Open Source Center Keeps Public in the Dark by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, May 19, 2008.

Steven Aftergood reports that Federal Government website, Open Source Center, the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) 'has imposed some rather ferocious controls on its unclassified products in order to shield them from public access. Even when its publications are not copyrighted, they are to be “treated as copyrighted” and in any case they “must not be disseminated to the public.”'

OpenCRS has posted another list of "fugitive" Congressional Research Service reports -- reports that are not yet openly available and online. They ask for your help by requesting them from your members of Congress and then uploading them to the OpenCRS.

Check out the list and request one that matches the needs of your own library and upload it today!

There is even a facebook group for OpenCRS.

Free public access to legal information has a long history going back to the earliest days of the Web. John Wonderlich describes some of the background in Legal Information as a Global Movement (Open House Project, May 27th, 2008), which also includes 3 videos about the movement. This is excellent, informative, and inspiring!

Tom Bruce describes still more of the history here.

As you can see by the flurry of blog posts, Shinjoung and I are trying to catch up after an extremely busy week in which we helped out with the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 34th annual Conference hosted at Stanford University. The workshops and programs (at least what I was able to attend in between running around, helping attendees get settled and work out their technology issues, helping to stream the video into Second Life ...) were extremely interesting. I even got to talk for a few minutes to Catherine Ruggles, one of the plenary speakers, who's the daughter of Richard Ruggles. I told her about scanning the 1965 report from the Social Science Research Council chaired by her father, which seemed to please her!

Now I'll have just enough time to catch up on sleep and then it'll be off to Anaheim for the ALA annual conference. I'll be hosting a preconference called Docs2.0, leading a session on digital collections at the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting, participating in the Publications Committee (anybody want to be the new editor for Documents to the People (DttP) (.doc) or write an article for the new GODORT occasional paper series?!) and generally being in 2 places at once the whole weekend. Please say hi! if you see me running around. There's always time to chat :-)

Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

For all you Doctor Who fans out there, I just got word that in this week's episode, "Silence in the Library", the good Doctor and Donna visit an abandoned outer space library complete with data ghosts!

[thanks to the shifted librarian!]

The Organization For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is asking the public this question: "How can the Internet make the world a better place?" The results will be shown at their Ministerial meeting on the “Future of the Internet” in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008. The best youtube videos will be shown to ministers and VIPs. It's good that OECD leaders are willing to listen to ordinary citizens' voices, but it's interesting that OECD is partnering with youtube (owned by google). I can understand why OECD is using youtbube -- numbers of existing users, ease of use of the tool, etc -- but it would be better IMHO if OECD used an open and community-driven system rater than one owned by one commercial entity. We'll post the best videos here when they're announced.

This article describes changes coming next month as well as some long term thinking about the future of searching across federal, state, and local government web sites. The new changes are aimed at giving the managers of agency web sites a bit more control over how their results appear to users of USASearch.gov. A user searching for "passport" will be more assured of finding a link to State Department's latest information and instructions, for instance. The article also notes long term changes are possible. The five-year contract that USASearch.gov has with Vivisimo will be expiring in a couple of years and in the last two years "the industry's best search companies have opened their development platforms and made it much easier to access their indexes through common application programming interfaces." Currently, USASearch.gov uses Microsoft Live Search and Vivisimo.

• Widgets to the rescue, By Wyatt Kash, GCN, May 26, 2008. "USASearch.gov aims to make agency info easier to find with new spotlight tool."

(cross posted on legalresearchplus.com)

Earlier this month the National Archives and Records Administration released their Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. This is a follow-up to a draft policy released in September of last year.

A fair amount of the report discusses the use of partner organizations in the digitization effort. The draft relased in September was open to public comment, and NARA has posted their responses to those comments here.

(Thanks to the American Association of Law Libraries Washington Office and their monthly E-Bulletin)

[Cross posted on Legalresearchplus.com]

The New York State Office for Technology and the New York State Archives, has just issued a report that "examines how the state can provide choice, interoperability and vendor neutrality in electronic document creation while ensuring electronic records are preserved and remain accessible."

