From The Hill:
A handful of Democratic senators are promoting legislation to repeal immunity for telecommunications firms that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warantless wiretapping program.
Congress voted last year to provide “retroactive immunity” to any companies participating in the controversial program. But with a more sizable majority, some Democrats are pushing to repeal that.
Sen. Chris Dodd [...]
Archive of entries posted on September 2009
Dodd pens telecom immunity repeal
Google, French publishers face off in court
From Reuters:
Major publishers accused Google on Thursday of “brutally” exploiting France’s literary heritage as they launched a court challenge to the Internet giant’s drive to scan digital copies of books and put extracts online.
Google Book Settlement 1.0 Is History
From the Huffington Post:
Version 1.0 of the proposed Google Book Search (GBS) Settlement is history, pushed into the dustbin by hundreds of submissions urging Judge Denny Chin to reject it, none more devastating than the one filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) just last Friday.
On the second day after the DOJ came out [...]
San Francisco Innovations Showcase
From DataSF:
The DataSF App Showcase celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the Mayor’s vision of a more collaborative and open government. The public can browse examples of new ways in which Bay Area constituents are using City data to improve San Francisco.
The World Prepares for International Right To Know Day, 28 September 2009
From freedominfo.org:
The 7th International Right to Know Day on 28th of September 2009 will mark a year of historic advances for the right of access to information and will be celebrated by the Freedom of Information Advocate’s Network which has around 200 organisations in 75 countries who are calling for universal respect for the public’s [...]
DOJ Statement Hinders Google Books Settlement
From SLA’s Public Policy blog:
On 18 September 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) advised a federal judge that, unless revised, the proposed legal settlement giving Google the digital rights to millions of out-of-print books threatens to block competition and drive up prices.
SLA has been active in discussions with Google since October 2008, and in [...]
Most Bundling Information Remains Undisclosed
From OMB Watch:
After the Federal Election Commission (FEC) formulated a rule on reporting campaign contributions bundled by lobbyists, many were concerned that it was too narrow and would not quite capture very much information. Now, we see those points were not misguided. The situations under which a member of Congress is legally required to disclose [...]
Intelligence Community Tries & Fails to add Silly Exemption to FOIA
From OMB Watch:
Earlier this month, the Washington Post ran a story about the intelligence community’s efforts to push legislators to amend the Intelligence Authorization Act (S. 1494) to exempt “terrorist identity information (TII)” from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Currently, this information is marked as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) with a stamp that reads [...]
A Problematic New Policy on State Secrets
From Secrecy News:
The Department of Justice yesterday released its long-awaited new policy on the state secrets privilege, which the government uses in litigation to withhold evidence when it believes that disclosure would harm national security. The new policy, presented in a memorandum from the Attorney General, includes procedural and substantive changes to current practice. But [...]
EFF Wins Release of Telecom Lobbying Records
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
A judge ordered the government Thursday to release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the records be provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by October 9, 2009.