Category «Freedom of Information»

Trump is looting our country. He just gave us (more) proof.

Lawyer Oyer – Trump is looting our country. He just gave us (more) proof. “This week [May 17, 2026], Trump filed a government ethics disclosure known as Form 278-T. It’s a roadmap to the corruption and conflicts of interest that have pervaded his presidency. Call me old fashioned, but it continues to surprise me that …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Securities Law

Taxpayer Funding for National Parks Diverted to Trump Vanity Projects in DC, NY

Via Crooked: A…New York Times review of federal documents found that $67 million in entry fees paid at national parks are now funding Trump’s D.C. construction projects. More specifically, $60 million is going toward repairing nine of the “capital’s ornamental fountains.” The last $7 million is going into the Reflecting Pool. [Note – no bid …

Subjects: Economy, Environmental Law, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research

Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement

Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement, Federal Register, May 27, 2026 AGENCY: Office of Personnel Management. ACTION: Notice with request for comment. SUMMARY: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requests comment on a draft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for use by Federal agencies for both new and existing employees. The form is intended to document Federal employees’ …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, E-Government, E-Mail, E-Records, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Data.gov: Implementation and Perspectives on Its Functions

CRS Report – Data.gov: Implementation and Perspectives on Its Functions. P.L.115-435 Publication Date: 05/21/2026. “…The OPEN Government Data Act defines data as “recorded information” and data asset as “a collection of data elements or data sets that may be grouped together.” However, OMB’s definition from implementation guidance in Memorandum M-25-05 interpreted the act’s definition of …

Subjects: E-Government, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation

Local prosecutors warn Trump: “If you send ICE to the polls, we’ll put them in jail.”

Defiance News: “Today, a coalition of locally elected district attorneys and prosecutors from across the United States have officially put the Trump administration on notice: any federal agent who shows up at a polling place in violation of state or federal law will be investigated and prosecuted under the laws of the jurisdiction in which …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Ever Been a Member of the Federalist Society or Endorsed Unitary Executive Theory

A serious claim requiring serious consideration. Christopher Armitage – “The Federalist Society spent forty years building a captured federal judiciary, and we are now living inside the result. The doctrine they built it around has a name, unitary executive theory, and the doctrine has a method. The method is to read every Democratic exercise of …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

SolarWinds Hack Was More Humiliating for the Government Than We Thought

Gizmodo: “The SolarWinds attack in 2020 was a humiliating all-out assault on U.S. government cybersecurity, and it’s likely that one key reason it’s not more famous is that we still know very little about what the hackers achieved. But we now have a few more crumbs to work with, because new revelations from Bloomberg have …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

DOJ Scrubbed its Website of Documents Related to January 6th Crimes

Follow up to $1.8 Billion Fund Could Funnel Money to Trump Allies, Decoding Fox News – The DOJ website now shows a blank page. Links to documents have been eliminated. I posted real time reporting throughout January 6, 2021 and identified a number of sources to access government documents specific to the event. These documents are …

Subjects: Censorship, Copyright, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation

Judge rules Trump White House must comply with Presidential Records Act

Citizens for Ethics: “A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction today requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve text messages, including Signal messages, pertaining to its work, in response to a motion filed and argued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on behalf of the Freedom of the …

Subjects: Censorship, Courts, E-Government, E-Mail, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research

Auschwitz Started in a Warehouse Too

Glass Empires: “This article is the historical companion to yesterday’s investigation of the WEXMAC TITUS warehouse buildout. Read this before they build the next camp. “If they did not know, they did not know because they did not want to know.” — Primo Levi, Afterword to If This Is a Man / The Truce, 1987.  …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Financial System, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation

Former prosecutor pursued by Trump calls for crackdown on election lies: ‘Lying can be held to account’

The Guardian – Politicians must be held accountable if their lies damage democracy, according to a former US federal prosecutor and FBI general counsel who was pursued by Donald Trump. Andrew Weissmann argues for new law to hold political liars like US president accountable for harming democracy. The US must be “as creative as possible” …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Recommended Books

The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you

Vox – no paywall: “….AI models learn by identifying patterns within enormous bodies of text. This widely-understood fact has an underappreciated consequence: LLMs don’t necessarily give the same answers in every language — certain phrases or arguments may appear more regularly in Japanese training data than in the English kind. This is not inherently a …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents