National Freedom of Information Coalition
Protecting Your Right to Open Government

Author: NFOIC

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Google, SpiderOak encrypt best against NSA, report says

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From U.S. News: Want to know which companies are protecting your data property against interception by spies at the National Security Agency or hackers who might be able to snoop your email on public wireless signals?

Google, Dropbox, Sonic.net and SpiderOak are the Web companies that met all five of the communications encryption steps recommended by a newly-released survey from the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights advocacy group.

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NFOIC’s State FOIA Friday for November 22, 2013

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From NFOIC:  A few state FOIA and local open government news items selected from many of interest that we might or might not have drawn attention to earlier in the week. While you're at it, be sure to check out State FOIA Friday Archives.

Minnesota high court: Business not subject to open-records laws

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Read More… from NFOIC’s State FOIA Friday for November 22, 2013

Social media monitoring secrecy will cost feds

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From Courthouse News Service: (CN) – After stonewalling demands about its plans to monitor social media, the Department of Homeland Security owes $30,000 in attorneys’ fees, a federal judge ruled.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said Homeland Security announced plans to monitor social media sites in February 2011.

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VA Risks Worsening Already-Bad FOIA Performance

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COLUMBIA, Mo — The Veterans Administration’s so far unexplained new processing policy for FOIA requests is examined in this report by reporter John Ryan at KUOW radio, the NPR affiliate in Seattle.  

"Here's a new layer of review for an agency that is already doing poorly on response times, and it's probably going to make it worse," said Ken Bunting with the National Freedom of Information Coalition in Columbia, Mo. "Instead of improving the backlog, it's going to add to the backlog."

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Obama transparency edict gets lost in the fog

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From The Washington Post: In his first inaugural address, President Obama said that “those of us who manage the public’s dollars” will “do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

And he issued a memo to all department and agency heads instructing them that “my administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

But maybe the message hasn’t quite sunk in everywhere.

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IRS hands over tax-exempt training materials to nonprofit publisher

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From Accounting Web: The congressional committees investigating the Tea Party scandal – including the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Darrell Issa (R-CA) – aren’t the only ones trying to get their hands on sensitive IRS documents. In response to a lawsuit initiated by Tax Analysts, a nonprofit publisher of tax information and expert analysis, the IRS has released almost 3,000 pages of training materials used by its Exempt Organizations (EO) division, most of them dating from 2012.

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The FBI doesn’t want you to know why it won’t tell you its secrets

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From Huffington Post: The FBI is going long to keep its secret files on animal rights activists a secret: It is fighting public records requests about why it keeps denying public records requests.

It’s a deeply meta strategy that’s also like the set-up for an Abbott and Costello routine — but to Ryan Shapiro, the MIT doctoral candidate profiled in Mother Jones on Wednesday as “the punk rocker who can liberate your FBI file,” it’s nothing new.

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NFOIC’s State FOIA Friday for November 15, 2013

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From NFOIC:  A few state FOIA and local open government news items selected from many of interest that we might or might not have drawn attention to earlier in the week. While you're at it, be sure to check out State FOIA Friday Archives.

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Read More… from NFOIC’s State FOIA Friday for November 15, 2013