Part-Time Policy Wonk

From News.com:

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to divulge documents related to immunizing telecommunications companies from lawsuits, saying they illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence until November 30 (Friday) to turn over documents relating to conversations it had with Congress and telecommunications carriers about how to rewrite wiretapping laws.

Posted by Anne at 05:37 PM | Permalink

From SLA’s Government Information Division:

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has posted a new edition of its USA Services Intergovernmental Newsletter with an e-government theme.

How E-Government is Changing Society and Strengthening Democracy, the Fall 2007 issue, presents 47 pages of articles on the topic, including:

• MAPLight.org: Shining a Light on Money and Politics, by Dan Newman (who was a speaker for our Mashups and Re-mixes program at SLA/Denver 2007)
• Stimulating Citizen Engagement in Government: Hampton, Virginia, by Charles N. Sapp and John Eagle
• Australia's Principles for ICT-Enabled Citizen Engagement
• Generational E-Democracy in Maine, by Matthew Dunlap and Lisa Ann Leahy
• Government Participation in Social Networks: Joining the Conversation, by Kevin Novak
• E-Authentication: Safeguarding Citizen Identity, by Georgia March and Jeff Gallimore
• and more ...

The articles are organized around the themes of building trust in government, engaging citizens, public comment, using social media, and getting to mature e-democracy.

Posted by Anne at 07:51 PM | Permalink

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

Posted by Anne at 07:50 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

As Justice Louis Brandeis said (I think), states can serve as laboratories of democracy. Out of the Land of Lincoln comes an idea, an effort proponents say is a first step in restoring transparency to lawmaking in the Prairie State.

Citizens and activist groups are attempting to pass the "Show Us" amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would require a three week (21 days) delay from the date all non-emergency bills are introduced to when they receive a final vote. The goal is to give citizens an opportunity to know what the legislature is voting on and give input.

Posted by Anne at 07:49 PM | Permalink

From NARA:

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum will release approximately 122,800 pages of historical materials from the Nixon presidency at the National Archives in College Park, MD.

Highlights include national security documents on U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Soviet Union, and on the Kurds. Also included are documents on the Vietnam War, on dealing with the terrorist Black September Organization, on producing the CIA’s Presidential Daily Brief, and on U.S. covert action in Chile. A selection of 15 documents from the release will be posted on the Nixon Presidential Library web site at www.nixonlibrary.gov.

Posted by Anne at 07:48 PM | Permalink

From the Miller Center of Public Affairs:

Between 1940 and 1973, six American presidents from both political parties secretly recorded just under 5,000 hours of conversations. This site is designed as a service to the research community by making freely available all of the presidential recordings, along with relevant research materials, so that scholars, teachers, students, and the public can hear and use these remarkable tapes for themselves.

To access the PRP's Transcripts, go to http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/transcripts.

Posted by Anne at 07:46 PM | Permalink

From Federal Computer Week:

The Office of Management and Budget has issued preliminary instructions Nov. 9 to agencies on how to report contract, grant and other types of financial data for inclusion in the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) system.

In a memo to agency secretaries, Robert Shea, OMB’s associate director for management, said the administration will issue a final policy when it launches the database by Jan. 1, 2008.

Posted by Anne at 08:46 PM | Permalink

From Good Jobs First:

State governments are improving their transparency practices, but many are still not taking full advantage of the Internet to inform the public. Online disclosure of corporate tax breaks and other economic development subsidies lags far behind reporting on procurement contracts and lobbying activities. These are the main findings of a report entitled The State of State Disclosure released today by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

Executive Summary (PDF; 63 KB)
Full Report (PDF; 496 KB)

Posted by Anne at 08:44 PM | Permalink

From the Associated Press:

Barack Obama, who's been scolding Hillary Rodham Clinton for not hastening the release of records from her time as first lady, says he can't step up and produce his own records from his days in the Illinois state Senate. He says he hasn't got any.

"I don't have — I don't maintain — a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn't have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records," he said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. He said he wasn't sure where any cache of records might have gone, adding, "It could have been thrown out. I haven't been in the state Senate now for quite some time."

Posted by Anne at 08:43 PM | Permalink

From History News Network:

A federal judge recently overturned part of an order by President George W. Bush that had strengthened the ability of former Presidents to block disclosures from their files. She said the National Archives has the final say on what is opened from Presidential records. But the Archives' difficulties in releasing Richard Nixon's records suggest that the ruling may have little impact on what the public learns about Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush.

Posted by Anne at 08:42 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.org:

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

Posted by Anne at 08:41 PM | Permalink

From Talking Points Memo:

Another year has almost passed under the Bush Administration, and so it's time to review how much less we know.

Last year, we launched the insanely ambitious project of recording every significant instance of this administration stifling government information. As we said then, "they've discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps." To be sure, the list will continue to grow through January, 2008.

Posted by Anne at 08:40 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Both the full House of Representatives and the Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to keep telecommunications companies on the hook for their role in illegal government spying on millions of ordinary Americans -- at least for now.

