From News.com:
Google is set to announce Monday that it is working with officials in four U.S. states to make sure all the public information they have online is easily accessible through the company’s search engine.
As part of a voluntary public-private sector partnership, Google has been helping technology managers in Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia remove [...]
Archive of entries posted on April 2007
Googling state government documents
Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington’s Newest Watchdogs
From Wired:
Tread carefully, politicians — concerned citizens are watching your every move on the web. Their tools? Custom data mashups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington. . .
. . . Anyone — from bloggers and students to lobbyists and activists — can use these [...]
Voices of Civil Rights
AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress welcome you to Voices of Civil Rights. We have collected and preserved thousands of personal stories and oral histories of the Civil Rights Movement, forming the world’s largest archive of personal accounts of civil rights history. The entire collection eventually will be [...]
India To Offer Free Broadband In Two Years
From India Times:
The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.
UK Slave records go online in anniversary year
From Information World Review:
Government records from one of history’s darker periods made freely available
An online archive detailing the names of slaves traded by the British has been launched as part of a series of events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.
Ancestry.co.uk documents nearly 100,000 slaves owned by British [...]
Industry Insider: Attorney tired of waiting game with FDA
From the Star-Ledger:
File this under “enough is enough.”
New Brunswick attorney Eric Weinberg, who represents several hundred clients suing Merck over health problems allegedly caused by the pain-relief drug Vioxx, began requesting information from the Food and Drug Administration nearly three years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
He is still waiting for most of it, [...]
Presidential Secrecy and the Law
Secrecy News reviews a new book on Presidential Secrecy:
Presidential secrecy is best understood not as an expression of executive strength but as a sign of weakness and insecurity, according to a provocative new book on the subject.
“When the president lacks diplomatic or interpersonal skill, he is likely to compensate by shielding his activities — even [...]
Court Asked to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo
From the New York Times:
The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.
Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail [...]
Web Harvest of the 109th Congress (2006)
From the National Archives and Records Administration:
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducted a harvest (i.e., capture) of House and Senate public web sites as they existed prior to December 11 2006. This harvest was intended to document Congressional presence on the World Wide Web during the closing weeks of the 109th Congress (2006).
The [...]
My First Two Years: Access Issues at the National Archives
Remarks by Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States to the Annual Freedom of Information Day Conference at the National Press Club, March 16, 2007, Washington, DC:
I have now served as Archivist of the United States for two years and bring you a brief interim report on this process as it applies to today’s topic. [...]