NASA Announces Request For Information On Von Braun Collection

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the historic first moon landing, NASA is seeking ideas from the public, academia, and industry about how to analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.

Von Braun was the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and a key figure in the development of the Saturn V rocket and NASA’s Apollo program. NASA has a full collection of “Weekly Notes” von Braun wrote during the 1960s and 1970s. These notes were used to track programmatic and institutional issues at Marshall, and are considered by many historians to be a valuable source of data.

NASA has issued a request for information and is looking for concepts that will provide an innovative resource for agency engineers and scientists, as well as researchers in academia and industry.

+ Request For Information (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Appendix 1 (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Biography — Dr. Wernher von Braun

Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

From an Article:

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

Source: MSNBC

See Also: Obama Blocks Visitor Log Disclosure (via Sunlight Foundation)

National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis Opens Civilian Personnel Records to the Public

The National Archives’ National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) opened more than 6 million individual personnel files of former Federal civilian employees from the mid-1800s through 1951. These records will be of special interest to genealogists, family members, researchers, sociologists, and historians.

Among the records are the files of prominent individuals who worked for the federal government, such as Walt Disney, Ansel Adams, Eliot Ness, Calvin Coolidge, J. Edgar Hoover, Gifford Pinchot, Walker Evans, and Albert Einstein.

Ronald L. Hindman, Director of NPRC characterized these records “as a veritable treasure-trove of information for researchers and genealogists.” He continued, “There are records from more than one hundred government agencies now available for discovery. They showcase the careers of government employees who investigated bootleggers; taught at Indian schools; worked in Japanese-American interment camps, in prisons, and on anti-prostitution boards, and created and implemented initiatives in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, among others.”

Source: National Archives

Medical Problems Could Include Identity Theft

The last time federal data on the crime was collected, for a 2007 report, more than 250,000 Americans a year were victims of medical identity theft. That number has almost certainly increased since then, because of the increased use of electronic medical records systems built without extensive safeguards, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the nonprofit World Privacy Forum and author of a report on medical identity theft.

And uncountable, Ms. Dixon said, are the people who do not yet know they are victims. They may not know that their medical information has been tampered with for months or even years….

Source: New York Times

Lists for the Top 25 documents viewed online and the Top 25 search phrases for May, 2009 were recently released on the CIA’s FOIA are are now online.

You are able to review the current list and compare them to the March and April lists.

Top 5 Search Terms (May)
1) UFO: 2442
2) Cuba: 1090
3) Bay of Pigs: 1089
4) France: 1059
5) Iran: 1051

The List of the Top 25 documents can be accessed here.
Source: CIA, Federal of Information Web Site

May 2009 Grey Literature Report

The Grey Literature Report is a bimonthly publication of The New York Academy of Medicine Library alerting readers to new grey literature publications in health services research and selected public health topics. In addition to this alert service, all resources are added and indexed in our Online Catalog.

Source: New York Academy of Medicine Library

From the Article:

The government accidentally posted on the Internet a list of government and civilian nuclear facilities and their activities in the United States, but a U.S. official said Wednesday the posting included no information that compromised national security

The publication of the list was first reported in an online secrecy newsletter Monday. The document had been posted on the Government Printing Office Web site, but has since been removed from that site.

In a statement, the Government Printing Office said Wednesday: “Upon being informed about potential sensitive nature of the attachment in this document, the Public Printer of the United States removed it from GPO’s Web site pending further review. After consulting with the White House and Congress, it was determined that the document, including sensitive attachment, should be permanently removed from the Web site.”

There are “zero” national security implications to the publication of this document, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. Aftergood found the document on the GPO Web site and highlighted it in his online bulletin.

“I regret that some people are painting it as a roadmap for terrorists because that’s not what it is,” Aftergood said.

“This is not a disclosure of sensitive nuclear technologies or of facility security procedures. It is simply a listing of the numerous nuclear research sites and the programs that are under way,” Aftergood said. “And so it poses no security threat whatsoever.”

Source: AP (via NY Daily News)

See Also: US Declares Nuclear Sites to the IAEA (via Secrecy News)

From the Announcement:

In a rare vote outside of Midwinter and Annual Conference, the ALA Council voted last month to award posthumous honorary membership to Judith F. Krug for her work in the field of intellectual freedom. Krug was the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation for more than 40 years. She died on April 11 after a long illness.

