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Fixing Pre-Publication Review: What Should Be Done? by Steven Aftergood, January 15, 2016. “Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway called attention in several recent columns to the pre-publication review process (here, here, here, and here) that many current and former national security officials and other government employees must submit to before their work can be published. …
Mondale, Walter F. and Stein, Robert A. and Fisher, Caitlinrose, No Longer a Neutral Magistrate: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the Wake of the War on Terror (January 1, 2016). Minnesota Law Review, Forthcoming. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2712892 Since the founding of our nation, the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government …
The Year in Homidices – Written and compiled by Edward Ericson Jr., Kenneth Stone Breckenridge, Rebekah Kirkman, and Brandon Soderberg – The following was written by Karen Houppert, City Paper editor: “People are killing people in the streets of Baltimore, nearly every day. In 2015, there were 344 homicides—most of them young black men. If …
“Freedom of Information complaints filed against the government — 498 in FY 2015 — are higher than they have ever been, according to a new analysis of fifteen years of court data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). The data further show that in the two-year period of FY 2014 – 2015 under President …
Kelly Hinchcliffe – “Each month in this column, I try to feature journalists who are telling important stories using public records. For my final column of 2015, I wanted to do something big and decided to find public records stories from all 50 states (plus, a bonus: Washington, D.C.). This is not meant to be …
Via POGO – “For the first time, U.S. residents will have access to data that documents how much individual companies are paying for the extraction of natural resources from public lands, as well as a more accurate picture of job creation and economic impact in the 18 states with the most drilling and mining activity …
“EPIC and a coalition of transparency advocates urged the Office of Management and Budget to comply with President Obama’s plan to promote open government. The OMB is expected to produce an open government plan, “describ[ing] how it will improve transparency.” However, OMB Has failed to act even as the Administration has urged other governments to …
“The Intercept has obtained a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States. The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, …
EFF – “A Victory for Privacy and Transparency: HRW v. DEA – In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only …
ArsTechnica – “For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target’s complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded …
“Governor Andrew M. Cuomo [on December 13, 2015] signed an executive order to expedite the freedom of information law appeals process. The order fast-tracks FOIL appeals by requiring that all state agencies file notice of an appeal, settle the record on appeal, and file a brief within 60 days, absent extraordinary circumstances outside agency control. …
“The 2015 edition of the Measuring the Information Society Report was launched on 30 November, 2015, on the first day of the World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium (WTIS) 2015, in Hiroshima, Japan. Parallel launch events took place in Addis Ababa, Brasilia, Cairo, Geneva and Moscow. The Report, which has been published annually since 2009, features key ICT …
