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“EPIC joined a letter signed by a coalition of privacy and civil liberty organizations to urge the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to open the markup process of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) to the public. CISPA suspends privacy safeguards so that companies can disclose vast amounts of customer and client …
James R. Jacobs – Government Information Librarian – Stanford University: “…[we have created] a petition on the White House’s “We the People” petition site. If you believe in free permanent public access to authentic government information, we hope you’ll sign the petition. And if every one of the @2500 govdoc-l subscribers signs, posts to their …
EFF: “Law professor and historian Tim Wu has called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) the worst law in technology. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has described the governments interpretation of it expansive, broad, and sweeping. And Orin Kerr, former federal prosecutor and law professor, has detailed how the government could use it …
Union of Concerned Scientists – “A strong democracy depends on transparency, accountability, and trust in the government to make evidence-based decisions that protect public health and the environment. Federal scientists play an important role in fulfilling this mandate by providing critical expertise to decision makers and the American people. But sometimes, political or commercial forces …
“A federal district court judge in San Francisco has ruled that National Security Letter (NSL) provisions in federal law violate the Constitution. The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a NSL on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In the ruling publicly released [March 15, 2013], Judge Susan …
The Implausibility of Secrecy, by Mark Fenster. University of Florida – Fredric G. Levin College of Law. February 18, 2013 “Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branchs obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administrations celebrated …
“In celebration of Sunshine Week, a number of organizations released Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reviews. These reviews, conducted by National Security Archives, the Center for Effective Government, Cause of Action, Associated Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org, indicate how agencies measure up when it comes to providing the public with information. Although the studies indicate that agencies …
Follow up to previous postings on Aaron Swartz, news that Aaron is to be honored with freedom of information award by the American Library Association – “A champion of open access rights to documents on the Internet, the 26-year-old activist under prosecution committed suicide earlier this year.” See also Aaron Swartzs Lawyers Accuse Prosecutors of …
“The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives you the right to access information from federal agencies. FOIAonline allows you to submit FOIA requests to all participating agencies from this website, track the status of requests, search for requests submitted by others, and generate up-to-the-minute reports on FOIA processing. FOIAonline participating agencies include: the Environmental Protection …
“Federal court records show that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits challenging government secrecy by news groups have declined, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). This slump in the number of media suits does not seem to indicate that there is less government secrecy. In fact, the overall number of …
Freedom of Information Act Performance, 2012: Agencies Are Processing More Requests but Redacting More Often. Center for Effective Government, March 13, 2013 “A building block of American democracy is the idea that citizens have a right to information about how their government works and what it does in their name. However, citizen access to public …
News release: “The Justice Departments Open Government Plan version 2.0 (PDF) announced a variety of new Department initiatives concerning the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A key initiative of this plan was the development of metadata standards that would facilitate the ability of interested persons to search and retrieve documents across websites …