The bills each make changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But, despite veto threats from the White House, neither of the two bills give blanket amnesty to telecoms that took part in the massive warrantless domestic surveillance program. Both bills would allow dozens of lawsuits against the telecoms to proceed, thus allowing federal courts to rule on whether dragnet domestic surveillance documented is legal.

Posted by Anne at 08:39 PM | Permalink

From the Mercury News:

Yahoo settled a lawsuit Tuesday brought against it by two imprisoned Chinese journalists who accused the Sunnyvale search giant of being complicit in their arrests for pro-democracy activities online.

In an unusual development, the deal was driven by the personal involvement of Yahoo Chief Executive and co-founder Jerry Yang, who publicly apologized to the journalists' families during a heated congressional hearing last week.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Kable's Government Computing:

Land Registry has pulled potentially sensitive documents from its online service

As from midnight on 5 November 2007, online access to documents such as mortgage deeds and leases will be removed. Members of the public wishing to inspect or have copies of any such documents can do so by applying in writing to Land Registry.

The move followed a report in The Daily Mail that criminal gangs have stolen £12m over the past two years by exploiting loopholes in the website. They gained access to documents such as title deeds to make it possible to sell properties they did not own.

Posted by Anne at 07:32 PM | Permalink

From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, launched a new online government document database, governmentdocs.org, at a tele-news conference.

The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind. . .

• Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.
• A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.
• Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
• Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.
• The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations' documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.

Posted by Anne at 07:43 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

A federal judge today ruled on a preservation motion filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ordering that telecommunications companies must preserve any evidence of collaborating with the government in illegal spying on ordinary Americans.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ordered the telecommunications companies to halt any routine destruction of documents or to arrange for the preservation of accurate copies. On December 14, each party must provide the court with confirmation that the court's order has been carried out. The court order did not require the government or the carriers to reveal whether or not they had any relevant evidence.

Posted by Anne at 07:42 PM | Permalink

From The Secrecy File:

You might think that the massive farm bill now on the table has nothing to do with government secrecy, but it does.

OpenTheGovernment.org, an umbrella organization of conservative and liberal organizations, discovered a provision in the measure that would create an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for all records related to the Agriculture Department’s animal identification system.

The National Animal Identification System tracks sick animals through the system, among other things. It includes cows with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, commonly known as “mad cow,” disease.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, is lobbying against the provision because it would “create an unnecessary bar” to finding out about the condition of animals in the nation’s food supply and how they are handled in the system.

Posted by Anne at 08:13 PM | Permalink

From OpenCongress.org:

If it hadn't been for the blogs, I, like many others, wouldn't have noticed H.R.1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. The bill was quietly approved by the House last week on a near-unanimous vote and the main stream media has all but ignored it. But as bloggers everywhere have pointed out, the bill's language is so ambiguous that it seems to define thoughtcrime and, since it is unlike most terrorism bills in that it's focus is on U.S. civilians, it raises important questions about the safety of our civil liberties.

Posted by Anne at 08:10 PM | Permalink

From the CBS News Horserace blog:

On Friday, The Politico reported that the Clinton library was preparing 10,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's "daily schedules" to be released in late January, though that release could be slowed down by the review process. Clinton has chalked up delays in releasing the documents to the difficulty of processing them as opposed to any efforts on the Clintons' part to suppress them.

"The Archives is moving as rapidly as the Archives moves," she said at the debate. "There's about 20 million pieces of paper there and they are moving, and they are releasing as they do their process. And I am fully in favor of that." Some documents related to Hillary Clinton have yet to even be processed by the Archives.

Posted by Anne at 08:08 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication.

Posted by Anne at 08:06 PM | Permalink

From The Gazette, the internal newsletter of the Library of Congress, and posted on the Library of Congress Blog:

The Librarian of Congress and the Library’s senior managers summoned to a House Administration Committee hearing on Oct. 24 countered members’ suggestions that they take their cues from Wal-Mart, Target or UPS on how to control and track the Library’s collections inventory.

They also refuted a Washington Post headline and story, published the morning of the hearing, which said 17 percent of the Library’s general collections is “missing.” The story was based on Inspector General Karl W. Schornagel’s March 2007 audit survey report, “Survey of Collections Access, Loan, and Management Division Service,” which was also a subject of the congressional hearing. Schornagel is authorized by statute to operate independently of the Library and to report directly to Congress.

Posted by Anne at 08:05 PM | Permalink

From the Better Government Association and National Freedom of Information Coalition:

Freedom of information laws are only as good as the response mechanisms built into the laws themselves. After all, if citizens can't take action to enforce their right of access shy of filing suit, what good are FOI laws?

When it comes to responsiveness measures, not much good at all.

The Better Government Association (BGA) and the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC) have united to review the recourse afforded citizens in the public records laws of all 50 states, and the conclusions make for some relentlessly depressing reading.

The tools available to citizens to enforce their rights under state FOI laws are, with rare exceptions, endemically weak.

The haphazard construction of state public records laws has resulted in an information gap that significantly affects the citizenry's ability to examine even the most fundamental actions of government, the study found.

Posted by Anne at 08:03 PM | Permalink

From The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register:

West Virginia’s Legislature has carved out nearly 100 exceptions to the state’s public records and open meetings laws since crafting them three decades ago, a review by The Associated Press has found.

