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Archive for the ‘Access to Information’ Category

GAO — National Archives: Progress and Risks in Implementing its Electronic Records Archive Initiative

Friday, November 6th, 2009

National Archives: Progress and Risks in Implementing its Electronic Records Archive Initiative (PDF: 154 KB)
From Highlights (PDF; 45 KB):

NARA has completed two of five planned increments of ERA, but has experienced schedule delays and cost overruns, and several functions planned for the system’s initial release were deferred. Although NARA initially planned for the system to be capable of ingesting federal and presidential records in September 2007, the two system increments to support those records did not achieve initial operating capability until June 2008 and December 2008, respectively. In addition, NARA reportedly spent about $80 million on the base increment, compared to its planned cost of about $60 million. Finally, a number of functions originally planned for the base increment were deferred to later increments, including the ability to delete records and to ingest redacted records. In fiscal year 2010, NARA plans to complete the third increment, which is to include new systems for Congressional records and public access, and begin work on the fourth.

Source: Government Accountability Office (David A. Powner, director, information technology management issues, before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)

Posted in Access to Information, Archives and Special Collections, Government Documents and Political Information, Info Management and Retrieval, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Research from Europe: A New System Preserves the Right to Privacy in Internet Searches

Friday, November 6th, 2009

From an ACM TechNews Summary

Researchers from Rovira i Virgili University, Autonoma of Barcelona, and Oberta of Catalonia have developed a system that protects the privacy of Internet search engine users through a new computer protocol. “It is a model based on cryptographic tools, which distort the profile of users when they use search engines on Internet in such a way that their privacy is preserved,” says Rovira i Virgili University’s Alexandre Viego. The researchers note that there are systems that provide anonymous navigation, but say their system provides a significant improvement in response time over anonymous systems, though it still delays searches slightly. The new protocol has already been tested in both closed research center intranets and on the Internet, and the results have made the researchers optimistic about a global implementation model. The researchers are currently working on the development of a final user version, and believe that it will soon be easy to integrate the system into the major platforms and browsers.

Read the Complete News Item

Source: AlphaGalileo

Posted in Privacy, Technology and Internet, Web Search | No Comments »

Data Held in Your Google Account Now Accessible From a Single Location

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

From the Article:

At a European privacy conference in Spain Thursday, the company unveiled a new service called Google Dashboard that summarizes the data that Google collects in users’ accounts for products like Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Web History, Checkout, Reader and YouTube. Users will be able to adjust their privacy settings for the various Google products directly from the dashboard.

Much of the information was previously available in the accounts and settings sections for each product, so Dashboard simply brings all that information together in one place.

[Snip]

[Our emphasis] Dashboard provides information only about users’ Google accounts for products that require users to log in or products where the log-in is optional. It does not address the search records of people who are not logged into Google or the cookie data that Google uses to aim ads at people. Many advocates say that the collection and storage of such data may raise the biggest privacy concerns.

[Snip]

Still, privacy advocates hailed the product.

“It is a significant step forward in terms of trying to unite the user experience for people who use Google products,” said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an independent advocacy group that receives some funding from Google and other technology companies. “We still need a lot more to protect consumers’ privacy.”

Access Google Dashboard

Source: Bits Blog, NY Times

See Also: Search Engine Land

Posted in Information Industry, Privacy | No Comments »

How to access newsgroups when your ISP dumps Usenet

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

How to access newsgroups when your ISP dumps Usenet

Verizon recently joined the likes of Comcast and Time Warner, becoming the latest Internet service provider to stop giving its customers access to newsgroups on Usenet, a decades-old collection of thousands of message boards worldwide.

In announcing its decision, Verizon mentioned a Web site that lists third-party commercial “news servers” that provide Usenet access for around $10 a month. Some offer free or low-cost trials.

What Verizon didn’t tell customers is that they can get free access to Usenet and other types of message boards through Google Groups. A Web-based service like Google isn’t as convenient as using news reader software, such as Windows Outlook Express or Windows Mail. But unlike with software, you can use Google to search the so-called Usenet archive, a database of more than 800 millions posts going back to 1981.

