NSA: Redact by rewriting.
As reported recently in Secrecy News, "The National Security Agency has issued new guidance to assist officials in redacting (censoring) documents in Microsoft Word format and producing unclassified Adobe Portable Document (PDF) files without inadvertently disclosing sensitive information." (NSA: Redacting With Confidence by Steven Aftergood, SECRECY NEWS, Volume 2006, Issue No. 8 January 20, 2006.) Now, one person who has examined the NSA document says that "it suggest redaction by complete rewriting."
When redaction is done by creating a new document and pasting in old text, opportunities for misbehavior and errors abound. The NSA's suggestions do address one such issue: figures appearing in the wrong place. Continue reading
Privacy
In light of recent developments (the subpoena of search records from Yahoo and Google, the revelations of secret government spying), two recent stories examine the issue of privacy of research and reading on the net.
- After subpoenas, Net searches give some pause, By Katie Hafner, CNET News.com, Jan 24, 2006.
- Privacy for People Who Don't Show Their Navels, By JONATHAN D. GLATER, New York Times, January 25, 2006.
A bill you are not allowed to see or discuss??
Surely, I thought, they're not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they're not going to say that the citizenry isn't allowed to know what's in the law that Congress is considering. [but it turns out] ...I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it. Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?We've seen this before. Laws that are copyrighted or considered the property of a private company. (One comment to the Felten post above says that it is it's perfectly acceptable for the law to be private intellectual property in forty-seven states.) But this is worse. Felten says of a proposed law to "plug the analog hole":
"This is much worse than a claim of copyright. Copyright doesn't stop you from talking about what is in the document, or from rephrasing it in your own words. A copyrighted law can at least be debated. Here, they're claiming the (proposed) law is a trade secret and cannot be discussed at all."What are the implications? There are at least two: First, treatment of a bill as being proprietary could become a precedent for even more private control of what should be public information leading to even less access to information and even less government accountability. Second, the law itself deals with "a fundamental vulnerability in copy prevention schemes" (see: the analog hole WikiPedia) in a way that would effect the functionality of all hardware for all purposes -- even legal copying of public information (say files downloaded from govt. agencies) could, potentially, be disabled because of this. Continue reading
Likely space requirements for digital deposit
One of the understandable concerns expressed by Federal Depository Libraries about the possibility of local storage and serving of electronic government publications is that of unknown storage requirements. How big of a hard drive and how expensive a computer would a depository library need to maintain a local digital collection? Our assumption at FGI is that if libraries were offered the option of digital deposit, they would only store materials that fit their depository profile. Thanks to the wonderful folks at Documents Data Miner, we now have a way to estimate storage requirements for particular depositories. I selected the libraries below at random and used the "URL Locator" feature to determine how many electronic titles these libraries would have received in 2005 if a digital deposit system had been in place. I then calculated storage space based on an average document size of 5MB per document or 10MB per document to come up with an amount of yearly storage space. For comparison, an Alaska State Document averages 3.7MB per document, so I'm being VERY conservative in my space estimate. If GPO has a figure for the average size of a federal electronic publication, I'd love to know it. Continue reading
Google agrees to censor search results in China
Google bows to China pressure by Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer Jan. 25, 2005 This is an interesting piece of information. On the one hand, Google is fighting the Dept of Justice subpoena on providing user information, but on the other hand the company has agreed (just as the other search engine companies have done) to censor search results in China. How does this get subclassified in the "do no evil" category?
"The popular search engine will block results that include such terms as "free Tibet," "democracy" and "Falun Gong" as part of a Chinese Web site the company is introducing today."Continue reading