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
Six pages and serendipity
Today I was searching the shelves of my depository for a report related to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and instead my eyes fell on this publication from the CIA: Donovan and the CIA : a history of the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency by Thomas F Troy Publisher: [Langley, Va.?] : Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1981. SuDoc: PREX 3.10:D71 This is the official story of how the CIA came to be. According to the preface, it was written in 1975 as an account of the agency's origin for new employees. It was promptly stamped SECRET. In 1981, the agency released a declassified edition which the preface hails as being "released for leisurely reading outside the office, and printed in one volume, this history should better serve it's original purpose." What made the CIA decide it could let its secret origin story out of the shadows? According to the preface, it was the excision of no more than six typewritten pages. Obviously, I haven't seen the missing six pages, but doesn't this case make it seem like the classification process is a little whimsical? The book is divided into three sections: "The COI (Coordinator of Information) Story" which covers from about 1929 to World War II, Wartime--The OSS Story and Postwar--The CIA Story, which ends with the establishment of the CIA. If anyone's read this volume, let us know what you think. As far as I can tell, the book has no electronic version. Google Books has a commercial version with no preview. Perhaps one day the government document version, which is in the public domain, will be posted. Might be interesting to run a tag cloud on the text. The electronic world has given us many gifts, but I'm not sure it could deliver an experience of serendipity like the printed shelf did for me today. From welfare to spies.
On a personal note, thanks to everyone who has sent words of appreciation to me regarding my being named as a Library Journal 2008 Mover and Shaker. I really think this is an award that in a real sense belongs to the entire documents community and especially to my co-volunteers here at FGI and the dozens of folks working on State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States. Thanks to each and every one of you who contributes to finding, describing, and making government information available to people in a way that respects their privacy. Without you I'd just be a mouth on legs. Continue reading
Why some web pages don’t work
Did you ever wonder why it is that, when you try to load some web pages, the text overlaps the pictures or the pull down boxes will not pull down or the page just appears blank and empty or any of a thousand other problems that made the page un-viewable or un-usable? Did you ever wonder why, when you ask your friends, they say they have no problem at all with those same pages?
Have you ever wondered what this means for users of all those government web sites you have carefully listed in your OPAC? Have you ever wondered if this means that these web sites won't work in 10 years -- or 1 year?
If so, this article is for you. It explains -- in very easy to understand, non-technical terms -- things like "Web Standards" and the differences between web browsers.
- Martian Headsets by Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software, March 17, 2008.
Joel is a software developer and his columns at Joel on Software are models of clear, comprehensive technical writing at its best. You can read and enjoy his columns if you are an advanced technologist/programmer or if you can't tell Java from JavaScript. If you care about the future of government information, or if you develop web pages, or sites, or web-based information, or if you are just curious about what will happen when IE 8 comes out, read this and enjoy.
There is no practical way to check if the web page you just coded conforms to the spec. There are validators, but they won't tell you what the page is supposed to look like, and having a "valid" page where all the text is overlapping and nothing lines up and you can't see anything is not very useful.
and...
Some of those pages can't be changed. They might be burned onto CD-ROMs. Some of them were created by people who are now dead. Most of them created by people who have no frigging idea what's going on and why their web page, which they paid a designer to create 4 years ago, is now not working properly.Continue reading