"The report [“A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State”] recommends establishing a statewide, cross-government Electronics Records Committee to address, in a formal, long-term and collaborative manner, all aspects of electronic record creation, management and preservation. The committee would facilitate state agency adoption, place the vendor community on notice of the state’s strategic direction and long-term commitment for technology openness, and ensure this commitment is institutionalized throughout the state enterprise and survives government leadership transitions. Another recommendation suggests the committee develops and publishes a final open records policy, and begins issuing a series of standards and guidelines for implementing the policy."

Hat tip to BeSpacific

I was cleaning my condo today and ran across a "government documents jounral" that I turned in as an assignment in grad school back in 1995. Part of what I did for this assignment was to subscribe to Govdoc-l, the documents librarians' electronic mailing list. I had to report my impressions. The three things I cited 13 years ago were:

1. Govdoc-L is practical.
2. Govdoc'rs are helpful
3. Govdoc-l is informative

I expanded on these ideas in my paper and then concluded with:

"In light of the three characteristics outlined above, I feel that it is extremely important for any documents librarian who has access to the internet to subscribe to this list!"

Aside from not being able to conceive a documents librarian without internet access in 2008, I think this advice is just as true today as it was 13 years ago!

These days govdoc-l has an RSS feed, so now there is even less excuse NOT to follow this important government information resource.

Don't go throwing out your microfiche machines just yet. At last month's Maker Faire, Andrew (aka Pillowsopher) showed off his microfiche-to-MIDI machine. The microfiche machine takes light (in this case, from the screen of the microfiche reader) and converts it into MIDI signals that can then be sent to devices that take MIDI input, like synthesizers or computers. Andrew made the machine for a San Francisco band called Microfiche. Anyone want to go to their next show on June 6?

Coverity, in collaboration with Stanford University and under contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has just released their Open Source Report 2008 (PDF). Their environmental scan of major open source projects found that the number of defects in open source code is dramatically dropping! More detail is available on ArsTechnica.

Now that we have definitive data that shows that open source software is strong on security, how can we get libraries to participate more readily on collaborative open source projects (like citation management, ILSs, CMSs...)? I'm reminded of a thought experiment posted by Joe Lucia, University Librarian @ Villanova University, in November 2007 on the NewGenCatalog list. In his post, Mr. Lucia called for a "shift of those investments from commercial software support (and staff technical support for commercial products) to a collaborative support environment for open source applications." Come on folks, let's make this shift happen!

In 2006, Coverity's scan detected an average of 0.30 defects per 1,000 lines of code, or, put differently, one code defects per every 3,333 lines. The lower boundary, in this case, was 0.02 (one defect per 50,000 lines) and the upper boundary was 1.22 defects per thousand lines of code.

Two years later, the average defect density has fallen to 0.25, or one error per 4,000 lines of code. The upper boundary remains unchanged at 1.22, but the lower boundary has shrunk to 0, implying that repeated scanning has eliminated the errors from at least one program—at least all the errors that Coverity's 2006 static analysis program was able to detect.

A 16 percent reduction in defect density over two years is a notable gain, and Coverity singled out certain participating projects as having an exceptionally low defect density.

• Postfix
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Samba

I always find it odd when news reports cite government documents without giving a link or good reference to them. It seems to me that this is something news web sites should do regularly. These reports are not always that easy to track down. Case in point: today's New York Times has a story about a Pentagon report:

• Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says, By James Glanz, New York Times, May 23, 2008

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

Using Google to search on the title of the report plus "site:.gov" yields nothing this morning, although the report is available from two different government web sites.

The report is available at the site of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee Holds Hearing on Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds for Iraq, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, along with other statements and documents.

• Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, U.S. Defense Department, Office of the Inspector General, Report No. D-2008-098, (May 22, 2008).

It is also available at www.dodig.mil/audit/reports with this url: www.dodig.mil/audit/reports/fy08/08-098.pdf The same google search with "site:.mil" substituted for "site:.gov" finds the title in a May 22 "what's new" story on the home page www.dodig.osd.mil of the Office of the Inspector General.

This is the second report I have looked for this week that is available as a PDF document on a government web site that google has (evidently) not indexed full text. I do not know if this reflects a google policy or just a delay in indexing.

Nextgov reports that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is free to reconnect itself to the Internet, thanks to a Washington D.C. District Court ruling earlier this month.