You also may find free news servers by searching the Web. We found a couple of sites that list them, including Newsparrot and the DMOZ open directory project. Some of the information we saw was out of date. But on Monday, we were able to post messages through one free server, news.gmane.org. For information about adding a news account, check your newsreader’s help files.

Source: Consumer Reports Money & Shopping Blog

Posted in Access to Information, Resources, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0, Web Search | No Comments »

Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone: A National Security Archive Guide

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

From the Home Page

Government records are fundamental to understanding official policies and the decision-making processes of our leaders. They can be vital resources for a journalist following a breaking news story about government misconduct, a military veteran’s family seeking information about benefits, or a student writing a history paper. Government documents provide first-hand, real-time accounts of events as they unfolded, generally without the editorial filter that characterizes secondary sources like books and news articles.

This guide, Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone: A National Security Archive Guide, provides a comprehensive overview of how to obtain documents from federal executive branch agencies. It focuses primarily on the Freedom of Information Act process. But it also briefly treats other means of accessing government records, including through publicly available sources and through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process for obtaining previously classified records.

Access the Guide By Chapters (PDF) or Download the Complete Guide at One Time (122 pages; PDF)

Source: National Security Archive
Hat Tip: David D. and Net-Gold

Posted in Access to Information, Legal | No Comments »

Library of Congress stands by report on Honduras Coup

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Library of Congress Stands by Report on Honduras Coup

Congress’s law library is rebuffing calls from the chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees to retract a report on the military-backed coup in Honduras that the lawmakers charge is flawed.

The request, by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., has sparked cries of censorship from Republicans who say the Democrats don’t like what the August report said: that the government of Honduras had the authority to remove deposed President Manuel Zelaya from office.

A spokeswoman for the Law Library of Congress – one of six Library of Congress agencies – said Thursday that the research agency stands by the report and that Librarian of Congress James Billington is preparing a response to the lawmakers.

Zelaya has been holed up at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for several weeks, and high-ranking U.S. officials were working Thursday to try to broker a resolution.

Republicans amped up their criticism Thursday of the Obama administration’s Honduras policy, asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate the State Department’s role in the crisis in Honduras. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said members of the Honduran congress told visiting members of Congress that the U.S. ambassador to Honduras was trying to put “Zelaya cronies” into government posts.

See previous story: Lawmakers ask Library of Congress to retract Honduras report

Source: Miami Herald

Posted in Censorship, Government Documents and Political Information, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »

Webcast: Live Event (October 30th): The 2009 Jeremiah Kaplan Institute on Libraries, the Information Society, and Social Policy

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

This is the first Kaplan institute will take place at Penn State University and be available live on the Internet between 9am-3pm EDT on Friday, October 30th, 2009.

The title of the 2009 institute is “The Right to Information Access”.

The United States Constitution codifies the right to free expression. But what rights have we to access the results of free expression?

“Libraries,” states the American Library Association, “help ensure that Americans can access the information they need – regardless of age, education, ethnicity, language, income, physical limitations or geographic barriers – as the digital world continues to evolve.” But two decades of rapid developments in information technologies have revealed a contradiction: it is easier than ever to disseminate information and to receive it, but it is also easier to control and monitor access to that information.

You can learn more and find links to view the webcast on this web page.

This event wil feature the following people:

+ John Willinsky, (keynote speaker) Professor of Education, Stanford University, Founder of the Public Knowledge Project and author of The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access. (MIT, 2005).

+ Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyright, US Copyright Office. Author of The General Guide to the Copyright Act of 1976.

+ John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School . Co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008) and Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008).

+ Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition of Networked Information, and member of the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress , Microsoft’s Technical Computing Science Advisory Board , the board of the New Media Consortium , and the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

If you can’t view the event live it will remain available on the web page once it concludes.

Source: Penn State University Libraries
Hat Tip: CNI

Posted in Access to Information, Information Policy | No Comments »

Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain Name Use in 1H2009

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain Name Use in 1H2009 (PDF; 673 KB)

The battle against phishing is a seesaw contest. On one side are the phishers, looking for better ways to steal money and Internet users’ personal data. On the other side is an array of security and software providers, financial institutions, and other like-minded parties who fight back with counter-measures of their own. While phishing remains a dangerous criminal activity involving great losses of money and personal data, the latest statistics also show that phishing has not increased by some measures, and that some anti-phishing measures have had a beneficial impact.

