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
What the candidates are saying about FOI
The Sunshine Week website created a page entitled: "What the Candidates Are Saying About Open Government and FOI" based on the the Sunshine Week survey responses and analysis of articles, speeches, and debate transcripts that give insight into the candidates' thoughts on government access to information. They state: "Only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards responded, and only Richardson answered all the questions. The remaining four leading major party candidates were re-surveyed following Super Tuesday in February. To date, none has replied". They mention Obama's Senate co-sponsorship of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which went into effect on New Years Day '08 with the launch of USAspending.gov, a site that "gives people access to information on government contracts, grants and other awards". Speaking of which, USAspending.gov is based on the software that runs Fedspending.org. I'm going to examine both these sites and see how the differ, but so far, the only difference I'm seeing is that USAspending.gov has a lengthy privacy policy which dotgovwatch.com claims is different from their previous warning! Continue reading
Public Dissatisfied with Government Financial Transparency
The Association of Government Accountants published a report entitled "Public Attitudes Toward Government Accountability and Transparency 2008", based on their first annual survey of public attitudes toward government financial information transparency and accountability. It is a part of AGI's "Advancing Government Accountability" campaign, which they hope will educate the government and the public on the benefits of government transparency, particularly in reporting government financial information. Not a big surprise here...the survey findings show that people are deeply dissatisfied with the availability of government financial information and how it is delivered to the public: "...among those who do receive information about governments’ generation and spending of money, there is a strong dissatisfaction with the information that they receive. The strongest dissatisfaction is with the information about the federal government’s financial management (Federal, 60%; State, 46%; Local, 38%). Only 5% are satisfied with what they receive from the federal government". To view more of the survey's findings, view or download the PowerPoint file. Librarians can learn from this...know where to retrieve government financial information and make this known to your patrons and your community! Continue reading