From the results of regulatory probes to the location of endangered wild animals and rare plants, lawmakers have steadily added limits to the public’s right to know. Such additions are necessary, legislators say. Open records advocates disagree.

Posted by Anne at 08:02 PM | Permalink

SLA Press Release:

Sandia is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, and is managed by Lockheed Martin. It is government owned and contractor operated. Funding is provided by the Department of Energy, with other major funding through the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Special Libraries Association (SLA), a nonprofit global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners, has asked that Sandia National Laboratories reconsider its plans to close their research library due to budget reductions. In a letter to Sandia's President and Director Thomas Hunter, dated 23 October, SLA called the decision short-sighted and dangerous.

Further reading from ASM News: Sandia Cuts Off Access to 'Hard-Copy Content' in Tech Library

Posted by Anne at 08:00 PM | Permalink

From LLRX:

If you look at FOIA litigation in only the context of who ultimately wins a case, you would come to the conclusion that the government routinely is the complete victor. That conclusion, however, would be wrong.

The results of FOIA litigation are much more than just a judge's opinion for one of the two sides in the case. Bringing a FOIA case often results in a more timely release of information, more information being released then the agency would have released if it wasn't in litigation and more information going to the requester about agency decisions and withheld documents.

Posted by Anne at 07:59 PM | Permalink

From the Financial Times:

A top Yahoo official who has come under fire for the company’s role in the 2004 imprisonment of a dissident in China apologised on Thursday for failing to tell US lawmakers that Yahoo knew more about the case than he initially acknowledged in testimony last year.

Michael Callahan, Yahoo’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement ahead of a congressional hearing next week that he “realised” that Yahoo had additional information about the nature of the probe into one of its users, Shi Tao, a journalist now serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, months after he testified that Yahoo had “no information” about the investigation.

Posted by Anne at 08:41 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

A little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight.

Draft House and Senate bills would allow the government to compel any "communications service provider" to provide access to e-mails and other electronic information within the United States as part of federal surveillance of non-U.S. citizens outside the country.

The Justice Department has previously said that "providers" may include libraries, causing three major university and library groups to worry that the government's ability to monitor people targeted for surveillance without a warrant would chill students' and faculty members' online research activities.

Posted by Anne at 08:40 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

The Senate appears deadlocked over legislation that would require members to file their campaign finance forms electronically -- the method used by their House counterparts, presidential candidates and the majority of state lawmakers.

Instead of submitting forms electronically, senators print their reports and deliver them to the clerk's office. The staff there scans them into a computer and transmits them electronically to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then prints the forms again and hires workers to type the information into a database so they can be made public online.

The practical result is that it can take months for Senate campaign filings to become publicly available. Names of donors to a particular campaign often will not be known until long after Election Day has come and gone.

Posted by Anne at 08:39 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

Earlier this month, Texas released a state spending database. The database, “Where the Money Goes,” allows citizens to search state spending by agency and recipient. The Houston Chronicle, makes the point that the bill that created this database was “modeled after federal legislation passed last year.” The Coburn-Obama bill’s teeth went all the way down to state level.

Texas is now one of six states this year that have created a database or adopted laws that require a spending database to be created.

Posted by Anne at 08:39 PM | Permalink

From the House Oversight Committee:

The White House is withholding hundreds of pages of documents about the activities of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff on the grounds that these documents involve internal White House deliberations. Unless the President is prepared to assert executive privilege over these documents, they should be tumed over to the Oversight Committee without further delay.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Online video-hosting services like YouTube have ushered in a new era of free expression online, as well as vigorous copyright enforcement efforts. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of leading public interest groups issued a "Fair Use Principles" document that sets out six concrete guidelines designed to minimize the collateral damage that copyright enforcement efforts may inflict on video creators who are "remixing" copyrighted material into new video creations.

Posted by Anne at 08:36 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

Broad classification restrictions on the disclosure of historical intelligence information are making it difficult or impossible to accurately represent the record of U.S. foreign policy, an official advisory committee warned in a report (pdf) to the Secretary of State last summer.

By law, the Department of State is obliged to publish "a thorough, accurate and reliable documentary record" of United States foreign policy in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.

But due to official secrecy, "the credibility of the series... remains in the balance," according to the newly disclosed report of the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

See "Report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, January 1-December 31, 2006," transmitted to the Secretary of State on June 19, 2007.

Posted by Anne at 08:33 PM | Permalink

From Secrecy News:

Although summary accounts of several National Intelligence Estimates have recently been declassified and published, this should not become standard practice, the Director of National Intelligence declared last week.

"It is the policy of the Director of National Intelligence that KJs [the Key Judgments from National Intelligence Estimates] should not be declassified," DNI J. Michael McConnell wrote.

See "Guidance on Declassification of National Intelligence Estimate Key Judgments," memo to the Intelligence Community Workforce, October 24, 2007.

Also, from the International Herald Tribune: US Intelligence officials clamping down on release of intelligence estimates

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top U.S. intelligence official said Friday.

Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts' willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell.

Posted by Anne at 08:31 PM | Permalink