Welcome Jinbonet Korean Progressive Network as February 2011 bloggers of the month
We have a group of special guests on the FGI podium this month. Please welcome the Korean information activists from the [w:Korean Progressive Network (Jinbonet)] (for more, see Jinbonet's biography and the Jinbonet about page in English). Jinbonet is over twelve-year-old organization based in Seoul, South Korea that provides ICT services (web hosting, mailing list, webmail) to that country's progressive movement, civil society and workers unions. Jinbonet actively works to protect human rights in the information society such as the freedom of opinion and expression in cyber space, the right to access information, and the right of privacy. Welcome Jinbonet! Shinjoung Yeo will be providing editing and translation help for this month's BOTM posts. Thanks Shinjoung! Continue reading
Jinbonet Korean Progressive Network, bloggers of the month for February, 2011
[w:Korean Progressive Network (Jinbonet)] is a nine-year-old organization in Seoul, South Korea. Jinbonet is a network that provides ICT services (web hosting, mailing list, webmail) to that country's progressive movement, civil society and workers unions. The activist/staff of Jinbonet include: Oh, Byoungil (antiropy@gmail.com twitter: @antiropy): Staff (coordinator) of Korean Progressive Network 'Jinbonet' since 1998. member of IPLeft since 1999. ??? YK Chang (della.yk@gmail.com): Founding member and Staff of Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet since 1998. She works for advocating freedom of expression on the internet and privacy. ??? Jung, Minkyung (jmk6@jinbo.net): Staff of Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet since 2009 Continue reading
Congressman Issa proposes collecting names of FOIA requesters over the last 4 years
[Update 1: some agencies, like the Department of Defense and State Department, already make their FOIA logs available. The Government Attic has a good list of agencies with logs as well. See this list of agency FOIA reading rooms and Stanford Library's FOIA collection. JRJ] I missed this when it was first published on Saturday (slow news day right?!). Last week Congressman Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to 180 federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Social Security Administration, asking for electronic files containing the names of people who requested the documents, the date of their requests and a description of information they sought. For those still pending after more than 45 days, he also asked for any communication between the requestor and the federal agency. Mr. Issa says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations. But, as the NYT notes, the "federal government receives about 600,000 FOIA requests ... a vast majority from corporate executives seeking information on competitors that might do business with the government." Republican Congressman Proposes Tracking Freedom of Information Act Requests. Eric Liption. NY Times.
Representative Darrell Issa calls it a way to promote transparency: a request for the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years. Mr. Issa, a California Republican and the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations. But his extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It “just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking,” said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. “It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good.” Mr. Issa sent a letter on Tuesday asking 180 federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Social Security Administration, for electronic files containing the names of people who requested the documents, the date of their requests and a description of information they sought. For those still pending after more than 45 days, he also asked for any communication between the requestor and the federal agency. The request covers the final three years of Bush administration and the first two years of President Obama’s. “Our interest is not in the private citizens who make the requests,” said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Mr. Issa. “We are looking at government responses to these Freedom of Information requests and the only way to measure that is to tally all that information.”[Thanks for the tip Crooks and Liars!] Continue reading
Financial Crisis Commission report released to the cloud
The final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was released on Thursday. Or as Frank Portnoy, in a NYT opinion piece today described it, three reports: "a 410-page volume signed by the commission’s six Democrats, a leaner 10-pronged dissent from three of the four Republicans, and a nearly 100-page dissent-from-the-dissent filed by Peter J. Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute." GPO has quickly created a purl for the report (http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo3449) which is linked to from the commission's Web site (and already available from Marcive and embedded in my library's catalog record). But what's more interesting is that the main link to the commission report -- http://c0182732.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/fcic_final_report_full.pdf -- is actually hosted on RackSpace, a cloud Web services company. It's interesting not only because the commission decided to publish their report with a private company -- and one not even listed at the GSA's apps.gov portal for .gov contracting of cloud services -- but that they couldn't even spoof the url so it *looked* like it was coming from a .gov server. This brings into question whether the commission's report is in the public domain as it is actually hosted on a non-.gov server. I've collected it with the Stanford library's EEMs tool (here's a project briefing from fall 2010 CNI meeting brief about Everyday Electronic Materials (EEMs)). But part of the EEMs process is a workflow for managing copyright issues. I'm assuming it IS in the public domain as the work of an official US govt organ, but how would Stanford University's general counsel (or IP lawyers in general) read this? This will no doubt be a growing and ongoing concern. Continue reading
Survey Finds Americans Satisfied With Federal Websites
"A group that measures the public's satisfaction with the federal government found that while public satisfaction with the services provided by federal agencies has 'plunged,' Americans remain satisfied with government websites."
- Survey Finds Americans Satisfied With Federal Websites, By Juliana Gruenwald, National Journal: Tech Daily Dose (January 25, 2011)