Interior allowed to reconnect to Internet, by Gautham Nagesh, Nextgov, May 21, 2008.

District Judge James Robertson granted on May 14 motions filed by [Deparment of the] Interior requesting that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Office of Hearings and Appeals, the Office of the Special Trustee, and the Office of Historical Trust Accounting be allowed to reconnect their networks to the Internet.

The BIA network was ordered to shut down in 2001 amid accusations of poor data security in the ongoing Cobell v. Kempthorne class action case.

Security questions remain, however.

[Judge] Robertson acknowledged that Interior’s IT security may still be inadequate. “The congressional and inspector general reports indicating that the Interior Department, overall, continues to receive failing grades on its IT report card are troubling, but I have no authority to act in response to them, nor do I have any colorable suggestion that the declarations before me … were made in bad faith,” he wrote.

As of this writing, the BIA site has not been fully restored. According to Interior chief information officer Michael Howell, it is expected to take a couple of months for the BIA to reconnect.

-Brian Provenzale

Go ahead and try with this online game called Budget Hero. Fun for the whole family :-)

Today, some mixed good news/bad news about the availability of free public data in the UK. As we've noted here before (e.g., Privatized Data Woes in Britain and News from abroad: UK open statutes & RFID in Canadian coins and The Semantic Web + Government Information = Serendipitous Reuse) the British government sells limited-use licences to its GIS data on a cost recovery basis. Now, as part of a proposed national geoportal, the UK would "create a single point of entry on the web to data held by public bodies such as local councils, Ordnance Survey (OS), the British Geological Survey and the Environment Agency." But, as the story says, "A new system will make geospatial information available without charge - yet we'll still have to pay."

• An Inspired debate on access, by Michael Cross, The Guardian, May 22 2008.

First, some very good news. Civil servants revealed last week that the British government has begun work on a system to make all the geospatial data it holds on the natural environment available for free inspection and re-use. Now the bad news. In this context, "free" means we will still have to pay to download much key data, especially if it is to be published or otherwise used commercially.

The Pew Center on the States has been running a "Government Performance Project" for some time. It seeks to grade the 50 states on
how well they manage their information, as well as their infrastructure, money, and people. The latest evaluation is titled Grading the States 2008 Report.

-George Wilson

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General has just released its report (PDF) (uploaded to the Internet Archive of course!) on the FBI’s involvement in detainee interrogations in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reuters reports that the “Bush administration’s top security officials ignored FBI concerns” and that the “FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use. According to McClatchy News, The IG's report had been delayed in part because the Pentagon slow-rolled its review of the report for classified information.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration's top security officials ignored FBI concerns over the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects, which one agent called "borderline torture," a four-year Justice Department probe found.

The FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use, said the 370-page report released on Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Critics say the techniques employed by the CIA and U.S. military in questioning terrorism suspects captured after the September 11 attacks amounted to torture.

FBI agents participated interrogations and still do, but bureau Director Robert Mueller directed agents in 2002 not to participate in coercive questioning, the report said.

[Thanks Crooks and Liars!]

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org -- along with folks from several other great orgs -- is organizing a non-conference in Chicago this August. He's looking for 100 delegates to meet and work on issues of making government information more accessible to more people in a variety of formats. Find out more information here.

Are there any FGI readers out there interested in going? So far, there are 3 working groups (case law, municipal govts, and copyright) but I'd love to put together a library working group. Any takers? Leave a note in the comments to let us know you're interested in going. In your comments, it'd also be good if you left your ideas about what tasks a library working group could handle. Think of this as pre-un-conference agenda setting :-)

The Internet has created a new generation of individuals and institutes that practice the time-honored tradition of observing and reporting on the activities of government. These are reporters in the sense of court reporters, not journalists, auditors as in independent investigators rather than CPAs.

The classic independent observer is the court reporter, such as Henry Wheaton and Richard Peters, two businessmen in the early days of the Republic who took it upon themselves to collect, print, and sell the decisions of courts. Indeed, it was a business spat between those two that led to the classic pronouncement by the Supreme Court on works of government:

The Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right. Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834)

The new breed of government observers span all walks of life. In addition to a vibrant commercial sector, there are increasingly a number of nonprofit, academic, and individual citizen efforts."

