In a supreme twist of irony, Newt Gingrich, speaking at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner which honors free speech, said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism. So in order to save the Constitution, Gingrich is proposing that it be "reexamined," a poor euphemism for completely gutting it. Here's the story about the speech, and here's a link Keith Olbermann discussing Gingrich's comments with George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley. George Orwell is truly rolling in his grave!

[Thanks Crooks & Liars!]

Here is a quick source of links to agencies and some key government documents dealing with government information policy.

OMB Watch is a nonprofit government watchdog organization whose mission is to promote open government, accountability and citizen participation. One of its major issue areas is Information Access. On its website, it lists several specific categories of information access issues that it tracks: Homeland Security, Environmental Right to Know, Data Quality Act, Peer Review, Politics & Science, Freedom of Information, Whistleblowers, and State Policies. In most of these policy areas, they have a useful page devoted to "Gov Docs" where they link to agencies and official and unofficial sources of laws, regulations, and reports dealing with government information policy.

• Homeland Security Gov Docs
• Environmental Right to Know Gov Docs
• Data Quality Act Gov Docs
• Peer Review Gov Docs
• Freedom of Information Gov Docs
• Whistleblowers Gov Docs

I was listening to KPFA, my local pacifica station this morning, and they were having a fund drive for the Pacifica Radio Archives. The archives contain the voices of 20th century history: Studs Terkel, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Martin Luther King, jr., Rosa Parks, bell hooks, and *many* more voices of peace and justice! The fund drive is needed to support their preservation project (and other projects) which seeks to digitize many of the old tapes in the archive in order to make them more accessible and longer-living. Or think about a donation in someone else's name for the holidays -- really, how many ties does your dad really need?!

Please, please, PLEASE donate to the pacifica archives if you can!

[Please note: I am not on the Pacifica board and FGI has no affiliation whatsoever with Pacifica. I just think that librarians and those interested in preserving history should support valuable preservation projects like this one.]

The approach of December means that millions of Americans will soon be shopping, shipping, printing, mailing, baking, eating, traveling, and/or simply hiding at home and watching cable TV or DVDs. Whatever the case, most people will spend the last month of the year consuming a wide variety of goods and services.

Therefore, this is an excellent time to think about being a wise consumer. Two sources that can help you in this quest are the Consumer Action Handbook and the Consumer Action Website.

Both are produced by the General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Information Center. Both provide a wealth of advice on what to consider before and after making a purchase. They also provide information about the proper way to file a complaint if the item or service you purchased was unsatisfactory, in addition to a long list of consumer contacts at major corporations.

One feature available on the website that isn’t replicated in the Handbook is the Consumer News box. This very useful little box provides links to consumer alerts and announcements from a number of different federal agencies.

To paraphrase both the Coneheads and Sergeant Esterhaus from Hill Street Blues, go forth and consume mass quantities, but hey, let’s be careful out there.

P.S. Thanks for letting me be the Blogger for November. It was fun!

FCC LAUNCHES "RURAL HEALTH CARE PILOT PROGRAM" WEBSITE Press Release (November 21, 2006) fcc.gov

The FCC has launched a website (http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/rural/rhcp.html) that provides a consolidated source of information about the FCC's recently announced Rural Health Care Pilot Program. The website includes the Order adopting the pilot program and the accompanying news release, a PDF slide presentation giving an overview of the program, and frequently asked questions (FAQs), The website will be updated periodically, as appropriate.

The FCC's pilot program is an innovative, enhanced funding initiative intended to help public and non-profit health care providers construct state- and region-wide broadband networks to provide telehealth and telemedicine services throughout the nation. The program will fund up to 85% of the costs of constructing those networks, as well as the costs of advanced telecommunications and information services that will ride over these networks. If selected, up to 85% of the cost of connecting to Internet2, a dedicated nationwide backbone, may also be funded by the pilot program. Connection to Internet 2 is not required, but may be requested by the applicants....

We'd like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on the GPO/DLC Digital Discussion questions that we at FGI prepared responses to.

Our input along with your comments and a cover letter, have been submitted to selected GPO staff and all members of the Depository Library Council.

If you have thoughts about how either the Government Printing Office or the
Depository Library Council could broaden the discussion on digital distribution of federal electronic documents, please comment here or consider sending a suggestion through the GPO Help System, available from any page on GPO Access.

On November 26, 2006, the volunteers at Free Government Information passed along all comments received on our DLC Digital Distribution page to the people named below. For a PDF copy of our responses and your comments, please see the file attached to this page.

Dear Mr. James, Ms. Russell, Mr. Davis, Mr. Wash and members of the Depository Library Council:

As you are well aware, the Depository Library Council held a session on Digital Distribution in Washington DC on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 as part of the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting.

In hopes of broadening the discussion on digital distribution beyond the confines of in-person Council meetings, I and the other volunteers at Free Government Information posted responses to the Digital Distribution discussion questions presented at Council on the FGI website (http://freegovinfo.info) and invited others to add their own comments.

We are attaching to this email a copy of our comments and the responses from other librarians. We do not pretend to represent the whole depository community, just a few voices from people unable to travel to Council.

We appreciate the fact that you are addressing this issue and reaching out to the depository community for their comments and ideas. Because this issue is so important and because so many depository librarians cannot attend Council meetings, we suggest that you reach out to the community even more and take input from a broader section of the community before major decisions are made. Some of the actions you might take include:

• Using your OPAL meeting room to hold a set of “virtual town meetings” on the topic of digital distribution.
• Survey either the entire FDLP or the subset of libraries indicating willingness to take digital items on issues related to digital distribution.
• Send GPO/DLC reps to State library association meetings to given presentations on FDSys and take suggestions on Digital Distribution.

Thank you for taking time to receive more input on an issue that will shape citizen access to federal government information for years to come.

Alternet just posted a story about the closing of the EPA libraries ("A Step Shy of Book-Burning." By Kelpie Wilson, 11/23/06). This article, in addition to positive news stories over the last month or so has moved the plight of the EPA libraries into the mainstream and caused our Congress people to reevaluate the horrendously bad decision that has caused the closure of EPA libraries. But the fight's not over yet. Please, please, please contact your representatives and let them know you support the refunding of EPA libraries -- AND fill in ALA's legislative action. See the ALA Washington office for background information.

In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff.

The EPA's professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to continue to demoralize its employees."

[..]Closing the EPA libraries is the perfect symbol to characterize the methods of the Bush administration. Since 2000, the Republicans have cemented their reputation as ushers of a new dark age. They have sought to shroud the light of science by closing libraries and by suppressing scientific reports. They have gagged their own scientists and persecuted whistleblowers. They have cloaked government in secrecy, a prime example being Dick Cheney's secret meetings with oil companies to draft an industry-friendly national energy policy. But that era is now winding down.

Recently, there was a govdoc-l thread on the posibility of Congress discontinuing its printed index to the United States Code. At first this didn't seem to be such a big deal since my library also subscribes to the U.S.C.A, LEXIS and the code itself is freely available online.

Subject: Re: US Code Index may be eliminated

I'm so glad you posed this question! I sometimes feel in the minority in the gov docs community because I'm at a public library, and your question brings up issues that are at the heart of serving our public! Our limited funds mean that Westlaw, Lexis, and other paid databases are not options, so yes, our patrons do use the index, and usually prefer using the print to the electronic option. They also use the appendices.

Please let the good folks at the Office of Law Revision Counsel know that if they do not put the money into the print version, then PLEASE spend that money on more computers, more instructional classes for library staff and the public, and more database access in our public libraries! Access to our country's laws should not be dependent upon the economic class of the person requesting it!

Melissa Earley

Reference Librarian II, Government Documents & H. Carlisle Bean Law Library
Spartanburg County Public Libraries

Since the vast majority of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries have historically been academic and special libraries, it is easy to overlook the needs of public libraries (20%) which as a group have fewer resources. Additionally, although public libraries are the smallest part of the FDLP, they are closest to the ordinary citizen that the FDLP is supposed to serve. So the federal government and the rest of the depostiory community have a responsibility to make it easier for public libraries to provide federal government information, not harder. If print is what is needed to help public libraries, the government should give it to them.

Thanks Melissa for bringing this issue of public library needs to the community's attention.

Here's a twofer to give you some more reading matter over the long weekend:

A friend sent me this internet campaign to shed public light on the secret Smithsonian/Showtime contract that would give Showtime a 30 year, non-competitive stranglehold on Smithsonian (i.e. public domain!) archives. Background on the story can be found at boingboing. If you want to be added as a signatory, please send email to Carl Malamud (carl@media.org) no later than Sunday, November 25, 2006.

After, I signed the letter, I was looking around the public.resource site and came across another campaign (perhaps dated but still viable!) that Carl had put together calling for a hacker tax credit! The basic idea is that open source software, because it is the driving force behind our new information culture, should be supported publically so that more growth can happen. Check out the text of the letter below that Malamud suggests you send to your Congresspeople. This campaign, as I said earlier, may be dated (he lists Vice President Al Gore as a suggested addressee), but open source software (sometimes called FLOSS) is still something for which we should all be advocating!

Pablo Picasso once said that good art is created, but great art is stolen. On the Internet, the same holds true. Good code is created, but great code is copied over and over.

The Internet was created from open source software, code that people can freely use to build new code, to run their networks, to create a new business, or to build a service that people can use.

Take for example the work of Paul Vixie, who has placed in the public domain the software that the Domain Name System runs on. This software has been used by every major Internet Service Provider and has been bundled into the operating system products of IBM, DEC, Silicon Graphics, and Sun.

Open source software created the Internet, and created the economic boom we now see in Silicon Valley. Most of the large web sites in the world run on the open source Apache web server. The $4 billion Netscape Corporation was built from the open source Mosaic. The PERL programming language was created as open source, but now fuels over $100 million in book sales for publishers like O'Reilly & Associates.

But, we are eating our seed corn. There is no systematic national effort to create open source software and it is increasingly difficult to keep this infrastructure alive. For every success story like Apache, there are dozens of projects that languish because of the lack of formal support for open source projects.

In the global village, open source software is not an alternative to commercial software, just as in our real cities public parks are not an alternative to our commercial districts. The parks make our cities thrive, and thriving cities are a good place to do business.

It is a happy accident that we have open source software, but there are simple steps that the federal government can take to provide even more fuel for the growth of our information economy. Here is a simple algorithm for a Hacker Tax Credit that could be added to the U.S. Code:

      #/us/usc/irs
      if {
            You produce software that is in the public domain ; 

      } andif {
            That software is used by at least 1000 people ; 

      } then {
            You may deduct your development and operational costs from your gross income for tax purposes ; } 

If the U.S. Congress could compile this simple subroutine into the U.S. Code, this simple step would have a greater effect than any cuts in capital gain taxes. I urge you to consider steps that the U.S. Congress can take to insure a strategic national reserve of open source software.

Sincerely,

Carl Malamud
media.org

**Public announcement**

It's never too early to start planning for Sunshine Week 2007 (March 11-17), the national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information! The 2nd annual webcast conference will include the results of a nationwide information audit organized by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Sunshine Week, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government and the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

But they need your help! The audit, which is set to be conducted in early January, 2007, will consist of requestors going to pre-selected government offices, asking for copies of a particular public document and then recording how well the agency responds.

If you are interested in participating or would like additional information, please contact Debra Gersh Hernandez, Sunshine Week coordinator, at dghernandez@asne.org or (703) 807-2100 as soon as possible. If you are ready to begin the audit but need a local partner, please contact the national audit facilitator Judith Burrell at judith_burrell@cox.net or (703) 281-3836.

While this won't be news to those who follow Census developments closely, it is a nice summary of some of the important deficiencies in the American Community Survey:

• 2005 American Community Survey by Roger Owen Green, NYS SBDC Research Network (November 21, 2006)

Writing for the New York State Small Business Development Center (NYS SBDC) Green notes that:

...because of previous cuts in the Congressional funding, the 2005 ACS does not capture data from group quarters, which include prisons, college dormitories, and nursing homes.

One thing this means is that in geographic areas where there is a large group quarters population, comparisons of figures from ACS to Census 2000 may be inaccurate or misleading. As Green says, "...politicians and the media have glommed onto these new statistics, making assertions about populations that the methodology does not support."

Here is another article about Google working with government agencies to get them to use Google SiteMaps to make their information more accessible:

• Google wants you, by Joab Jackson, GCN (November 20, 2006).

John Lewis Needham, development manager for Google, is quoted as saying that at least 20 percent of all government information is locked in databases that can only be accessed from web forms. He also cites a study that discovered that "70 percent of visitors to the National Institutes of Health were directed there by search engines, whereas only 4 percent of the visitors came directly to the site by simply typing in the Web address."

The Directorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress: A Treasure Hidden Under a Bushel Basket, By Michael Ravnitzky, LLRX.com, November 12, 2006.

Michael Ravnitzky, a Washington, D.C. area attorney and journalist, has published this useful article about this "little known but well-regarded and highly influential research department contained within the Library of Congress." The mission of the Directorate of Legal Research is "to provide high quality, timely, and innovative research, analysis, and reference services on issues of international, and foreign and comparative law."

But obtaining reports from the Directorate is very difficult. No overall list of DLR reports has ever been produced or released and the Directorate itself says that it has no comprehensive list of its own publications. While the Pennyhill Press sells copies of 66 DRL reports, there are evidently many more that it does not sell.

