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The New York City Council has passed, and sent to Mayor Bloomberg for signature, the first bill of its kind for any city or state, requiring online publication of all city agency reports and publications within ten days of issuance. A prior press release is available here. All documents are to be sent in electronic …
C-SPAN has a public service called CapitalHearings.org that allows you to listen live, via streaming audio, to selected Senate hearings. The site provides a schedule indicating the committee, time and location of each respective hearing.
The Department of Homeland Security quickly issued, without benefit of public comment, new final interim regulations limiting public access to secret and sensitive agency information under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Procedures.
Effective January 24, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms became the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) as provided in the Homeland Security Act of 2002. See this document detailing the change. The newly launched website for the TTB is here, and includes the following resource areas: Alcohol & Tobacco Newsletter, Alcohol …
Momentum against the TIA program is escalating, as the Senate agreed yesterday in a voice vote to accept Ron Wyden’s Amendment 59 to H. Res. 15, the continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2003. The purpose of the amendment is to block the use of funds for further development and expansion of the program until …
The Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Public Policy Committee issued a press release “recommending a rigorous independent review of the U.S. Government’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.” The organization also issued a copy of a letter they sent to the Armed Services Committee, on behalf of their membership of 70,000 computer scientists, stating in part: …
Since last summer, there have been a series of articles discussing the impending introduction of a new e-gov portal that will facilitate easy online access to, and accept public comments on, the thousands of proposed rules and regulations from over 150 federal agencies that appear each year in the Federal Register. After much delay, the …
The administration’s proposed plans for e-government initiatives have been dealt a significant blow by Senate appropriations actions which cut $40 million from the requested total of $45 million for FY 2003. Through the E-Government Act of 2002, agencies are working on a coordinated effort to streamline, standardize and improve the management and operation of online …
U.S. military websites are subject to a new directive issued on January 3 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to remove sensitive, unclassified information published on the huge DOD web databases (comprising 770 gigabytes of total data), that could potentially be of assistance to the intelligence gathering efforts of our enemies.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles apparently caught personnel from Allstate Insurance illegally accessing online records for personal purposes, and subsequently banned the company’s direct access to the system pending further review. Previous incidents involving obtaining personal data through online DMV searches has resulted in criminal acts, and is therefore an issue of significant concern for …
The increased focus on the activities of the Total Information Awareness program culminated this week with several legislative initiatives, as mentioned in my post here. It is interesting to note that the TIA site now hosts a slide show with detailed accompanying notes, titled, Security With Privacy (in PDF). There is also a media update …
Senators Ron Wyden, and Harry Reid are seeking to disable the Total Information Awareness surveillance program by the most direct means possible – an amendment to discontinue its funding. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a press release that stated, “It is time for the Senate to put some reins on this …
