CIA Claims the Right to Decide What is News, The National Security Archive, June 14, 2006.

The National Security Archive today filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), challenging the Agency's recent practice of charging Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) fees to journalists pursuing news. The FOIA says that "representatives of the news media" can be charged only copying fees since they help to carry out the mission of the law by disseminating government information; but the CIA last year began claiming authority to assess additional fees if the Agency decides any journalist's request is not newsworthy enough. In adopting this new practice, the CIA reversed its prior 15-year practice of presumptively waiving additional fees for news media representatives, including the National Security Archive.

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Officials sued over phone records access, by Mark Sherman, Associated Press Writer, Wed Jun 14, 2006.

The federal government sued the New Jersey attorney general and other state officials Wednesday to stop them from seeking information about telephone companies' cooperation with the National Security Agency. The unusual filing in U.S. District Court in Trenton, N.J., is the latest effort by federal authorities to halt legal proceedings aimed at revealing whether and how often AT&T, Verizon and other phone companies have provided customer records to the NSA without a court order.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education gives more information about Google's government search and other deals the government is making for private sector delivery of government information. It says this is connected to "Google’s drive to digitize government documents" Google and the Gov, Chronicle of Higher Education's The Wired Campus, June 15, 2006

In early July, the Library of Congress Law Library will begin sending thousands of volumes of U.S. Congressional hearings to Google for digitization. The first shipment will consist of 5,000 volumes, but library officials anticipate that they will send 10,000 volumes a month to the search-engine company, says Mark Strattner, the law library’s chief of collection services.

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Vice President Refuses to Disclose Classification Data, OMB Watch, 06/13/2006

For the third consecutive year, the Office of the Vice President has refused to disclose information on its security classification practices, according to a report released last month. The refusal contradicts a presidential order to disclose data on classification and declassification, issued by President Clinton and amended by President Bush in 2003.... The Office of the Vice President asserts that the order does not apply to it, even though the office regularly complied with the order before 2003. The implementing directive for ISOO states, "Each agency that creates or handles classified information shall report annually to the Director of ISOO statistics related to its security classification program." An agency is defined as any "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information."

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Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining, By Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post, June 15, 2006; D03.

As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies.... Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data.

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