FOIA: Good News, Bad News
- Senate Acts, Bureaucrats Stall on FOIA Requests by Mike Mitchell and JR Santo, ABC News The Blotter, August 20, 2007.
- Still Waiting After All These Years Part I An in-depth analysis of FOIA performance from 1998 to 2006, by the Coalition of Journalists for an Open Government, August 8, 2007
- Still Waiting After All These Years Part II
Help get Fugitive CRS Reports!
Ari Schwartz reports on the Open House Project mailing list some good news from OpenCRS.com about CRS reports and an opportunity to help.
He says that OpenCRS has gotten 76 of 100 new reports from the past 6 weeks.
Follow the link below to the complete email that has a list of the fugitives, pick a report that sounds interesting, call up one of your representatives offices in DC, ask them to email you a pdf of the report, and post it at http://www.opencrs.com/addreport.php
Fugitive CRS Reports by Ari Schwartz, Open House Project mailing list Aug 21, 2007
Continue readingCarl Malamud Takes on WestLaw
Carl Malamud (a hero of public access to public information!), who has taken on the SEC, Patents, and Congress and C-Span, is now tackling the 5 million or so pages of federal case law.
- Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw, by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar (08.19.07)
- In Re: State and Federal Cases and Codes Released by Public.Resource.Org as Test Data README FILE (Aug 17, 2007)
- A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free By John Markoff New York Times (August 20, 2007)
Carl's short-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of the Federal Reporter, the Federal Supplement, and the Federal Appendix. The medium-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of all state and federal cases and codes.
Continue readingGovt agencies get in on wikipedia whitewashing act
As everyone knows, wikipedia has been in the news recently because several large corporations got caught scrubbing their wikipedia entries -- Wired is keeping track of the most shameful wikipedia spin jobs. Well now it's been shown that the CIA and FBI has gotten in on the act. Anyone got the time to use Wikiscanner to see what other government agencies are scrubbing their wiki images? Continue reading
Expanded Use of Domestic Spy Satellite Data
The Department of Homeland Security will begin to share spy satellite data with domestic law enforcement agencies next year. The theory is that satellite images will assist in border security. The most interesting news resport I've read on this topic came from Fox News. While all the news reports pointed out concerns about oversight and the effect on privacy, only this article mentioned that *getting* data isn't the end of the story - to be meaningful, someone somewhere has to analyze it and that this kind of data would be likely be of low priority:
Analysts across the intelligence community are already swamped with incoming data from foreign surveillance, and they may have little time for lower-priority work.
In light of recent expansions on wiretapping, this is, well, unnerving.