Honorary membership, ALA’s highest honor, is conferred in recognition of outstanding contributions of lasting importance to libraries and librarianship. The award will be presented on Saturday, July 11, during the Opening General Session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago

Source: American Library Association

See Also: An Interview with Judith Krug from 1995 (via American Libraries)

From the KnowPrivacy Web Site:

Key Findings
+ Users are concerned about data collection online and want greater control over their personal information.

+ Users lack awareness of some data collection practices.

+ Users don’t know who to complain to.

Direct to Complete Report

Source: KnowPrivacy

See Also: The NY Times Summarizes the Report

From the Summary:

The importance of the right to information is an increasingly constant refrain in the mouths of development practitioners, civil society, academics, the media and governments. What is this right, is it really a right and how have governments sought to give effect to it?

Access to the complete document is free.

Direct to Full Text Document (167 pages; PDF)

Source: UNESCO

Monster mashup: mapping every plane in the air

FlightAware slurps up more than 1GB a day in federal radar data in order to map, almost in realtime, every commercial flight in the US. Open source tools provide much of the site’s power, but its users provide the ingenuity.

Source: Ars Technica

Hat tip: BO

NTSB Expands Release of Accident Investigation Public Dockets Available on Website Beginning June 1

The National Transportation Safety Board today announced that it will begin to release all accident investigation public dockets to the NTSB public website…beginning June 1, 2009, in accordance with the NTSB Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Improvement Plan.

This effort serves to further bring the Safety Board into compliance with a number of legislative and executive mandates aimed at improving the U.S. government’s use of electronic media to foster a more open and transparent government.
…
In order to access the NTSB’s public dockets, interested website visitors may visit the FOIA Electronic Reading Room on the NTSB website and select the list of dockets that are organized by transportation mode. The link to the list of public dockets may be found here: http://www.ntsb.gov/Info/foia_fri-dockets.htm

Source: National Transportation Safety Board

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired

Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

“You don’t need a TV. You don’t need a radio. You don’t even need a newspaper,” says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. “But you need the Internet.”

Mr. Pitts’s experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a “digital divide” would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies: Classified Information and Controlled Unclassified Information

As outlined in my January 21, 2009, memoranda to the heads of executive departments and agencies on Transparency and Open Government and on the Freedom of Information Act, my Administration is committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. While the Government must be able to prevent the public disclosure of information where such disclosure would compromise the privacy of American citizens, national security, or other legitimate interests, a democratic government accountable to the people must be as transparent as possible and must not withhold information for self-serving reasons or simply to avoid embarrassment.

To these ends, I hereby direct the following:

Section 1. Review of Executive Order 12958. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this memorandum, and after consulting with the relevant executive departments and agencies (agencies), the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs shall review Executive Order 12958, as amended (Classified National Security Information), and submit to me recommendations and proposed revisions to the order.
(b) The recommendations and proposed revisions shall address:

(i) Establishment of a National Declassification Center to bring appropriate agency officials together to perform collaborative declassification review under the administration of the Archivist of the United States;

(ii) Effective measures to address the problem of over classification, including the possible restoration of the presumption against classification, which would preclude classification of information where there is significant doubt about the need for such classification, and the implementation of increased accountability for classification decisions;

(iii) Changes needed to facilitate greater sharing of classified information among appropriate parties;

(iv) Appropriate prohibition of reclassification of material that has been declassified and released to the public under proper authority;

(v) Appropriate classification, safeguarding, accessibility, and declassification of information in the electronic environment, as recommended by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction and others; and

(vi) Any other measures appropriate to provide for greater openness and transparency in the Government’s security classification and declassification program while also affording necessary protection to the Government’s legitimate interests.

Source: White House Press Office

From the Article:

President Barack Obama wants to hear from his top administration officials about a single-stop process to declassify some of the nation’s secrets.

Obama ordered his national security adviser to recommend how best to open government documents among agencies and to the public. Obama says the review should favor disclosure if it won’t threaten national security.

Source: AP (via Next Gov)