Bush War on Terror Memos
ProPublica has a very nice page listing Bush Administration memos that dealt with the "War on Terror." The list is annotated and has links to those that are public and lists those that are still secret.
- The Missing Memos, by Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica, January 28, 2009.
The Bush administration’s "war on terror"—including its controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping—was all underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration chose to keep many others secret, citing security and confidentiality concerns. The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting a list of the relevant memos, both public and secret.Continue reading
Bush White House Web Site Archive
The George W. Bush Presidential Library web site has what they describe as a '"snapshot" of the Whitehouse.gov web site [of the George W. Bush administration]. This is historical material, "frozen in time." The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.'
The Bush Record page has the publications A Charge Kept: The Record of the Bush Presidency 2001–2009 and Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush and 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record. Continue readingOpen formats
Over at the Open House Project mailing list there has been a long discussion recently of how to make sure we have long-term, open, free, public access to Congressional and Presidential videos. (See also: Congress on YouTube and Should Obama ditch YouTube?) Today, Clay Shirky posted a clear and concise and persuasive summary of why we need open formats. (Re: Open video, Clay Shirky, Jan. 28, 2009.)
I was the head of the technical work on the Library of Congress's digitial preservation network (NDIIPP) in the early part of the decade, and when we undertook a survey of threats to long-term preservation of digital material, we assumed, dumb bunnies that we were, that we were dealing with issues of storage, redundancy and migration costs. It turned out, though, that the biggest threat to long-term preservation isn't hardware or cost, it's format; proprietary formats don't just happen to hamper unexpected future uses, that's what they are _designed_ to do. If you had an ASCII file and a WordStar file, both from 1987, and had to open and read each one as quickly as you could, what would the difference in elapsed seconds be? There has been some back and forth on this list about possible threats to putting USG-created materials into the hands of commercial entities. I'm on record as worrying about that precisely because path dependence on commercial motivation can easily come a cropper, and I recently had an experience that seemed to highlight that risk. Last Friday, I heard a talk at the Smithsonian from the awesome George Oates, who was instrumental in getting the Flickr Image Commons going. It was an inspiring talk, and when I went to introduce myself afterwards and we were talking about what might be next, she told me Yahoo had cut her job in the December round of layoffs. Of course. Why shouldn't Yahoo have done that -- the Commons may have been good PR for them in 2008, but its hard to argue that the cost is going to be recouped in revenues somehow. When we are talking about public goods, we are talking about goods that don't flourish in the commercial market *by definition.* We need to make that part of all the systemic thinking we do about open data; Ogg for video would be a great addition to the arsenal.There have been some excellent discussions going on over at the Open House Project Google Group lately. If you don't usually monitor that list, you might want to browse through the last couple of weeks posts. Continue reading
CRS reports to be released
Wikileaks plans to release nearly 10,000 Congressional Research Service reports. See: Wikileaks and CRS, Clay Shirky, Jan 28, 2009. Continue reading
Nationalizing the American Banking System?
Here is an interesting news analysis from The New York Times on whether nationalization or partial-nationalization of the American banking system is a good idea. The pros and cons are discussed in detail. The transcript of George Stephanopoulos' interview with Nancy Pelosi is available from ABC News. She discusses the GOP stimulus proposals and also talks about recovery plans for banks. Continue reading