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“The FBI recently began open beta testing of eFOIA, a system that puts Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests into a medium more familiar to an ever-increasing segment of the population. This new system allows the public to make online FOIA requests for FBI records and receive the results from a website where they have …
News release: “Beginning Sunday, November 29, the government is prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk under Section 215, including of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons. And, while under the prior program NSA collected metadata in bulk and sought court approval for individual queries, the USA FREEDOM Act requires that the government must now …
The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World – An Analysis Paper | No. 20, March 2015. The ISIS Twitter Census – Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter. J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan. “The Islamic State, known as ISIS or ISIL, has exploited social media, most notoriously Twitter, to …
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Pew – “Although many observers have documented a global decline in democratic rights in recent years, people around the world nonetheless embrace fundamental democratic values, including free expression. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities in nearly all 38 nations polled say it is at least somewhat important to live in a country …
Josh Schwartzman, Max Shron – Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu “Using matching and regression analyses, we measure the difference in citations between articles posted to Academia.edu and other articles from similar journals, controlling for field, impact factor, and other variables. Based on a sample size of 34,940 papers, we find that …
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org today, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites. The project, made possible by a 2014 Knight News Challenge award, will address how social media sites moderate user-generated content and how free expression is affected across …
ACLU: “Location records can reveal an enormous of information about a person, especially with the proliferation of smartphones that constantly track our whereabouts. Because privacy laws haven’t kept up with advances in technology, police have long claimed the authority to access this information from cell phone companies without warrants. That’s changing. While Congress and the …
News release: “Web-based training sessions about powerful new insecticides seeping into some of the continent’s most sensitive wetlands were cancelled by a senior U.S. Department of Agriculture official due to its subject matter, according to documents posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER is characterizing the cancellation as another example of USDA …
“Many of the world’s most powerful Internet and telecommunications companies are not doing enough to respect basic user rights, according to new research released today. Even the companies that ranked highest are missing the mark in some ways, and improvements are needed across the board to demonstrate a greater commitment to users’ freedom of expression …
“Thirty-two years ago, a NATO nuclear release exercise named Able Archer 83 “may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger,” according to an above-Top Secret President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report released last month to the National Security Archive after a twelve-year fight. The release sparked extensive media coverage …
The Open Government Partnership – Third Open Government National Action Plan for the United States. October 27, 2015 “Open government has long been a cornerstone of democracy in the United States. Principles of transparency and an accountable, responsive government are embedded in Federal law and the U.S. Constitution, and the United States was one of …