This report attempts to understand the scope of the global phishing problem, especially by examining domain name usage and phishing site uptimes. Specifically, this new report examines all the phishing attacks detected in the first half of 2009 (1H2009) — between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2009. The data was collected by the APWG and supplemented with data from several phishing feeds and private sources. The APWG phishing repository is the Internet’s most comprehensive archive of phishing and e-mail fraud activity. Our data confirms new and ongoing trends, and we hope that bringing them to light will lead to improved anti-phishing measures.

Source: Anti-Phishing Working Group

Posted in Privacy, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

FCC Announces Release of Report on Barriers to Broadband Adoption by the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

FCC Announces Release of Report on Barriers to Broadband Adoption by the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute (PDF; 64 KB)

The Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute (ACLP) at New York Law School has released a report identifying major barriers to broadband adoption among senior citizens and people with disabilities, and across the telemedicine, energy, education, and government sectors. This report was prepared in coordination with staff of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative (OBI) for use in the development of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.
…
ACLP Director Charles M. Davidson said “The report provides the FCC with a comprehensive analysis of major barriers to broadband adoption among under-adopting demographic groups and sectors of the economy. Our hope is that this report will be used as a starting point for further discussions regarding ways to maximize the adoption rate across every demographic group and sector.”

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.7 MB)

Posted in Access to Information, Government Documents and Political Information, Information Policy, Papers and Presentations, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Social Networking – Legal and Ethical Issues for Lawyers and Investigators

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Social Networking – Legal and Ethical Issues for Lawyers and Investigators

Should an investigator or attorney “friend” a prosecution witness in order to find impeachment evidence? Are there legal or ethical bars to surreptitiously gathering data from social network profiles? Should the intent of the user have any bearing on the formulation of law related to access? These and more questions were stirred up in the mix of case studies presented at the (first, annual?) symposium, Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking, sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law. Yeah, a long title but, hey, these folks are academics. And the case studies constituted just the first panel (”Problems Unique to Social Networking and the Law”) of an extraordinary assemblage of academic, government, activist, policy and practicing lawyers rounding out the 5-panel day.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, – the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases – whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access.

See: Social Networks: Friends or Foes

Source: PI Buzz

Posted in Legal, Papers and Presentations, Privacy, Search News, Social Media, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

ALA & ARL Provide Statement on USA PATRIOT Amendments Act of 2009

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Access the Statement (2 pages; PDF)

On October 20, 2009, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Representatives Jerrold R. Nadler (D-NY) and Bobby Scott (D-VA) introduced the USA PATRIOT Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R.3845). The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Library Association (ALA) believe that this bill contains
necessary and important reforms to the powers created by the USA PATRIOT Act.

Several provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act are set to expire on December 31, 2009 unless Congress acts to reauthorize them. This “sunsetting” provides lawmakers with an
opportunity to revisit the USA PATRIOT Act and address the numerous shortcomings and abuses that have come to light in the years since its passage. The Senate Judiciary
Committee took up these issues recently with disappointing results. Senator Feingold’s excellent proposals for comprehensive reform, which ARL and ALA endorsed, were
passed over in favor of a minimal bill that would offer library patrons some limited protections for their offline activities, but does little else to address deep concerns with
the original USA PATRIOT Act. The full Senate has yet to vote on a bill.

Access the Complete Statement (2 pages; PDF)

Source: ARL/ALA

See Also: ALA: House takes lead with strong surveillance reform bills
You will find links to track the legislation via GovTrack.us

See Also: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Disappointed in Patriot Act Revisions
Two librarians from Vermont are featured in this report.

Posted in Access to Information, Libraries and Librarianship, Privacy | No Comments »

An Editorial Published In the Guardian: In praise of… Wikileaks

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

From the Editorial

A brown paper envelope for the digital age, Wikileaks.org is now home to more than 1m documents that governments and big business would rather the public did not see. The site – similar to Wikipedia in style, but otherwise independent of it – serves as an uncensorable and untraceable depository for the truth, able to publish documents that the courts may prevent newspapers and broadcasters from being able to touch.

