Part-Time Policy Wonk

Department of Energy Press Release:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library, along with eight other participating countries, today [June 22, 2007] opened an online global gateway to science information from 15 national portals. The gateway, WorldWideScience.org, gives citizens, researchers and anyone interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology such as that deployed by Google, Yahoo! and many other commercial search engines.

Posted by Anne at 08:41 PM | Permalink

The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0
David C. Wyld, Associate Professor Southeastern Louisiana University
(99 pages, PDF)

Dr. Wyld examines the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development of the second-generation Internet, where interactivity among users is key. This is also referred to as "Web 2.0." Wyld observes that blogging is growing as a tool for promoting not only online engagement of citizens and public servants, but also offline engagement. He describes blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments in which they engage directly with the public. He also describes how blogging is used within agencies to improve internal communications and speed the flow of information. Based on the experiences of the blogoneers, Wyld develops a set of lessons learned and a checklist of best practices for public managers interested in following in their footsteps. He also examines the broader social phenomenon of online social networks and how they affect not only government but also corporate interactions with citizens and customers.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Government Executive:

Patrice McDermott, executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, chose to participate in a Tuesday workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Web Science Research Initiative because she wants to convince techies that the government's underutilization of the Internet has a lot to do with politics.

The workshop, held this week at the National Academy of Sciences, brought together government officials, computer scientists, academics, Web standards leaders and government vendors. W3C, an Internet standards group, organized the event to facilitate the deployment of Web standards across government Web sites; help shape research agendas; and guide officials in crafting Web policy that increases access to government information.

After speaking at the event, which was closed to the press, McDermott told Technology Daily: "What the people in there -- mostly technology people -- don't understand is that it's not just a resource decision, it's a political decision to expose that information. It's really more the politics than the policy."

Posted by Anne at 08:36 PM | Permalink

From Townhall.com:

The Federal Election Commission introduced a new feature Tuesday on its website to track presidential campaign donations as a part of a larger effort to make campaign finance data more accessible.

The FEC now has an online map that graphically displays individual contributions to 2008 Presidential candidates, organized by zip code. Users may also look at and compare contributions to specific candidates, all candidates, or all candidates from a political party.

The new system also allows users to export campaign finance data to an Excel spreadsheet.

Posted by Anne at 08:34 PM | Permalink

Alliance for Taxpayer Access Press Release:

Public access to NIH-funded research took a major step forward this week with Senate Appropriations Committee agreement to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that its funded research be made publicly available on the Internet.

Posted by Anne at 08:33 PM | Permalink

From Ars Technica:

The German government—one small part of it, at least—now recognizes Wikipedia as an important distribution channel for public information, and it's setting aside funds to create more accurate articles.

The Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe (FNR), Germany's Agency of Renewable Resources, is one small part of the much larger Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection (BMELV), a ministry more used to putting out press releases about "progress in saving Baltic cod" than Wikipedia. But, according to the FNR, part of its budget will be set aside to fund a three-year program aimed at providing accurate German-language information about specialized renewable resource topics.

Posted by Anne at 08:31 PM | Permalink

From the Mercury News:

Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google Inc. is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide.

The online search giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs.

Posted by Anne at 08:15 PM | Permalink

From Forbes.com:

Google has threatened to close its German online services Google Mail if the German government does not scrap its controversial draft law that would monitor telecommunications and internet traffic, Peter Fleischer, the company's global privacy counsel, said in an interview with WirtschaftsWoche magazine.

Fleischer said the German Justice Ministry wants to make it an obligation not only for internet providers but also for those which offer E-mail services to provide customers data in such a way that users could be identified.

Posted by Anne at 08:13 PM | Permalink

From the CIA FOIA Reading Room:

Two significant collections of previously classified historical documents are now available in the CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

The first collection, widely known as the "Family Jewels," consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency's charter. [The CIA link for the "family Jewels" report can be found at http://www.foia.cia.gov/ and is a 700+ page report. The National Security Archives has created a more direct access route.]

The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations."

