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Safeguarding Our Patrons’ Privacy: What Every Librarian Needs to Know about the USA PATRIOT Act & Related Anti-Terrorism Measures, videotape (120 minutes) and manual (27 pp.), published December 2002, are available for $35 from the Association of Research Libraries.
The New York City Council has passed, and sent to Mayor Bloomberg for signature, the first bill of its kind for any city or state, requiring online publication of all city agency reports and publications within ten days of issuance. A prior press release is available here. All documents are to be sent in electronic …
C-SPAN has a public service called CapitalHearings.org that allows you to listen live, via streaming audio, to selected Senate hearings. The site provides a schedule indicating the committee, time and location of each respective hearing.
The Department of Homeland Security quickly issued, without benefit of public comment, new final interim regulations limiting public access to secret and sensitive agency information under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Procedures.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press announced the launch of a new blog, Behind the Homefront, “a daily chronicle of news in homeland security and military operations affecting newsgathering, access to information and the public’s right to know.” The launch date was chosen to coincide with the official establishment of the Department of …
Oral arguments on the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) case are scheduled for March 5. Solicitor General Ted Olson’s 55 page brief (PDF) in U.S. v. American Library Association (ALA) is now available here. Olsen argues that the lower court decision (210 F. Supp 2d 401) overturning the requirement that federally funded libraries must filter …
The Digital National Security Archive currently hosts 35,000 declassified documents, comprising 15 distinct collections on U.S. security policies and decision making. For example, you may access documents from the Cuban Missle Crisis, Iran-Contra Affair, and Presidential Directives on National Security from Truman to Clinton. There is also a Documents of the Month section, and the …
U.S. military websites are subject to a new directive issued on January 3 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to remove sensitive, unclassified information published on the huge DOD web databases (comprising 770 gigabytes of total data), that could potentially be of assistance to the intelligence gathering efforts of our enemies.
According to this posting, the Chinese government is blocking user access to blogs created with Blogspot. This source also provides links to a range of information concerning the ongoing, systematic campaign by the Chinese government to censor and restrict citizen access to the Web.
The National Intellectual Property Researchers Association (NIPRA), whose members “serve as the world’s main concentration point for IP information disseminated by the USPTO,” have sued the USPTO in District Court for the ED of Virginia. Their action was precipitated by the USPTO’s project to transition from a paper document collection to an online access system. …
On January 7, teenager Jon Lech Johansen was acquitted by a Norweigan criminal court of charges related to creating a utility (DeCSS) that descrambled the code for DVD players, and publishing it on the Web. For other articles on this decision, see CNN, The Register, BBC, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Internet News reports that the IRS will implement a completely automated FOI system this year in accordance with requirements of the 1996 Freedom of Information Act Amendments. See this Federal Computer Week article for more information about the new IRS software program, VeFOIA, and its developer.