[Snip]

Useful in Britain, it is invaluable in less free societies, such as China, where the authorities play a cat-and-mouse game with Wikileaks’ Swedish webhosts to try to block access. So far Wikileaks has stayed ahead, with technology leaving the law lagging behind. The site exists in a sort of legal limbo, not private, but not yet fully accepted by courts as part of the public domain.

Source: The Guardian (U.K.)

Posted in Access to Information | No Comments »

ALA: House takes lead with strong surveillance reform bills

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

From the Blog Post:

The USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R. 3845) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R. 3846), introduced into the House of Representatives Tuesday, would together systematically reform our national surveillance laws.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee failed to pass a bill that would restore the balance between protecting civil liberties and ensuring law enforcement has the tools it needs to fight terrorism, but leaders in the House have boldly stepped up to reopen the public debate on these challenging issues and address the need for reform,” American Library Association (ALA) President Camila Alire said.

[Snip]

H.R. 3845 calls for reform to Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, often referred to as the library provision, by improving the standard for issuing a Section 215 order, providing recipients of Section 215 orders with the ability to immediately challenge both the underlying order and any gag order associated with it, and prohibiting a request for Section 215 records to a library or bookseller for documentary materials that contain personally identifiable information concerning a patron.

[Snip]

“Libraries have been on the receiving end of both Section 215 orders and NSLs, and we know reform is needed to these broad, sweeping policies in order to prevent the abuse of these tools and to protect innocent Americans from the unwarranted surveillance, collection and retention of their personal information,” Alire said.

Read the Complete Blog Post

Source: American Library Association District Dispatch

See Also: Track the Legislation (Free) Using the Powerful GovTrack.us.

+ Track H.R. 3845 (Note the Numerous Tracking Options on the Right Side of the Page)

+ Track H.R. 3846

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Privacy | No Comments »

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) Disappointed in Patriot Act Revisions

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

From the Interview:

([Bob] Kinzel, [Reporter, Vermont Public Radio] The controversy started when [Senator Patrick] Leahy [D-VT] offered a second version of the bill that didn’t include all of the protections of his first plan. He says he did this because the stronger provisions received very little support in his committee. When the changes were adopted, the Library Association withdrew its support for the legislation.

Senator Sanders says he doesn’t care for the changes either:

(Sanders) “I’m not happy with the language as it currently stands.”

([Bob] Kinzel, [Reporter, Vermont Public Radio] Sanders says it’s possible to fight terrorists and protect civil liberties.

(Sanders) “I would also hope that everybody in this country respects the Constitution of this nation and that you don’t go on fishing expeditions and tapping people’s phones or securing the books that they’re reading or going into the websites that they are looking at without evidence that you have reason to believe that they are involved in terrorist activities. That’s what the issue is.”

Also interviewed are:

+ Trina Magi, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Library Associate Professor at the University of Vermont.

+ Gail Weymouth, Chairperson, Intellectual Freedom Committee, Vermont Library Association and Library Direct, Sherburne Memorial Library, Killington, VT.

+ Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT)

Much More of the Report via the Transcript or Listen Online/Download the Complete Report.

Source: Vermont Public Radio

Posted in Access to Information, Privacy | No Comments »

Consumer Data Broker ChoicePoint Failed to Protect Consumers’ Personal Data, Left Key Electronic Monitoring Tool Turned Off for Four Months

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Consumer Data Broker ChoicePoint Failed to Protect Consumers’ Personal Data, Left Key Electronic Monitoring Tool Turned Off for Four Months

ChoicePoint, Inc., one of the nation’s largest data brokers, has agreed to strengthened data security requirements to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company failed to implement a comprehensive information security program protecting consumers’ sensitive information, as required by a previous court order. This failure left the door open to a data breach in 2008 that compromised the personal information of 13,750 people and put them at risk of identify theft. ChoicePoint has now agreed to a modified court order that expands its data security assessment and reporting duties and requires the company to pay $275,000.

In April 2008, ChoicePoint (now a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, Inc.) turned off a key electronic security tool used to monitor access to one of its databases, and for four months failed to detect that the security tool was off, according to the FTC. During that period, an unknown person conducted unauthorized searches of a ChoicePoint database containing sensitive consumer information, including Social Security numbers. The searches continued for 30 days. After discovering the breach, the company brought the matter to the FTC’s attention.