Posted by Anne at 08:10 PM | Permalink

From ePractice.eu:

As part of its mission to inform the European eGovernment community about key issues of common interest, the eGovernment Observatory maintains a series of Factsheets presenting the situation and progress of eGovernment in 32 European countries: EU-27, Croatia, Turkey, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, providing for each one of them a wide and consistent range of information. . .

. . . As a general rule, factsheets are updated every 6 months with a new Edition. Important updates between two Editions may result in a new Release.

Posted by Anne at 09:09 PM | Permalink

From the Wall Street Journal:

. . . An important note: The records being put online are public, and available – sensitive information and all -- to anyone who goes down to the courthouse or county seat. And many of them have already been compiled and digitized by data warehouses, who often make them available to marketers and real-estate professionals. Open records are a longstanding American tradition; so too is a hold-your-nose acceptance that commercial entities will try to make a profit by exploiting that openness.

But at the same time, it's too simplistic to say that just because records are available by going to a government building and talking to a clerk, we shouldn't worry that they're now available through some Web sleuthing. Sometimes a difference of degree is so significant that it may as well be a difference of kind: Foes of the recording industry rightly note that people have always stolen music by taping it for their friends, but it's risible to compare the potential effect of running off some cassette copies of an album to that of making a digital copy of that album available for the taking online.

Similarly, it takes a pretty determined busybody or thief to visit the courthouse, and the law has acknowledged this, noting the "practical obscurity" of such records. The Web may not change the status of public records, but it means the end of practical obscurity, enabling drive-by voyeurism for the bored or petty – or identity thieves in the cybercafes of, say, Nigeria or Romania. . . .

Posted by Anne at 09:05 PM | Permalink

From CBS News:

The White House on Friday defended Vice President Dick Cheney's decision not to cooperate with a government office charged with safeguarding national security information — and denied that Cheney ever suggested the agency be shut down.

Despite objections from the National Archives and others, presidential spokesmen say Cheney's office is not bound by certain sections of a presidential executive order that seeks to protect national security information generated by the government.

Posted by Anne at 09:04 PM | Permalink

From Time:

On the same day that the CIA announced it will soon release hundreds of pages of once-classified documents that detail some of the agency's most closely guarded — and controversial — secrets of old, it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting even his own Executive Branch's efforts to find out what kind of secret material his office has been stashing away over the last four years.

Cheney's office, according to a story first reported by the Chicago Tribune, has resisted attempts by a tiny federal agency to compile information — in accordance with an executive order signed by George Bush himself — on the classified documents being held by the Vice President's operation. Cheney's office argued that the Vice President's office, because it has both executive and legislative branch duties, is exempt from the order.

Cheney's dustup with the normally non-controversial National Archives and Records Administration is the latest reminder that Cheney believes he can play by his own rules. And it probably secures for Cheney a place alongside Richard Nixon in the Washington pantheon of secret-keepers.

Posted by Anne at 09:02 PM | Permalink

From the Wall Street Journal:

It was about a week ago that House Democrats ran up the white flag on earmarks and begrudgingly agreed to live by their campaign pledges to make pork requests public. It was also about a week ago that Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a sweeping new state transparency law, which will give his taxpayers detailed information about every state expenditure, grant and contract. Mark the difference.

Even as Washington has fiddled on earmarks--delaying, obfuscating and basically doing all it can to avoid enacting real reform--a transparency movement has been sweeping the nation. Angry over Alaskan Bridges to Nowhere, and frustrated by the lack of willpower in the nation's capital, small-government activists have turned their attention to the states. If ever Washington lagged behind a movement, this is it.

Posted by Anne at 09:52 PM | Permalink

Nature Press Release:

Today Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and partner organisations launch Nature Precedings, a free online service enabling researchers to rapidly share, discuss and cite early findings.

Written scientific communication takes place mainly through journals, but increasingly the web provides complementary opportunities for more rapid, participative and informal communication.

