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how to save the world – Dave Pollard: “…But perhaps equally-important in this century are the non-military wars battling for the “hearts and minds” of citizens — fights over votes, seats, laws, ideologies and tax dollars rather than land. It is hard to deny, for example, that the US is engaged in a so-far-non-military civil …
CNN: “Book banning — or at least, book banning attempts — appears to be having a resurgence. The American Library Association recorded 729 challenges to library, school and university materials and services in 2021, the most since the organization began tracking those attempts in 2000. While that might seem low overall considering the approximately 99,000 …
Berkeley Library – ‘Islands of hope’: Ukrainian libraries respond to Russian invasion in surprising and heartbreaking ways — here’s how – “Thousands of miles from UC Berkeley, in libraries across Ukraine, the squeak of shifted chairs has been replaced by the blare of air raid sirens, and the distant rattle of old pipes by the …
Axios: “The National Urban League’s 2022 “State of Black America” report warns of a systematic effort to “disenfranchise, delude, manipulate and intimidate American voters,” Axios’ Russell Contreras writes. “[T]here’s a plot to destroy American democracy,” National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial told reporters on a call ahead of today’s release of the annual …
Washington Post: “On April 1, 1950, an army of 140,000 census enumerators, equipped with fountain pens and government forms, started fanning out across the country to paint a portrait of the United States. Knocking on doors, asking questions about marriage, divorce, race and income, they gathered the personal details of life for 151 million Americans …
Global Investigative Journalism Network: Editor’s Note: This is the introductory chapter of a new, five-part GIJN guide to investigating elections that will be serialized over the coming month. Look for the second installment, “Chapter 1: New Election-Digging Tools,” next week. Elections around the world face increasingly common threats, including disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, voter suppression, rising …
Via Patrice McDermott, Government Information Watch, [h/t Mike Ravnitzsky] – “Come July 2022, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. The Verge reports – ‘The archive was never built to be a permanent repository of content, and maintaining the outdated site was no longer “cost effective,” the EPA …
NiemanLab: “…In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which stands alongside Wikipedia as one of the great not-for-profit knowledge-enhancing creations of modern digital technology. You may know it best for the Wayback Machine, its now quarter-century-old tool for deriving some sort of permanent record from the inherently transient medium of the web. (It’s collected 668 …
Kottke.org – “In response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, the FBI released their internal 83-page guide to internet slang (most of which are initialisms and acronyms). The quality of the scanned document is very poor, but it’s (just) readable. A few of my favorite phrases gleaned from skipping around the report: …
Motherboard/Vice: “Last June, the Department of Defense released a long-awaited and much-hyped document called “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” detailing the government’s knowledge of UFOs and its programs trying to detect and catalog them. Many UFOlogists hoped that the “UFO report” would be a watershed moment in the field, showing that the government was taking …
“The Open Internet Alliance aims to strengthen the advocacy voice of medium-sized companies and organisations that promote and defend Open Internet principles. We welcome participation from other like-minded companies. The Open Internet is at a crossroads in Europe. With the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU has an opportunity to create …
Morten, Christopher, Publicizing Corporate Secrets for Public Good (February 13, 2022). University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 171, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract= “Federal regulatory agencies in the United States hold a treasure trove of valuable information essential to a functional society. Yet little of this immense and nominally “public” resource is accessible to the public. …
