NY Times publishes some FOIA documents
In an investigation on how the Bush administration uses retired military officers to promote its message on the Iraq war, the New York Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation. The story based on these documents (Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand By David Barstow, New York Times, April 20, 2008) is supplemented online by "Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated" (How the Pentagon Spread Its Message and a "Document Archive," which allows users to read and download documents and parts of documents. Of the 8000 pages, only a few are available online, but these include emails, a "Talking Points Memo," excerpts from a Transcript of meeting with Mr. Rumsfeld, and a Pentagon document that reports "Monitoring of Analysts." Together, the audio-visual presentation and the documents are a small model for how newspapers could be using the power of the web to enhance their coverage and utility. I would certainly like to see all 8000 pages online! The story itself is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the daily news.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions." ...Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.Continue reading
Prosecutors argue for “unprecedented” court secrecy
In an odd addendum to the corruption case of (now former) Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, prosecutors are arguing that once the executive branch says something is classified, courts are virtually powerless to review or disagree. The arguments are in the case of Thomas Kontogiannis, a New York financier who admitted to one charge of laundering bribe money for former Rep. Cunningham.
- Cunningham figure's plea deal was sealed, By Greg Moran, San Diego Union-Tribune, April 20, 2008
While portions of the case remain secret, a batch of previously sealed court filings was released this week that show the government arguing what media law experts said was an astounding position.... In essence, prosecutors argued that once the executive branch says something is classified, courts are virtually powerless to review or disagree. That is true, they argued, even when the information is part of court records - which historically have been considered open under the First Amendment.Continue reading
A discussion by archivists of long-term preservation of digital government information
There is an excellent post relevant to government information over at ArchivesNext. I recommend this highly.
- NARA and the web harvest: a discussion of the issues, ArchivesNext, April 14, 2008.
Depending on the agency, decisions on how best to share information might have been driven initially by technological factors more so than long term capture of knowledge. From reading records managers’ forums, I gather that in some agencies IT more so than RM may have driven adoption of solutions for dealing with electronic records. No two organizations are going to have exactly the same culture and organizational climate. So it’s hard to predict how preservation of electronic information is going to play out throughout the government.Continue reading
Privatized Data Woes in Britain
While FGI normally focuses on US government information policy issues, there is a conflict going on in the UK that mirrors some of the recent stories about public data being used by private companies in a privileged way, forcing the taxpayer to pay twice for their data. An April 17, 2008 Guardian article titled A costly 2008 Domesday Book details how not one, but two British agencies contracted with commercial companies to post government compiled data. The result:
After seven years of legal wrangling, an official, complete and constantly updated list of addresses in England and Wales is about to become available for commercial use. The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), compiled from data supplied by local councils, is being promoted as the best list of property addresses since the Domesday Book. Free data it is not. Although prices have yet to be finalised, the commercial firm hosting the service said this week it will cost between £15,000 and £20,000 a year. Profits will be shared among local authorities to help them keep data up to date. The gazetteer is not the only address database on the market. The state-owned Ordnance Survey also offers addresses as part of its MasterMap digital geographical database of Britain.Most of the article is about campaigns to free the data. In analyzing the roadblocks, they talk about issues that will be familiar to US readers:
"We would like to give it away free," says Nicholson. However, he says, local authorities are not going to give their work away when they have to pay for the use of postcodes from the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File. Neither can Ordnance Survey, which is required by the Treasury to show a return on its activities, and regards MasterMap as a key part of its revenue-generating portfolio.We wish the Free Our Data campaign well. This is probably a good to time to mention that what FGI objects to isn't the selling of data per se, but the selling of data that has already been compiled at taxpayer expense. If a private company wanted to raise its own venture capital, compile its own address list completely independent of government sources, we'd be all for it charging whatever the market could bear. But a private entity should not be allowed to be the sole, fee-based dispenser of information that has been compiled by government agencies using money confiscated through taxation. THAT's what we're against. Continue reading
HHS Appeals Ruling That Would Give Consumers More Access to Physician Medicare Claims Database
According to an article in today's Los Angeles Times, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice have appealed a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that would give consumers more access to Medicare healthcare data. Specifically, the August 2007 ruling, based on a FOIA request and then a subsequent lawsuit by the advocacy group Consumers' Checkbook/Center for the Study of Services, would have allowed disclosure of a subset of Medicare billing records for four states (Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington) and the District of Columbia. The information requested would not have contained any patient identifying information, but could have potentially allowed consumers to get more understanding of the operations of Medicare and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as well as make decisions about physician expertise and efficiency, according to the Times. As the judge's decision put it, "The public interest at stake is the interest in obtaining information that would help the public make more informed Medicare decisions and the interest in more information of how government funds are spent." However, the American Medical Association opposed the ruling, and has also petitioned to join the appeal. The HHS appeal is based on a 1979 federal court ruling that blocked release of Medicare physician reimbursement data. HHS states that it shares the goals of Consumers' Checkbook in providing a transparent health care marketplace for consumers, but says that the 1979 ruling conflicts with the 2007 ruling. Observers quoted in the Times article said that the HHS was under pressure from the AMA to keep the data from being released and that it wasn't just a matter of conflicting legal opinions. The HHS news release announcing its decision to join the DOJ appeal against release of Medicare data is here. Last summer's ruling on the release of the data is here. Continue reading