Part-Time Policy Wonk

From the  National Law Journal:
I teach law students how to conduct legal research. The most effective way to do this is to provide hands-on training, but one of the most important tools, PACER, is off limits.
PACER, which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is profitably managed by the Administrative Office of the U.S. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

From the Washington Post:
The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.
The new policy requires agencies, including [...]

This report offers an overview of the four information access laws noted above [the Freedom of Information Act, and the Privacy Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the Government in the Sunshine Act], and provides citations to additional resources related to these tools.

From OMB Watch:
Back when the Recovery Board released the Recovery.gov redesign contract, many in the transparency community were upset at the extent to which the General Services Administration redacted the contract. While we certainly expected General Services Administration (GSA) – the agency which conducts most of the federal government’s procurement – to redact proprietary information, [...]

From NextGov TechInsider:
The government will not release stimulus data from the private sector and states on Recovery.gov until Oct. 30, 20 days after spending reports are due, the board overseeing Recovery Act funds announced on Monday.
The statistics affected include reports from states and local governments, contractors, universities, nonprofits and other parties that have received a [...]

From the Boston Globe:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration, prompted by public records requests from the Globe, has acknowledged that city employees were routinely deleting e-mails, a potential violation of the state public records law.

From Secrecy News:
Ordinarily, decisions about granting security clearances and determining whether an individual has a “need to know” certain classified information are made by the executive branch.  But a federal judge recently ruled that a court can also make such determinations and can require the disclosure of classified information to a cleared individual even against [...]