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Each year the Congressional Research Search (CRS) publishes approximately 1,000 reports of which the public may have access to several hundred. In an interesting change of policy, Secrecy News reports that access to selected reports previously provided via the websites of two members of Congress, Rep. Mark Green (R-WI) and Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), has …
Below I have posted part of an email message sent to law-lib late this evening by one of our colleagues, Amy Hale-Janeke: “The San Diego County Public Law Library will be closed tomorrow, Oct. 28th due to the fire disaster. We were also closed today. For those of you who have not been watching the …
California’s pioneering Financial Information Privacy Act SB 1, signed by Gov. Gray Davis on August 27, is in serious jeopardy of being preempted by amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Congress Is Close to Eliminating a Privacy Law Privacy bill may curtail safeguards in state law
AP reports that the White House has failed to cooperate with the bi-partisan commission investigating the 9-11 attacks. This action takes the form of refusing to provide essential documents to the commission despite the threat of a subpoena. The panel is facing a May 27, 2004 deadline to complete its work. According to an October …
Post Office Wants to ID the Mail: “A small change in labeling requirements for bulk mailings announced Oct. 21 requires bulk mailers to identify themselves on the outside of the envelope with a valid address. This marks the first step in the Postal Service’s desire to create “intelligent mail.” See Embracing the Future: Making the …
This link is to the text of an email sent by the Author’s Guild to its 8,000 plus members, voicing concerns about Amazon’s new Search Inside the Book database: The Guild questions whether proper permissions were received from the authors of the 120,000 books in Amazon’s database. In addition, the organization has deteremined that it …
Telecommunications: Issues Related to Competition and Subscriber Rates in the Cable Television Industry. GAO-04-8, October 24. Highlights. “Competition leads to lower cable rates and improved quality. Competition from a wide-based company is limited to a very few markets. However, where available, cable rates are substantially lower (by 15 percent) than in markets without this competition.”
Today the New York Times reports on two students MIT students who, with the backing of their university, have devised a music sharing system called the Libraries Access to Music Project (LAMP), which they contend will eliminate the contentious copyright issues currently associated with file sharing on campuses nationwide. Their work is financed by Microsoft, …
Achieving E-Government for All: Highlights from a National Survey, published October 22, by Darrell M. West, Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University. More than 1,600 local, state and federal websites were reviewed using the free Bobby Accessibility Test. Several key facts: government data is increasingly migrating to the web; more than 100 million …
Today California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced that the state won a judgment of $2 million against a spammer (The People of the State of California v. PW Marketing, Santa Clara County Superior Court) in what will be a model for future cases involving unsolicited email. As I posted previously, the state’s new anti-spam law …
This article from the October 21 Washington Post answers the question of why there is no longer any media coverage on the return of our military personnel who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently this past March, the Pentagon issued a directive stating: “There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, …
Federal Computer Week reports on the continued lack of support for funding e-government initiatives, as the Senate approved a paltry $5 million of the $45 million requested by the President for Fiscal 2004. According to the OMB’s Statement of Administration Policy: “As has been demonstrated by successes from the modest $5 million invested in each …
