LOC budget request for FY 2009
The Open House Project has a report on the March 5 testimony of Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. His prepared statement (see attached) presented information on on current LoC initiatives, and described funding priorities. The testimony repeatedly mentions 2008's "deep and painful cuts to the Library’s budget", and the Librarian adds "I feel obligated to say that if we are stretched much farther, we may soon reach a breaking point." Furthermore, the statement adds,
"Demand for online services, increased pressure on web services operations to enhance THOMAS, the World Digital Library (WDL), and the Legal Information Services (LIS) databases, and the need to develop new configurations and applications have severely strained technical assistance and infrastructure support provided by the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) and Information Technology Services (ITS). Since 1995, THOMAS has provided free legislative information on the web. Our congressional and public constituencies have for several years been requesting upgrades to both THOMAS and LIS to enhance content and searchability. ... However, the IT and digital demands on the Library will need support from the Congress in fiscal 2010 to sustain the Library’s ability to provide services to the Congress and its constituents. " Continue reading
Sunshine Week March 16-22
Sunshine Week has been mentioned in previous posts but it certainly deserves its own blog post too. This national initiative is set to take place March 16th through the 22nd. Its purpose is to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Anyone can take part, as long as you do something to engage discussion about open government. For example, you could write a letter to your local newspaper, host a panel discussion at your library, hold a debate on the FOIA in your political science class, etc. Visit the Sunshine Week website for more information on events and resources and ideas to help spread the word. Updates will be posted on the Sunshine Week blog. So...what will you be planning to do that week or maybe for next years Sunshine Week? Care to share your ideas? (Because I'm looking for some!) I think this year I will create a daily post on my depository's blog about open government and freedom of information resources, but next year I'd like to do something more interactive and on a larger scale with the community. Continue reading
Air Force lawyers send DMCA notice to YouTube
Air Force lawyers have issued a DMCA take-down notice to YouTube (here's the PDF of the DMCA notice), demanding the removal of a publicly available video promoting its Cyber Command project. There's only one problem with that: material produced by federal agencies is by law in the public domain and not copyrighted. And the Air Force website has a privacy policy that states, "Information presented on the Air Force Recruiting website is considered public information and may be distributed or copied."
It's cyber war! Lawyers representing the Air Force's elite electronic warriors have sent YouTube a DMCA takedown notice demanding the removal of the 30-second spot the Air Force created to promote its nascent Cyber Command. We'd uploaded the video to share with THREAT LEVEL readers.Continue reading
Census 2010 Problems
Uh oh. The Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA) PDAs that are supposed to replace the traditional pen and paper method used by census-takers are not working properly. Thus, the census "dress rehearsal" this spring has been delayed by a month as the agency scurries to come up with backup plans. The FDCA program that was meant to save taxpayers $1 billion now has these delays sending the cost $600 million to as much as $2 billion. Carlos M. Gutierrez, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, testified at the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on the status of the 2010 Census. Gutierrez stated: "We have discovered serious problems with the FDCA program and I am personally involved in bringing key issues to the surface and developing a way forward. In short, the current situation is unacceptable." The GAO published a report on these Census problems and made an announcement designating the 2010 Census Project as "High Risk". The GAO warned the Census bureau last year about slow and inconsistent data transmission from last year's field testing. Guess they should have heeded that warning, right? The IEEE blog made a good point on this whole mess: "Fed Ex can use handhelds to track packages, why can't we do the same for collecting Census data - should be dead easy, right? The idea in itself wasn't not outrageous, as long as the risks involved were clearly understood and managed" and obviously they were not! Continue reading
Limits of Full Text Searching: Finding FOIA Docs
The federal government posts a fair amount of material requested by citizens under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online. They do this in part so they don't have to respond to multiple requests for the same material. An of example of this that I love to use to document the feds' disturbing tendency to surveil harmless people when looking for national security risks is the FBI electronic FOIA reading room. But if you don't know whether an agency has an electronic FOIA reading room, it can be confusing searching for FOIA related materials. One way that I started looking for this type of material was to toss the term "foia" into a usa.gov search along with my search term. In this way I was easily able to locate the CIA's 5,000 pages on the US involvement in overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala in 1954. But try this technique with other countries, like say Cameroon and while you get a lot of results, nothing seems quite on point. Why is this? Mostly because many federal pages quite rightly have a link to their FOIA information page. This page usually has information on how to contact the agency to make a FOIA request and sometimes has a link to an electronic FOIA reading room. In some cases, like that for the State department, the reading room is a little bare, consisting mostly of annual reports. If we had a government web with good metadata or could otherwise catalog FOIA related materials, then finding FOIA related documents would be a lot easier. But as it is, people are left with many results to sift through for a few nuggets of information. And if you're reading this and are thinking "Why doesn't he know about ______, which provides gov't wide access to documents released under FOIA?", then by all means let me know about in comments. Continue reading