From Rapid City Journal: House and Senate conferees are continuing to meet to resolve the differences between the House and Senate versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. We received a copy of a letter to the conferees from the National Freedom of Information Coalition, calling attention to a provision in the House bill that would undermine the Freedom of Information Act.
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From Investigative Reporting Workshop: iFOIA, a free online system to create, send and track federal and state records requests, is now up and running. After nearly a year of project development, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) offered iFOIA to Bloomberg News and NPR for beta testing. Since its official release at the Online News Association Conference on Oct. 17, major newsrooms, including The Washington Post, have hosted representatives from the Reporters Committee for tutorials on how this resource can be used effectively by journalists. […]
From Standard Newswire: WASHINGTON, Nov. 6, 2013 /Standard Newswire/ — Judicial Watch announced today that on October 17, 2013, thanks to Judicial Watch litigation, the public gained access to more than 57,000 pages of previously withheld documents from the Clinton Presidential Library related to the National Taskforce on Health Care Reform, a “cabinet-level” taskforce chaired by former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during the first term of the Bill Clinton presidency.
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From RT: The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent years conducting surveillance on a prominent libertarian anti-war web site, in part because the agency mistakenly believed that the activist page had tried to hack the FBI's own site, according to a new report.
FBI documents viewed by the The Guardian reveal that an investigation into Antiwar.com was motivated by an examination of a “threat” that planned to “hack the FBI web site.” Yet the site never threatened any such thing.
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Read More… from Anti-war site, upon notifying FBI of cyber-threat, became surveillance target
From FierceGovernmentIT: The United States says it will expand open data and modernize the Freedom of Information Act as part of six new transparent government commitments made in an updated national action plan released by the White House Oct. 31.
The United States issued the commitments during the Open Government Summit in London. This year, the annual event brought together 1,000 delegates from more than 60 countries to discuss open government plans.
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From NFOIC: Open government groups, including NFOIC members and allies, are urging House and Senate conferees to remove provisions from the Farm Bill that provides for increased government secrecy regarding agricultural and livestock operations.
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From Courthouse News Service: (CN) – President George W. Bush’s presidential directive on cybersecurity is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a federal judge ruled.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center had filed the FOIA request in June 2009, seeking information related to National Security Presidential Directive 54.
Visit Courthouse News Service for more.
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Read More… from Cybersecurity directive from Bush kept secret
From Al Jazeera America: While much has been made of the government’s current penchant for secrecy, few have noticed that this atmosphere now shrouds government history as well.
Working on a biography of a noted Washington journalist, I placed a routine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2011 for her FBI file. The timing of my application seemed propitious. Two years earlier, President Barack Obama had signed an executive order to speed declassification of materials and had issued an encouraging FOIA memorandum.
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Read More… from US government secrecy making historical research difficult
From Journalist’s Resource: Since the Progressive Era, ideas about the benefits of government openness — crystallized by Justice Brandeis’s famous phrase about the disinfectant qualities of “sunlight” — have steadily grown more popular and prevalent. Post-Watergate reforms further embodied these ideas. Now, notions of “open government” and dramatically heightened levels of transparency have taken hold as zero-cost digital dissemination has become a reality. […]
Read More… from Open government and conflicts with public trust and privacy: Recent research ideas
From The Daily Caller: The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Department of Justice in regards to whether a criminal suspect was placed under NSA surveillance.
On Thursday, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the U.S. government policy for notifying criminal defendants that they are being monitored by the government.
Visit The Daily Caller for more.
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Read More… from ACLU sues DOJ, demands to know whether suspects were placed under NSA surveillance