Ravnitzky does an excellent job of digging into the sources that do exist to track down this useful information. Bookmark this article for future reference questions!

What is the difference between true and fake sharing? Lawrence Lessig addresses the question on his blog this week:

• More bad karma: When Web 2.0 meets lawyers 1.0, by Lawrence Lessig on Lessig Blog(Nov 16, 2006).

What is the relevance to government information? Lessig points out that YouTube, a company that was built upon sharing of information "freely" to everyone, is threatening legal action against someone for simply enabling people to save YouTube content to their own machines. There is an irony there! And the irony leads us to wonder how GPO will "freely" distribute government information without prohibiting full, easy, access to complete content.

GPO can do this in a number of ways such as using DRM technologies (GPO has never said they will shun DRM). But an even easier way is to make government information "viewable" (as they promise in their strategic plan) but not make the document easy to download. (Have you ever tried to download more than one page at a time of the Congressional Record)?

While it is easy for us to take government openness for granted and assume that government secrecy is an aberration, a new book that examines government secrecy world-wide warns us of dangers that exist today and identifies problems that we can see in the United States. From the publisher:

Roberts goes further than the popular view that secrecy is simply a problem of selfish bureaucrats trying to hide embarrassing information by showing how such powerful trends as privatization, globalization, and the "networking" of security agencies are complicating the fight against secrecy.

The book is Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age by Alasdair Roberts of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, New York, Cambridge University Press (January 2006, 334 pages).

We know about privatization of government information and this week we saw more about networking of security agencies when Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte submitted to Congress the Information Sharing Environment Implementation Plan (November 2006). This plan explicitly calls for "policies, processes, protocols and technology that enable the sharing of ["terrorist related"] information among federal, state, local, tribal and private sector entities, as well as our foreign partners." While this may seem a reasonable proposal in the abstract, it has two problems: First, it is not clear that the "terrorist related information" will always be information about terrorists; it may often be massive amounts of information on all citizens, which the government hopes to use to identify terrorists. Second, there is no proposal for sharing information with the public; that implies that this information will be shared and kept secretly -- exactly what Roberts discusses in his book.

Thanks to Secrecy News for the pointer to this book!

Can you be required to comply with a government policy or law that is itself secret?

Although we are not allowed to see the law in question, at least we can see the court documents and amicus curiae briefs filed in the court case challenging this situation. See:

• Confronting Secret Law by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (November 15, 2006).

Some Americans Lack Food, but USDA Won't Call Them Hungry. By Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post, Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page A01

The USDA has eliminated the term "hunger" from the categories it uses to describe impoverished households. The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security." This is absolutely horrendous that in the world's richest country (to say nothing of the 820 million hungry people in the rest of the world!), 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people!! -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year.

This is a good time to review Jessamyn's post from a few months back entitled, "reduce, reuse, and recycle... food." If the numbers above sicken you, please consider donating food and/or time to your local Food Not Bombs and/or donate food at your local food bank.

Documents quoted:

• Household Food Security in the United States, 2005. US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• The State of Food Insecurity in the World. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

November is American Indian Heritage Month. Following are some federal sites that offer excellent information about American Indians:

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence, American Indian Heritage Month Resources

The National Museum of the American Indian

Smithsonian Education, American Indian Heritage Teaching Resources

FirstGov, Native American and Tribal Cultural Resources

And, if you’d like to include some Native American foods in your Thanksgiving celebration, the Native American Nutrition Education Database from the National Agricultural Library includes some sources with recipes.

Mitsitam! (Which, to the Delaware and Piscataway people, means "Let’s eat!")

Some OCLC Research Web services By Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Programs and Research and Chief Strategist, Next Space (No.4 2006).

'Web service' is the term used for a set of emerging approaches that allow applications to communicate more easily using Web-based protocols. Effectively, Web services are a way of allowing applications to interconnect ...

See our remix page for examples of remixing government information. While these aren't all Web Services in the technical sense, they are all examples of reuse of public information and the precursors to true web services for government information.

Recently I've been able to update our page on Presidential Signing Statements with these three relatively new signing statements:

• 20061004 - No privacy reports under DHS?
• 20061013 - Keeping Internet gambling in the dark
• 20061017 - No information on threats to America

Each of these statements appear to deny reports to Congress and/or the general public.

We at FGI look forward to the day when Presidential Signing Statements that purport to cancel portions of passed laws are challenged in the courts.

No President, Republican, Democrat or other should have the ability to selectively annul portions of laws through signing statements. They should either veto the laws, challenge them in open court, or faithfully execute them as they have sworn to do. Those are the lawful options in our country.