Nature Precedings is a free service from NPG that provides a way for researchers to share preliminary findings, solicit community feedback, and claim priority over discoveries. By promoting the rapid and open exchange of scientific information, the site ultimately aims to help accelerate the pace of discovery.

Nature Precedings accepts submissions from biomedicine, chemistry and the earth sciences. These are reviewed by professional NPG curators and accepted only if they are considered legitimate scientific contributions of likely interest to others in the field. Accepted contributions are assigned stable identifiers ('Digital Object Identifiers' and 'Handles') that enable formal citation, and are made available through an open-access archive. Submissions are not subjected to peer review before they are released. Because of this, contributions are usually published within one working day, often much sooner, and no charge is made to either authors or readers.

Posted by Anne at 09:50 PM | Permalink

Press Release:

The Library of Congress (LOC) recently joined the Science.gov Alliance. The nation's oldest federal cultural institution and largest library in the world, the LOC serves as the research arm of Congress with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The addition brings the Science.gov Alliance membership to 17 organizations. Currently in its fourth generation, Science.gov provides search of more than 50 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to over 1,800 scientific Web sites and 30 deep Web databases.

Posted by Anne at 09:44 PM | Permalink

Abstract:

The Freedom of Information (FOI) Acts passed in 2000 in England and Wales and in 2002 in Scotland require organisations, including UK Higher Education Institutions (HEI), to provide requested information within certain conditions. The JISC Information Governance Gateway (JIGG) project aims to provide a single online gateway into information and resources related to HEIs’ compliance with information governance legislation, including FOI. One of the project’s objectives is to provide dissemination of the FOI disclosure logs by a web search within the gateway and also using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It is hoped this will assist HEI records management practitioners in sharing their experiences of dealing with FOI requests, and lead to future collaborations within a wider community. This paper describes the development of a JIGG FOI Application Profile as a `template’ for FOI disclosure log entries, and its subsequent translation into a practical application.

Source: In Chan, Leslie and Martens, Bob, Eds. Proceedings ELPUB2007: The Eleventh
International Conference on Electronic Publishing - Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access (via E-LIS)

Posted by Anne at 09:41 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney's office has refused to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the past four years and recently tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules, according to documents released by a congressional committee yesterday.

Since 2003, the vice president's staff has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration charged with making sure the executive branch protects classified information. Cheney aides have not filed reports on their possession of classified data and at one point blocked an inspection of their office. After the Archives office pressed the matter, the documents say, Cheney's staff this year proposed eliminating it.

Posted by Anne at 09:39 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

Posted by Anne at 09:37 PM | Permalink

From the AALL Advocacy listserv:

BACKGROUND

H.R. 2771, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act for FY 2008 and its accompanying Report 110-198, were filed late Tuesday night. The recommended amounts for the Government Printing Office are not good.

H.R. 2771 is scheduled for a House floor vote tomorrow and we have just learned that Rep. Jeff Flake (AZ-R-6) will offer an amendment that would reduce the recommended funding level for GPO’s Congressional Printing and Binding (CP&B) by an additional $3.2 million. This is especially bad news because during the full House Appropriations Committee mark-up last week, $5 million of the recommended level was taken out of the CP&B.

IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED

Please contact the office of your House representative immediately through the US Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121.

Urge your representative to vote “No” on the Flake amendment (amendment #11) to H.R. 2271.

The CP&B funding is crucial so that GPO can publish and distribute to federal depository libraries the essential legislative resources of the 110th Congress, including the 2006 U.S. Code.

Posted by Anne at 09:44 PM | Permalink

From Xinhua News Agency:

China has established more than 30,000 libraries in rural areas since 2006 in a move to bridge the "information gap" and help the farmers develop business opportunities, an official with the Ministry of Civil Affairs said on Thursday.

Jiang Li, vice Minister of Civil Affairs, said China started a program of establishing libraries in communities for urban residents in May 2003 and extended it to the rural areas last year.

Posted by Anne at 09:38 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted today to authorize subpoenas related to the National Security Agency (NSA)'s domestic spying program, setting the stage for a Congressional showdown over the surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. The subpoenas demand certain legal documents that the Administration has withheld despite Congress' repeated requests.

