From Yahoo! News:
Syrian authorities have blocked an independent news website run by a group that promotes free press, a human rights group told AFP.
“Authorities blocked the Mashed al-Suri (syriaview.net) site, an independent online newspaper run by the Syria Center for Free Press and Expression,” said laywer Mohannad al-Hassani who heads the Syrian Organization for Human [...]
Archive of entries posted on June 2006
Syria blocks independent news website: rights group
FOIA Facts: The Return of the Backlog
From LLRX:
Like a boomerang, FOIA backlogs are back! FOIA backlogs are the number of pending requests at an agency at any one point in time. Ok, some may argue that they never really went away. However, many agencies greatly reduced the number of cases in their FOIA backlogs during the late 1990s and earlier this [...]
OA Business Model a Challenge for Public Library of Science
From Library Journal:
It seems that open access journal publishing, known as the “gold” version of OA, isn’t paved with gold. In an eye-opening analysis in the journal Nature, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first open access journals in 2003, is said to be facing a “looming financial crisis.”
Royal Society charges £300 per page for open access
From Information World Review:
The Royal Society is to charge authors £300 per page to use its new open access journal service.
EXiS Open Choice will offer authors whose work is accepted by Royal Society journals the opportunity to make their articles immediately available online. Initially authors will be charged a discounted rate of £225 per A4 [...]
Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror
From the New York Times:
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.
ACLU v. National Security Agency
From a recent commentary on Findlaw.com:
ACLU v. National Security Agency: Why the “State Secrets Privilege” Shouldn’t Stop the Lawsuit Challenging Warrantless Telephone Surveillance of Americans
The American Civil Liberties Union is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit requesting that the National Security Agency (NSA) be enjoined from its ongoing violation of the Foreign Intelligence [...]
DOJ OIG Survey of Access to Information Problems Encountered by Gov’t Agencies
Survey Results on Access to Information Problems Encountered by Federal, State, and Local Accountability Organizations, Evaluation and Inspections Report, I-2006-006, June 2006. (107 pages, PDF)
Accountability organizations such as federal and state offices of inspector general and state and local audit organizations are responsible for helping ensure that government operations use public resources wisely and achieve [...]
Blogs test political limits of Internet in China
From the Washington Post:
A New York Times columnist has created Chinese-language blogs on two of China’s most popular Web portals to test the limits of the Internet in China — but one of them could not be accessed on Wednesday.
Lawmakers to Crack Down on Data Brokers
From the Washington Post:
Even as others cited the Fifth Amendment, a former data broker enthralled Congress on Wednesday with a bizarre, behind-the-scenes lesson on how this shadowy industry covertly gathers Americans’ telephone records without subpoenas or warrants.
Some lawmakers gasped and others shook their heads in amazement during testimony from James Rapp, a former data broker [...]
House panel would ask Bush for surveillance records
From News.com:
The U.S. Justice Department would have to turn over records of the National Security Agency’s telephone surveillance program to Congress under a resolution passed by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
The resolution, which passed on a voice vote, must be approved by the full House of Representatives before it is sent to the [...]