Appeals court ruling on the NSA collection of phone records
UPDATED (5/8/2015) Concurring opinion added. News of the recent ruling by a federal appeals court that the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records violates the Patriot Act is widely available. Below are the links to a couple of good accounts of the ruling and the ruling itself. N.S.A. Phone Data Collection […]
Not Your Grandmother’s Librarian
The Cover story of The Nation this weeks is about librarians battling for privacy. Librarians Versus the NSA, by Zoë Carpenter, The Nation (May 6, 2015, the May 25, 2015 edition). Amy Sonnie, a librarian and activist in Oakland, told me that there’s a debate within the profession about whether librarianship is, or should be, […]
Latest FOIA News
via LIS-GISIG/gov-info.tumblr.com CRS: CRS: Freedom of Information Act Legislation in the 114th Congress: Issue Summary and Side-by-Side Analysis CRS: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): Background, Legislation, and Policy Issues CBO Gov Doc: H.R. 653, FOIA Act “H.R. 653 would amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA generally allows any person to obtain records […]
USDA restricting access to 7,584 fruit paintings
Here’s another story of a digitization effort that’s not been made publicly available. USDA’s National Agricultural Library hosts the Pomological Watercolor Collection, which contains 7,584 historical — and beautiful! — agricultural watercolor paintings of different varieties of fruits and nuts, commissioned between 1886 and 1942. Through a grant from an environmental non-profit called The Ceres […]
NOAA image puzzler and the “fugitive of the day”
NOAA’s Earth Observatory does an image puzzler of the month where they post Landsat 8 images from their Operational Land Imager (OLI) satellite. April’s image turned out to be a twofer: a very cool image of South Korean seaweed cultivation AND in the citation was a fugitive document “Seaweed Cultivation of Korea” published by NOAA […]