Posted by Anne at 09:36 PM | Permalink

At USA.gov, find active and archived blogs from U.S. federal agencies. Currently linking to 10 active sites, including Library of Congress Blog, Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog, and Health Marketing Musings.

Posted by Anne at 09:34 PM | Permalink

SLA Action Alert:

The National Archives and Records Administration, was created within the National Archives in 1934, given its own staff in 1951, authorized to make grants in 1964, and reorganized in 1975 as the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Its 15 members represent the three branches of the federal government and six professional associations of archivists, historians, documentary editors, and records officers. Budget talks for 2008 are starting the week of the 18th of June. Please contact your Congressional representatives now. The NHPRC grants program is authorized at $10 million through FY 2009. This valuable program received its fully authorized $10 million back in FY 2004. In FY 2007, Congress appropriated $5.5 million for NHPRC grants and $2 million for administrative costs, despite the Administration’s continued efforts to eliminate the program. If Congress allows the NHPRC grants to be dropped from the budget it would have a detrimental effect, causing funding from other sources to be withdrawn or reduced. This would be devastating to such projects as development of new archival programs, promotion of the preservation and use of historical records, coordination in addressing major archival issues, editing and publication of the papers of nationally significant individuals and institutions; and a series of other activities relating to documenting America's heritage.

Posted by Anne at 09:32 PM | Permalink

From Bloomberg:

The FDA's 20,365 unfilled [FOIA] requests for information exceed the totals for the departments of Defense and Justice. One company, FOI Services Inc., accounts for 44 percent of the backlog, according to the agency. Researchers, consumer groups and individuals say the delays limit their ability to alert the public to food and drug dangers and to hold the FDA accountable.

Posted by Anne at 09:29 PM | Permalink

From the Baltimore Sun:

The Bush administration sometimes fails to follow all provisions of laws after President Bush attaches "signing statements" meant to interpret or restrict the legislation, congressional examiners say.

Read the GAO Opinion on White House Signing Statements, June 18, 2007 (43 pages, PDF)

Posted by Anne at 08:33 PM | Permalink

From CNN:

Despite the new Democratic congressional leadership's promise of "openness and transparency" in the budget process, a CNN survey of the House found it nearly impossible to get information on lawmakers' pet projects.

Staffers for only 31 of the 435 members of the House contacted by CNN between Wednesday and Friday of last week supplied a list of their earmark requests for fiscal year 2008, which begins on October 1, or pointed callers to Web sites where those earmark requests were posted.

Of the remainder, 68 declined to provide CNN with a list, and 329 either didn't respond to requests or said they would get back to us, and didn't.

Posted by Anne at 08:32 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls -- the first circuit court ever to make that finding.

Over the last 20 years, the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant. But today's ruling -- closely following the reasoning in an amicus brief filed the by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups -- found that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment.

Posted by Anne at 08:30 PM | Permalink

From The Hill:

The destruction of e-mails from top White House officials “could be the most serious breach of the Presidential Records Act in the 30-year history of the law,” according to an interim report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The committee is investigating the use of non-White House e-mail accounts issued to senior staffers and whether these violate the Presidential Records Act. According to the interim report, which was released Monday, there is “evidence of potentially extensive violations” of the law.

Posted by Anne at 08:33 PM | Permalink

Federal Research: Policies Guiding the Dissemination of Scientific Research from Selected Agencies Should Be Clarified and Better Communicated, GAO-07-653, May 17, 2007

Researchers at federal agencies disseminate their research results through a variety of approaches, including scientific publications, presentations, press releases, and media interviews. Because of recent concerns about some federal researchers possibly being restricted from disseminating their research on controversial topics, GAO determined (1) the policies that guide the dissemination of federal research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); (2) how effectively these agencies have communicated their policies to researchers; and (3) the extent to which researchers have been restricted in disseminating their research.

