From PC World:
Speaking at a conference in South Korea, Eric Schmidt, the chairman and CEO of Google Inc., ducked the question of whether his company’s dominance of Internet search may ultimately distort democratic gains from improved information access. But he promised governments will be held to account more than ever before.
“Politicians will be forced to [...]
Archive of entries posted on May 2007
Net a ‘Force for Democracy’ says Google’s Schmidt
Tracy, CA case tests the power of government officials to avoid disclosure of their emails on public business
From the California First Amendment Coalition:
Those enterprising members of the Tracy City Council have come up with a strategy to hide from public view all their written communications about government business. With a bit of legal legerdemain, they claim to be able to evade state open-government laws, transforming their communications from public records into private [...]
CRS Report – Access to Government Information In the United States
Available from the Project on Government Secrecy:
The Constitution of the United States makes no specific allowance for any one of the co-equal branches to have access to information held by the others and contains no provision expressly establishing a procedure for, or a right of, public access to government information. Nonetheless, Congress has legislated various [...]
Historians Oppose Destruction of Guantanamo Detainee Records
From the National Coalition for History:
On April 26, 2007, the National Coalition for History, the American Historical Association, and twenty other organizations wrote to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein to express concerns about the possible destruction of records relating to the cases of detainees being held at [...]
UK Plan to stop silly FOI requests
From Kable:
The information commissioner Richard Thomas will announce plans to deter vexatious requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. At a conference in London on 24 May 2007, he will say that such cases can waste public money and jeopardise the reputation of the Act.
Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s Today progamme, Thomas said that [...]
U.S. Military Records Now Online
From Discovery News:
The world’s largest database of U.S. military records, spanning more than four centuries from the 1600’s to the Vietnam War, is now available and searchable online, according to Ancestry.com.
Highlights from the collection include World War I and World War II draft registration cards; prisoner of war records from the War of 1812, the [...]
Standing Up for Open Access
From Inside Higher Education:
Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were perplexed: How could a membership organization that gladly accepts and archives their scholarly work turn around and limit transmission of the material?
MIT faculty have contributed roughly 350 papers in the last eight years to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ digital database, according to Ellen [...]
Following the Money Trail Online
From the New York Times:
The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org.
It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.
All of this is public [...]
Council on Foreign Relations Launches Campaign 2008
With a focus on the most significant international issues in mind, CFR.org has launched its Campaign 2008 site, engineered to track the campaign through the prism of foreign policy, trade, international economics, and national and homeland security issues. Pundits may bemoan the extended campaign period, yet a silver lining may exist if the added months [...]
Google is watching you – ‘Big Brother’ row over plans for personal database
From The Independent:
Google, the world’s biggest search engine, is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives.
In a mission statement that raises the spectre of an internet Big Brother to rival Orwellian visions of the state, Google has [...]