A puzzling executive order "The Bush administration makes it harder to get information from the government," By J. Timothy Sprehe, Federal Computer Week, Jan. 23, 2006.

Sprehe, president of Sprehe Information Management Associates, has a long-time interest in government information. His latest column for FCW enumerates recent FOIA actions in light of the executive order, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information" (Dec. 14, 2005). He concludes:

In light of the administration's record of excessive secrecy, what are we to make of the new executive order on FOIA? In my judgment, the executive order is window dressing. It is another ploy to distract attention from how the administration consistently denies the public the information it has a right to see.

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Shhh!!: Keeping Current on Government Secrecy. by Laura Gordon-Murnane. Searcher Magazine, Vol. 14 No. 1 — Jan 2006. This is a very thorough article that includes a hefty list of govt watchdog groups concerned with FOIA and issues of govt secrecy -- including FGI!! For example, I hadn't seen OpenTheGovernment's well-researched and documented Secrecy Report Card 2005: Quantitative Indicators of Secrecy in the Federal Government (PDF).

Since September 11, 2001, several important trends have affected access to federal documents and information. First and foremost, the federal government is keeping more information away from the public. In July 2005, The New York Times reported that the government in a single year (2004) classified more than 15 million pages, while declassifying only 28 million pages. Not surprisingly, the increased secrecy is very expensive and costly. The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) issued its 2004 Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities and found that "the total security classification cost estimates within Government for FY 2004 is $7.2 Billion." This represents an "11 percent increase above the cost estimates reported for FY 2003." Furthermore, in its 2004 Report to the President, ISOO warned that "over classification, besides needlessly and perhaps dangerously restricting information sharing, also wastes untold dollars." Secrecy is also costly in terms of sharing information and being prepared to deal with threats to national security. The 9/11 Commission identified over-classification of documents and the "need to know" culture as one of the serious problems that led to a failure of imagination. Continue reading →

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Today I noticed that Search Engine Watch has posted a well written review of the new FirstGov search engine. For those of you not familar with it, FirstGov was established during the Clinton Administration and has this current vision:

FirstGov.gov, the official U.S. gateway to all government information, is the catalyst for a growing electronic government. Our work transcends the traditional boundaries of government and our vision is global–connecting the world to all U.S. government information and services

If you interact with government at all, this is a site worth visit for its well organized lists of resources grouped by user (citizen, business, other gov't) and by subject. The creators of FirstGov realized everyone isn't on the web yet, so they also provide 800 numbers for agency helplines. I've never thought that much of their search engine because it never distinguished between federal and state resources very well. Despite the great improvements outlined in the Search Engine Watch article above, this failing remains. Continue reading →

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The search continues, By Brad Grimes, Government Computer News (01/23/06) Vol. 25 No. 2.

This is an interview with Vinton Cerf, sometimes referred to as "the Father of the Internet" and who is now "Chief Internet Evangelist" for Google. In it, he says that Google has a "modest operation in the D.C. area" and that Google believes that a number of Google "enterprise program" services will be of interest to various government branches. He also says that Google is working with the Library of Congress to make portions of its holdings accessible and more easily searchable and that "it is possible that Google can assist in making more information accessible through cooperative programs with the [government]." With regard to recent discussion of "search" being able to replace metadata, he says:

Search has the remarkable property that it makes otherwise unstructured information discoverable. The addition of metadata can increase our ability to identify the most relevant information, relative to a given query and query context, so Google users will ultimately benefit from the availability of metadata. [Search and metadata] are not in conflict with each other.

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I received a telephone call from a professor at Morehouse College who wanted statistical data on teachers pay and class room sizes. I referred him (the Morehouse professor) to the Digest of Education Statistics in print. I also walked the professor through steps over the phone on how to obtain the online version of Digest of Education Statistics. He indicated to me that I had helped him out a lot and he was very pleased with the way I'd assisted him. Chad Nathaniel Robert Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, GA Coordinator, Government Publications Department Continue reading →

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