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Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – “Committed to the protection of civil liberties and privacy in the nation’s efforts against terrorism” 19 March Hearing – Agenda, Witness Testimony Now Available See also ComputerWorld: “A U.S. National Security Agency surveillance program focused on overseas telephone and email communications is targeted and narrow, and not the bulk collection …
Pinterest Blog: “Every company that stores information — from banks to phone companies to email providers — must respond to requests for that information from folks like law enforcement agencies, courts, and others. We think it’s important that you know about these requests. That’s why we’re publishing our first transparency report, covering the six months …
2014 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas via the Guardian: Eric Schmidt to dictators: ‘You don’t turn off the internet: you infiltrate it’: “Google’s executive chairman concerned by manipulative new approach of governments spooked by popular uprisings…Schmidt was pressed on the last year’s revelations of surveillance by agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US, …
CRS – Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests. Jim Nichol, Coordinator, Specialist in Russian and Eurasian Affairs. March 5, 2014. “Russia made uneven progress in democratization during the 1990s, but this limited progress was reversed after Vladimir Putin rose to power in 1999-2000, according to many observers. During this period, the State Duma (lower legislative chamber) became dominated by …
Follow up to previous postings on license plate collection programs – see Shawn Musgrave’s article [editor of MuckRock via BetaBoston]: “Today, a legislative committee in Boston is scheduled to hold a hearing on a bill that would ban most uses of license plate readers, including the vehicle repossession business, making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll …
Positive Thinking About the Future in Newspaper Reports and Presidential Addresses Predicts Economic Downturn. Sevincer AT, Wagner G, Kalvelage J, Oettingen G. Published online before print, February 4, 2014, doi:10.1177/0956797613518350. “Previous research has shown that positive thinking, in the form of fantasies about an idealized future, predicts low effort and poor performance. In the studies reported here, we used computerized …
[snipped – article includes charts and graphics] – “Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few …
Secrecy News: “The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that builds and operates U.S. intelligence satellites, frequently makes mistakes when it classifies national security information, according to an assessment performed last year by the NRO Inspector General. “From the classified documents we reviewed at NRO headquarters, 114 of 134 documents contained classification errors,” the IG report said. Agency classification …
CNN: “The first batch of a massive collection of confidential memos and papers from the Clinton White House will be released Friday, Februrary 28, 2014 by the former commander-in-chief’s presidential library, the National Archives and Records Administration announced Thursday. Approximately 25,000 pages of new documents, including confidential communications between President Bill Clinton and his top advisers, will be …
“The Naval War College just unveiled a new online publication – the 4,000-page “Gray Book” collection of Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz communications that started in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack and ran right up until the closing days of the war. This eight volume collection is available here, and will be a great …
U.S. PIRG – Closing the Billion Dollar Loophole – How States Are Reclaiming Revenue Lost to Offshore Tax Havens: “Every year, corporations use complicated gimmicks to shift U.S. earnings to subsidiaries in offshore tax havens – countries with minimal or no taxes – in order to reduce their state and federal income tax liability by billions of dollars. …
Computational Analysis of Official Secrecy – a project by historians, data scientists, legal scholars, and transparency advocates from Columbia University: “The enormous growth in the number of official documents – many of them withheld from scholars and journalists even decades later – has raised serious concerns about whether traditional research methods are adequate for ensuring government accountability. But …