The FTC alleged that if the security software tool had been working, ChoicePoint likely would have detected the intrusions much earlier and minimized the extent of the breach. The FTC also alleged that ChoicePoint’s conduct violated a 2006 court order mandating that the company institute a comprehensive information security program reasonably designed to protect consumers’ sensitive personal information.

+ United States of America (for the Federal Trade Commission) v. ChoicePoint Inc.

Source: Federal Trade Commission

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Information Industry, Legal, Privacy, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

CIA’s Venture Capital Arm, In-Q-Tel, Invests in Social Web Monitoring Firm

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Noah Shachtman, in a Wired exclusive, “U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” discusses the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, investing in a company named Visible Technologies that monitors the social web. He also reports that the CIA is using Visible’s service. Here’s the news release from Visible.

Schatman Writes:

It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords,

It’s important to know what the CIA is up to and this article does a good job providing that info.

The rest of the article (worth reading) offers more about what Visible does; comments from Steven Aftergood, editor of Secrecy News; and more about the investment and In-Q-Tel in general.

Source: Wired

Can you name another company that received funding from In-Q-Tel? That’s right, Keyhole Corp. And of course we all know that Keyhole was acquired by Google in 2004 and became Google Earth and used with other Google Map services.

+ In-Q-Tel Invests in Keyhole (June 25, 2003)
+ Google Acquires Keyhole (October 27, 2004)
+ In-Q-Tel Sells 5,636 Shares of Google (November 14, 2005)

The acquisition was reported in many places including the Washington Post, The Register, and InternetNews.com.

Here’s the Keyhole Inc. home page a couple of weeks before the Google acquisition. (via Internet Archive)

Could Visible Technologies and what they offer be ripe for a Google purchase? We know Google is in acquisition mode. Something to think about.

Posted in Access to Information, Open Source Intelligence, Social Media, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Personal Financial Records found in Dumpster

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Personal financial records found in Dumpster

Authorities from both the Tampa Police Department and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office are looking into how files containing private financial information ended up in two Dumpsters.

The owner of a hair salon, Claudia Dozier, discovered the documents as she was taking out the trash behind her business, Hair Visions Salon, south of Temple Terrace. Dozier called a television reporter, who determined that they were mortgage applications belonging to Creative Financial Services of Tampa Bay Inc., a mortgage lending company.

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Posted in Privacy, Search News | No Comments »

Cool! Revelations from the Russian Archives: Exhibit Publications from the Library of Congress

Friday, October 16th, 2009

From the Web Site:

With the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, ownership of the huge archival legacy of the entire Soviet period (both of the government of the USSR and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), located in large centralized archives in Moscow and Leningrad, passed to the now-independent Russian Federation. Russian archivists turned to American colleagues, including Librarian of Congress James Billington, in early 1992 to request assistance in declassifying and organizing the formerly secret and inaccessible party archives.

In exchange for assistance and advice offered by Americans, including the Library of Congress, the new Russian Commission on Archives offered the Library of Congress the remarkable opportunity to exhibit in Washington original, formerly top-secret, documents from the Communist Party archives. The exhibit, termed “Revelations from the Russian Archives,” was the first of the Library’s exhibits to be put online, in the very early days of the Internet. The exhibit opened in June 1992 with a symposium of Russian and American historians, librarians, and archivists presenting views on the significance of the epochal changes occurring since the then-recent collapse of the USSR and the consequences of these changes for archival documents from the entire Soviet period, 1917-1991.

IIn 1997 the Library published Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, a compendium of translations of all the documents in the exhibit. This richly illustrated book presents 343 documents on a broad range of subjects with commentary to make their significance clear.

The three publications digitized here were published at the time of the June 1992 exhibit at the Madison Gallery of the Library of Congress’ Madison Building. They detail the items shown in the exhibit and present a summary of the symposium of scholars discussing the documents.

+ Access the Revelations from the Russian Archive

+ Revelations from the Russian Archives: A Report from the Library of Congress (Page Images, View Online) ||| (70 pages; PDF)

+ Revelations from the Russian Archives: a Checklist (Page Images, View Online) ||| (32 pages; PDF)

Source: Library of Congress

Posted in Access to Information, Archives and Special Collections, History | No Comments »