All of this raises the question, What's a clandestinely inclined government to do when rogue reclassified documents reside in privately held collections? Let's see - eighteen such documents, from the collection of intelligence historian Matthew Aid, are now up on the website of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. 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 […]
Continue Reading →