In his October 4, 2006 Statement on Signing the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007 (H.R. 5441), the President said:

The executive branch shall construe section 522 of the Act, relating to privacy officer reports, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.

and

The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(4) in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to require the opinions of heads of departments and to supervise the unitary executive branch. Accordingly, the affected department and agency shall ensure that any reports or recommendations submitted to the Congress are subjected to appropriate executive branch review and approval before submission.

The full text of HR 5441 can be found on its Thomas page.

Section 522 appears to be intended to prevent anyone but the DHS privacy officer from altering his/her reports:

SEC. 522. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by any person other than the Privacy Officer appointed under section 222 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 142) to alter, direct that changes be made to, delay, or prohibit the transmission to Congress of any report prepared under paragraph (6) of such section.

Makes you wonder why you'd want other people to alter the reports, or why a REPUBLICAN Congress might be concerned enough to put this provision into legislation.

Section 503(c) does not appear to come with a subparagraph 4. If you spot such a provision or know what the President is talking about, please let us know in comments or by e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo.info

The October 13, 2006 Statement on Statement on Signing the SAFE Port Act contained this statement:

The executive branch shall construe as advisory provisions of the Act that purport to direct or burden the conduct of negotiations by the executive branch with foreign governments, international organizations, or other entities abroad, that purport to direct executive branch officials to negotiate with foreign governments or in international organizations to achieve specified foreign policy objectives, or that purport to require the executive branch to disclose
deliberations between the United States and foreign countries. Such provisions include subsections 205(d) and (i) and 803(b) of the Act; subsection 431(b) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 301 of the Act; and subsection 629(h) of the Tariff Act of 1930,
as amended by section 404 of the Act. Such provisions, if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, would impermissibly interfere with the President's constitutional authorities to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs, participate in international negotiations, and supervise the unitary executive branch.

The full text of the Safe Port Act can be found on its Thomas page.

One of the more surprising areas where the Administration is refusing to report on is Internet Gambling. The President fears for the safety of the country if this report is made to Congress:

803 (b) Report Required- The Secretary of the Treasury shall submit an annual report to the Congress on any deliberations between the United States and other countries on issues relating to Internet gambling.

One would think that the Administration would want to document progress towards eliminating Internet gambling. What purpose is served in keeping it secret?

Of course, one can also be surprised that Internet gambling made into a ports bill to begin with!

From Statement on Signing the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122), published on October 17, 2006 and put into October 30 Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents

A number of provisions in the Act call for the executive branch to furnish information to the Congress or other entities on various subjects. These provisions include sections 219, 313, 360, 1211, 1212, 1213, 1227, 1402, and 3116 of the Act, section 427 of title 10, United States Code, as amended by section 932 of the Act, and section 1093 of the Ronald W. Reagan National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005 (Public Law 108-375) as amended by section 1061 of the Act. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the
performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

The full text of the Act can be found on the HR 5122 bill page on Thomas.

Some of the information the President proposes to withhold include:

• Sec. 313. Response plan for remediation of unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions, and munitions constituents.
• Sec. 360. Energy efficiency in weapons platforms.
• Sec. 1211. North Korea. - This section requires an interagency review of policy towards North Korea and requires this report - (4) REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the appointment of an individual as Coordinator under paragraph (1), the Coordinator shall submit to the President and Congress an unclassified report, with a classified annex if necessary, on the actions undertaken under paragraph (3). The report shall set forth--(A) the results of the review under paragraph (3)(A); and (B) any other matter on North Korea that the Coordinator considers appropriate.
• SEC. 1213. INTELLIGENCE ON IRAN. - This section requires a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, plus a "Presidential Report on Policy Objectives and United States Strategy Regarding Iran"
• Sec. 1402. Quarterly reports on Department of Defense response to threat posed by improvised explosive devices.

To all of these questions of interest to the Republic's representatives, the President asserts authority to withhold information. If the President believed that Congress' requests were unconstitutional, he had a duty to either veto the legislation or file immediate suit in federal court to nullify the offending provisions.

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. John Markoff, NY Times, November 12, 2006

As you all know, FGI has been interested in and has tracked on the semantic web for quite some time. We've implemented some web2.0 technologies on FGI (see our delicious tags?), but imagine my surprise in coming across this NYT article extolling web3.0(!) aka the semantic web. The money is gradually getting behind the semantic web (witness IBM and Google working on it). It's coming folks so libraries need to start thinking about it and finding ways to implement those ideas in our bibliographic tools.

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.