Highlights (PDF)
Full Report (PDF)

Posted by Anne at 08:30 PM | Permalink

From Google's Public Policy Blog:

At the beginning of 2005, I was Google's lone public policy guy. Today, there's a bigger – and growing - team of us scattered around the world, working on issues like privacy, child online safety, copyright and trademark protection, content regulation, reform of the patent system, and broadband policy. These issues are fundamental to the future of the Internet (and of the individuals it empowers), and are increasingly prominent on the agendas of policymakers worldwide.

We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way. Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort, to know what we're saying and why, and to help us refine and improve our policy positions and advocacy strategies. With input and ideas from our users, we'll surely do a better job of fighting for our common interests.

This blog is part of the dialogue we're hoping to foster.

Posted by Anne at 08:26 PM | Permalink

The Sunlight Foundation reports:

Sen. Ted Stevens has

blocked the markup of legislation that would provide transparency for presidential library donations, which currently have no official disclosure requirements. . .

. . . Sen. Stevens has apparently objected that the new law would be prospective, e.g. it would capture what is going on now and in the future, but not the fundraising by former presidents and he's interested in former President Bill Clinton's fundraising for his library. But that's ridiculous. All legislation is prospective. There is a very real conflict of interest in private contributions to a sitting president to fund his legacy library. The public ought to know who's contributing this money, in real time.

Posted by Anne at 08:22 PM | Permalink

From the Austin American-Statesman:

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has placed a hold on a measure that would undo President Bush’s 2001 executive order that gave presidents and former presidents increased authority to block the release of White House records.

Coburn’s move came a day after a Senate committee advanced the measure, which had won overwhelming House approval in March and seemed headed for Senate approval.

Coburn’s staff had no immediate comment on Thursday, but a spokeswoman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said Coburn is not convinced lawmakers can overturn a presidential executive order. Maria Najera said the matter is being researched.

Posted by Anne at 08:18 PM | Permalink

From the Guardian:

Imagine Government 2.0. Wisdom no longer flows from officialdom to the population, but is co-created with citizens. Civil servants contribute openly to Facebook groups on controversies of the day. Government websites have wiki areas where people can exchange tips about filing tax returns or claiming benefits. Databases of restaurant inspections, tide tables and postcodes are available for all to see and re-use in mashups of geography, time or events. Before launching a new online public service, the government checks to see whether a user community is already doing it better. In short, government learns to let go of the web.

Read the report ‘The Power of Information’ [PDF 280KB, 57 pages] by Tom Steinberg, founder and Director of mySociety, and Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council.

Posted by Anne at 08:08 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

A judge ordered the FBI today to finally release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans' personal information. The ruling came just a day after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays.

EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report. This week, more evidence of abuse was uncovered by the Washington Post, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.

Posted by Anne at 08:05 PM | Permalink

From The National Archives (UK):

Vital government information is becoming increasingly fragile and could be lost forever unless something is done to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change. That was the stark warning as the government announced plans this week to address the need for digital preservation - making sure that information remains accessible for as long as it is needed, even after the format in which it was created has become obsolete.

This issue affects all governments worldwide but Britain is one of the first countries to tackle it. A ground-breaking project led by The National Archives will look at options for setting up a shared service across government departments to take, migrate and preserve digital data on their behalf.

Posted by Anne at 08:04 PM | Permalink

From Photo District News:

After years of litigation, Jerry Greenberg’s $400,000 judgment for willful copyright infringement against National Geographic Society has been vacated.

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed its own infringement verdict and vacated the jury award on June 13, explaining that the Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling in Tasini v. New York Times put the case in a new light that required the reversal.

Greenberg sued NGS in 1997 for infringement because the publisher used his images in a CD-ROM compilation of all back issues of National Geographic magazine. NGS argued all along that the compilation, called The Complete National Geographic, was a revision of its magazines. Under copyright law, publishers aren’t required to get permission from contributors for revisions of existing works.

Posted by Anne at 08:02 PM | Permalink

From News.com:

The Bush administration on Thursday blasted a congressional proposal that would shield a broad swath of news gatherers, including some bloggers, from revealing their confidential sources.

