Lawrence Lessig Webcast: Change Congress
Just a reminder that Lawrence Lessig will lecture at the National Press Club on Thursday, March 20th at 1:30 pm. The lecture will also be available via webcast. Lessig will introduce a plan designed to increase congressional transparency, called "Change Congress". More information about Lessig and this event can be found at the Sunlight Foundation website. Continue reading
NetSquared $100K mashup competition
TechSoup's NetSquared mashup challenge pays out a total $100K this year to the best of 122 submitted projects. I'm going to have way too much fun browsing through the project proposals. Casting my votes, though, is already proving difficult... Using user downtime? Massive mashup calendars? Warnings for hidden corporate abuses every time I make an online purchase? Ohboyohboyohboyohboy. And of course, many of these envisioned projects would not even be imaginable were it not for widely available and mostly reliable government information data sources. Continue reading
Keynote Speech from National FOI Day Conference
The First Amendment Center posted the full-text of the 2008 National FOI Day Conference's keynote speech, "A New Balancing Test: How Excessive Classification Undermines National Security" by J. William Leonard, former chief of the Information Security Oversight Office. Leonard quipped that his remarks on government secrecy would be his most candid, "a sort of ‘Leonard Unplugged’ if you will for those of you into the MTV scene". He discussed instances of excessive secrecy that produced serious consequences, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, stating, "Secrecy comes at a price - sometimes a deadly price - often through its impact upon the decision-making process". He also proposed a new way for government officials to determine whether information needs to be classified in the interest of national security; what he calls the "New Balancing Test": "We are long familiar with what many regard as the “traditional” balancing test of national security versus openness – of secrecy versus transparency. Instead, the balancing test of which I talk is more along the lines of national security versus national security; i.e. what will cause greater damage to national security, the disclosing or withholding of specific information". Continue reading
Sssh! It’s a Secret
The FAS Project on Government Secrecy Blog contains an informative post about secret sessions of the House of Representatives, including one that took place on March 13th to consider classified matters concerning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). For more information about secret sessions, read "Secret Sessions of the House and Senate" and "Secret Sessions of Congress: A Brief Historical Overview," by the Congressional Research Service. I knew that the Senate held secret sessions (54 since 1929), but I did not know that the House only held three secret sessions since 1830 and they took place in 1979, 1980, and 1983! However, there were unsuccessful attempts to hold a secret session to discuss the assessment of the war in Iraq in 2006 (search for page H7371) and the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2008 (pages H4795-4796, H4808, and H4867-68). Also, the proceedings of a secret session are not published unless the House or Senate votes to release them. If they vote to release them, then the transcripts will be printed in the Congressional Record, but if the House votes not to release them, then the they are preserved at NARA and may be available to the public after 30 years. Continue reading
New Best. Title. Ever.
We hadn't added much to our Best. Titles. Ever. humor page lately. I'm happy to end that dry spell with a document that is both humorously titled and useful: Hills Bros. coffee can chronology : field guide, published by U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management in 2006. Why does the Bureau of Land Management care about what coffee cans looked like in the 1910s? For a very good reason. According to the document's introduction, Hill's Brothers Coffee cans are a great way to date digs dating back to the late 1800s because of the tendency of Hills Brothers to change their can designs every so often. I'd love to copy and paste their explanation into this post, but I can't. The BLM authors chose to lock their PDF into a form that cannot be copied from. You can make copies of the entire file and you can print pages from it, but you can't copy and paste the text nor can you extract the pictures from it. Yet as a public domain government document, there is no legal reason to impose these kind of restrictions. This is part of the future we fear, one of crippled electronic documents that aren't as reusable as they could be. Today BLM has decided we can't copy and paste from a public domain document. Maybe another agency will decide tomorrow that we shouldn't be able to print their document. That's what faces us unless the federal government has a consistent policy that renounces Digital Rights Management (DRM). **Addition by James: I've attached a PDF of the document from which I was able to copy and paste. Please download this copy and leave a comment if you're *not* able to copy and paste. **Addition by Daniel: Thanks for the demonstrating the power of a polite request. It's nice to see responsive and helpful gov't agencies. **Further addition by James: While I believe in the power of a polite request, this one was Jim working his magic to subvert the copy-blocking. He saved the original pdf, printed/saved as pdf (macs let you convert to pdf from the print menu!), jiggered a few things and then the DRM was foiled. That's the PDF doc that is attached to this discussion :-) Continue reading