On April 17, 2008, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public en banc hearing on broadband network management practices. Hosted by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, the event was attended by five FCC Commissioners who heard from legal scholars, high-tech entrepreneurs, Web start-ups and an auditorium full of interested community members about whether and how the FCC should provide more oversight of phone and cable companies in order to ensure "net neutrality."

Stanford Law School Archivist Sarah Wilson has compiled a document with testimony, statements, press releases and news coverage related to the hearing. Her work, The FCC Hearing at Stanford, is available as part of the Robert Crown Law Library Legal Research Paper Series.

-Kate Wilko

Federal Computer Week (FCW) profiles 4 government blogs and one non-government blog that they find worth reading here: 5 blogs worth reading, FCW, May 12, 2008. For each one they give a description, notes on how often it is updated and why it is worth reading, and sample entries.

1. The Impact of IT on Businesses and Their Leaders
2. Department of Health and Human Services blog
3. Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog
4. DipNote
5. Navy Department CIO blog

A 2006 Department of Defense directive on Information Operations (“Information Operations,” Department of Defense Directive O-3600.1, August 14, 2006), which had previously been withheld as “For Official Use Only,” was released last week in response to a FIOA request from Steven Aftergood and the Federation of American Scientists (Thanks Steven!!). This may or may not have something to do with the defense contractors imbedded in our mainstream media outlets. Steven raises the question of whether those imbedded contractors violate or implement this policy. Thoughts?

I just uploaded the document to the IA govt documents collection. FYI, I've started a new tag -- IA deposit -- for those documents that are uploaded to the IA. The tag (*every* tag on FGI) has an RSS feed of course, making it easy for library catalogers to keep up to date and get those fugitives cataloged and accessible to your users!

The directive, issued by the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence), assigns baseline responsibilities for the conduct of information operations, an umbrella term that includes electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security.

Among related capabilities, the directive cites “public affairs,” the purpose of which is “to communicate military objectives, counter misinformation and disinformation, deter adversary actions, and maintain the trust and confidence of the U.S. population, as well as our friends and allies. Effective military operations shall be based on credibility and shall not focus on directing or manipulating U.S. public actions or opinion.”

[Thanks Secrecy News!]

Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, writes that the Bush administration's hostility towards public access to and preservation of records combined with changes in technology that have transformed the way in which we all communicate are leading to a situation in which "primary sources on the most important decisions and activities in the government may be lost, destroyed, or closed to the public." [emphasis added]

• The White House: Off Limits to Historians? by Meredith Fuchs, Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (5-1-08), posted at History News Network on Thursday, May 8, 2008.

[O]ver the last seven years there have been a series of moves by the current administration that may ensure that the records of the White House and the federal offices and agencies that work closely with the White House will not be available to historians.

Another note from abroad reminding us that the importance of accessing government information is recognized worldwide:

Title: Promise of technology is for everybody (By HESSA AL JABER)
Source: The Peninsula On-line: Qatar's leading English daily, 5/17/2008
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/commentary/commentaryother.asp?file=maycommentary482008.xml

In article otherwise on technology for the disabled, the head of Qatar's Information and Communications Technology had this to say about government information:

Because people with disabilities cannot participate in government processes or benefit from government services if they don’t know what government offers, ictQATAR looks forward to setting a timeframe in which all public government information is universally accessible. This will include information that the government provides through radio and television programming, kiosks, and websites. And I call upon other government entities to begin incorporating into their websites accessibility functions such as media players, specially designed web browsers, and other assistive technologies.

In the near future, ictQATAR will work to establish a Fund to offset the costs of both individual and organisational adoption of ICT to benefit the disabled. Although the details have yet to be fully developed, we expect that disabled individuals will apply for grants or vouchers to help pay for technologies and/or services that will enable them to benefit from the same opportunities as everybody else. Similarly, government organisations, corporations, and other organisations will be entitled to grants to encourage the universal provision of services and employment of disabled individuals.

To the extent the government's goals are in line with the desires of Qatar's people, we wish them well in their efforts to place government information online. For more information about Qatar, please see the US State Department's Background Notes for Qatar, last published in July 2007.