The latest draft of the Free Flow of Information Act would pose a grave threat to national security and federal criminal investigations by protecting far too large a segment of the population, a U.S. Department of Justice official told Congress.

Posted by Anne at 08:00 PM | Permalink

Introducing LOUIS:

Welcome to the first phase of LOUIS - the Library Of Unified Information Sources, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, and an effort, to paraphrase Justice Louis Brandeis, to illuminate the workings of the federal government. Our ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government. We are not there yet, but we can now offer these documents organized in a user-friendly interface, with a powerful search engine.

A screencast is available to help familiarize users with the site.

Posted by Anne at 08:34 PM | Permalink

From the Kansas City Star:

A Senate committee on Wednesday approved a bill to override President Bush’s executive order granting presidents and former presidents more power to block the release of White House records. The White House has promised to veto the bill, but the House approved it in March by a veto-proof 333-93 margin, and similar overwhelming approval is expected in the Senate.

Posted by Anne at 08:31 PM | Permalink

From the Houston Chronicle:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the actual number of mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousands, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

Posted by Anne at 08:23 PM | Permalink

The Capitolist FAQ:

The Capitolist is an anonymous, uncensored message board for congressional staff members. Contributors are welcome to express their views and opinions on congressional affairs, politics or any other subject of interest. We encourage contributors to discuss their first-hand experiences with lawmakers and to report on the events of the day.

Posted by Anne at 08:27 PM | Permalink

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs today approved the Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act. While the legislation would strengthen protections for federal whistleblowers who expose waste, fraud and abuse of power, it fails to address scientists who expose the manipulation, distortion, or suppression of their work, according the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Posted by Anne at 08:25 PM | Permalink

Press Release:

The leaders of the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the proposed creation of a new federal facility aimed at identifying terrorists. The Subcommittee is concerned that, without the proper safeguards in place, billions of personal records that will be stored there may be vulnerable to theft or abuse.

The FBI is currently seeking $12 million to develop a new, mammoth, data-mining center that will collect billions of records on individuals suspected of terrorist connections over the next few years. The new National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) proposed in the Department of Justice’s FY2008 budget justification document, will include 90,000 square feet of office space and a total of 59 staff, including 23 contractors and five FBI agents. . .

. . . “Documents predict the NASC will include six billion records by FY2012. This amounts to 20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States,” wrote the Subcommittee leaders.

Read the letter to GAO.

Posted by Anne at 08:23 PM | Permalink

Talking Books for the Blind, GAO-07-871R, June 12, 2007:

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a part of the Library of Congress, operates a free national talking (audio) book program for qualified blind, visually impaired, or physically disabled residents of the United States and its territories, as well as qualified U.S. citizens residing abroad. NLS produces and distributes analog cassette players and talking books and periodicals recorded on audio cassettes to approximately 434,000 individual subscribers and 33,000 institutions through a network of 132 participating libraries and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). . .

. . .The Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Committee on Appropriations asked us to review NLS planning and management of its digital talking book development and acquisition project. Specifically, our objectives were to determine to what extent NLS (1) performed sufficient analyses to select technologies for the next generation of the talking book system and (2) effectively managed the development of the selected digital talking book technology and mode of distribution.

Posted by Anne at 08:22 PM | Permalink

From the Environmental Working Group:

For decades, American taxpayers have provided tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies to some of the largest and wealthiest farm businesses in the nation. But thousands of people who benefited from the subsidy flow were shielded from public view behind layers of partnerships, joint ventures, limited liability corporations, cooperatives, and other business structures that obscured their personal subsidy claims.

Not anymore.

A new Web site, developed by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) from millions of previously unpublished USDA subsidy records and released today, provides nearly full disclosure of federal farm subsidy beneficiaries for the first time. The disclosures include individuals, sometimes numbering in the dozens, whose subsidy benefits pass through one or more plantation-scale farm businesses that produce vast quantities of subsidized cotton, rice and other crops. Many of those businesses receive millions in USDA crop subsidies each year, and according to the new USDA