Author archives

Report Backs Public Access to CRS Reports

Congressional Research Service Products: Taxpayers Should Have Easy Access. From the report: “$81 million of tax-payer money funded the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in FY 2002. CRS authors products at the request of current Members of Congress, many of whom become lobbyists, but CRS products are made difficult if not impossible for the public to …

Subjects: Congress, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legislation

Draft of New Patriot Act Legislation

The advocacy group Public Integrity issued a press release on February 7 detailing their research on a previously secret 120 page draft of what is being called the “Patriot Act II” legislation, which apparently has not been shared with the House Judiciary Committee. This draft was written by the staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft. …

Subjects: Courts, Patriot Act, Privacy

More Opposition to Gov't Data Mining

The National Journal reports that opposition to the government’s Total Information Awareness Project continues to gain momentum. Sen. Ron Wyden, who spearheaded a bill to limit spending on the program, spoke this week with a coalition of advocacy groups including the ACLU, in an effort to ensure that the upcoming conference report will adopt the …

Subjects: E-Government, Internet, Privacy

Joint Study to Improve Health-Related Web Searches

The URAC (a non-profit charitable organization that establishes standards for the health care industry) and Consumer WebWatch (a non-profit that “seeks to improve the credibility of online information”, are partnering on a project to improve consumer access to health data on the web. Their study will entail benchmarking the quality of health related information on …

Subjects: Search Engines

E-Lawyering

There has been an increased focus on e-lawyering lately, although the provision of free and fee-based services online has been underway for years. Two recent resources from the ABA on how lawyers are using email and the Web to market and deliver services to clients are: Some Call It eLawyering: Is It a Brave New …

Subjects: Marketing

GPO and Privacy Issuances

GPO Access recently made available The Privacy Act Issuances, 1995, 1997 1999, and 2001 Compilations Online. The fully searchable database uses a template to enter information in the following fields: Full text of the Privacy Act Notices, Agency, System Number, or System Name, and also supports Boolean searching. The data entails “descriptions of Federal agency …

Subjects: E-Government, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Privacy

Rating Top 250 Law Firm Websites

Micah U. Buchdahl of HTMLawyers, Inc. has published his IMA (Internet Marketing Attorney) web site reviews and awards. Well worth a read, Micah has spent considerable time evaluating the sites of the 250 largest law firms in the United States, and ranking them according to his determination of their merits in the following categories: design, …

Subjects: Internet, Marketing