20061004 – No privacy reports under DHS?
In his October 4, 2006 Statement on Signing the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007 (H.R. 5441), the President said:
The executive branch shall construe section 522 of the Act, relating to privacy officer reports, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.and
The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(4) in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to require the opinions of heads of departments and to supervise the unitary executive branch. Accordingly, the affected department and agency shall ensure that any reports or recommendations submitted to the Congress are subjected to appropriate executive branch review and approval before submission.The full text of HR 5441 can be found on its Thomas page. Section 522 appears to be intended to prevent anyone but the DHS privacy officer from altering his/her reports:
SEC. 522. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by any person other than the Privacy Officer appointed under section 222 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 142) to alter, direct that changes be made to, delay, or prohibit the transmission to Congress of any report prepared under paragraph (6) of such section.Makes you wonder why you'd want other people to alter the reports, or why a REPUBLICAN Congress might be concerned enough to put this provision into legislation. Section 503(c) does not appear to come with a subparagraph 4. If you spot such a provision or know what the President is talking about, please let us know in comments or by e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo.info Continue reading
20061013 – Keeping Internet gambling in the dark
The October 13, 2006 Statement on Statement on Signing the SAFE Port Act contained this statement:
The executive branch shall construe as advisory provisions of the Act that purport to direct or burden the conduct of negotiations by the executive branch with foreign governments, international organizations, or other entities abroad, that purport to direct executive branch officials to negotiate with foreign governments or in international organizations to achieve specified foreign policy objectives, or that purport to require the executive branch to disclose deliberations between the United States and foreign countries. Such provisions include subsections 205(d) and (i) and 803(b) of the Act; subsection 431(b) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 301 of the Act; and subsection 629(h) of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended by section 404 of the Act. Such provisions, if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, would impermissibly interfere with the President's constitutional authorities to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs, participate in international negotiations, and supervise the unitary executive branch.The full text of the Safe Port Act can be found on its Thomas page. One of the more surprising areas where the Administration is refusing to report on is Internet Gambling. The President fears for the safety of the country if this report is made to Congress:
803 (b) Report Required- The Secretary of the Treasury shall submit an annual report to the Congress on any deliberations between the United States and other countries on issues relating to Internet gambling.One would think that the Administration would want to document progress towards eliminating Internet gambling. What purpose is served in keeping it secret? Of course, one can also be surprised that Internet gambling made into a ports bill to begin with! Continue reading
20061017 – No information on threats to America
From Statement on Signing the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122), published on October 17, 2006 and put into October 30 Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents
A number of provisions in the Act call for the executive branch to furnish information to the Congress or other entities on various subjects. These provisions include sections 219, 313, 360, 1211, 1212, 1213, 1227, 1402, and 3116 of the Act, section 427 of title 10, United States Code, as amended by section 932 of the Act, and section 1093 of the Ronald W. Reagan National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005 (Public Law 108-375) as amended by section 1061 of the Act. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.The full text of the Act can be found on the HR 5122 bill page on Thomas. Some of the information the President proposes to withhold include:
- Sec. 313. Response plan for remediation of unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions, and munitions constituents.
- Sec. 360. Energy efficiency in weapons platforms.
- Sec. 1211. North Korea. - This section requires an interagency review of policy towards North Korea and requires this report - (4) REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the appointment of an individual as Coordinator under paragraph (1), the Coordinator shall submit to the President and Congress an unclassified report, with a classified annex if necessary, on the actions undertaken under paragraph (3). The report shall set forth--(A) the results of the review under paragraph (3)(A); and (B) any other matter on North Korea that the Coordinator considers appropriate.
- SEC. 1213. INTELLIGENCE ON IRAN. - This section requires a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, plus a "Presidential Report on Policy Objectives and United States Strategy Regarding Iran"
- Sec. 1402. Quarterly reports on Department of Defense response to threat posed by improvised explosive devices.
Web3.0!
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. John Markoff, NY Times, November 12, 2006 As you all know, FGI has been interested in and has tracked on the semantic web for quite some time. We've implemented some web2.0 technologies on FGI (see our delicious tags?), but imagine my surprise in coming across this NYT article extolling web3.0(!) aka the semantic web. The money is gradually getting behind the semantic web (witness IBM and Google working on it). It's coming folks so libraries need to start thinking about it and finding ways to implement those ideas in our bibliographic tools.
From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.Continue reading
Privacy and the “Terrorist Surveillance Act”
President Bush says that he wants the lame duck Congress to pass the Terrorist Surveillance Act (President Bush Meets with Cabinet Rose Garden, November 9, 2006).
What does this have to do with government information? If we continue with the current trend of government information being available only on the web from government-controlled web servers, we enhance and simplify the ability of the government to monitor and examine the government information we read. The "Terrorist Surveillance Act" will make this worse because it will effectively change the minimalist privacy policies the government has (see Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?) into surveillance policies.
The "Terrorist Surveillance Act" is misnamed. It doesn't authorize the government to spy on terrorists, it authorizes the government to spy on everyone hoping that it can find terrorists.
Why is that bad? Surely, it shouldn't be bad "if I have nothing to hide" right? As Guy Kewney explains, mining data for patterns yields matches for people who are not terrorists. It enables the government to find innocent people and worse it enables the government to find...
...[n]ot terrorists, just enemies. Hostile journalists, campaigning lobbyists, critical journalists, businessmen who are likely to sponsor rival parties, people who oppose the party leader's favourite idea of the year.Kewney's comment uses examples from the UK, but it is relevant to citizens of any government that is trying to use data mining of legitimate information seeking behavior to try to identify terrorists. Such surveillance has more of a chilling effect on regular citizens than it does on actual terrorists.
- "I have nothing to hide" - or the Sainsbury's Lesson By Guy Kewney, The Register (November 8, 2006)
The "Terrorist Surveillance Act" is a misleading name for a bad idea. I believe it is just the sort of misguided, bad policy that voters rejected in our recent election.
Now we can do two things: We can tell our representatives that we don't want this legislation now, or in January, or ever. And, we can insist that GPO and government agencies deposit copies of government information with FDLP libraries, ensuring that citizens have access to government information from libraries that respect privacy and honor the "right to read" which depends or our right to privacy.
Continue reading