In his provocative Opinion piece Our Fill-in-the-Blank Constitution in the April 13 New York Times, Geoffrey Stone examines this question and more. He emphasizes that contitutional law is not a mechanical exercise in just applying the law, a fact that needs always to be considered in the selection and evaluation…
“On January 21st, 2009, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government in which he described how: ‘public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge.’ To…
Volume 3 March 2010 Security and Privacy on Social Networking Sites From the Desk of David Badertscher What are the security and privacy issues associated with social networking sites? Social networking sites have become very popular avenues for people to communicate with family, friends and colleagues from around the corner…
In a unanimous 3-0 Decision last Tuesday April 6 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the Federal Communication Commission did not have the authority to order Comcast in 2008 to cease and desist interfering with the traffic of Bit Torrent a P2P…
A Legal Analysis of Reed Elsevier, Inc. v, Muchnick March 18, 2010 CRS Report No. R40944; 3/18/2010; Posted 4/5/2010 Author(s): Brian T. Yeh, Legislative Attorney Subject(s): Intellectual Property No. of Pages: 11 Abstract: Although an author need not register his or her work with the U.S. Copyright Office to obtain…
On October 6, 2009 the Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a request to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for access to records concerning “use of social networking websites (including, but not limited to Facebook, MYSpace, Twitter, Flickr and other online social media) for investigative (crimiinal or otherwise) data gathering purposes…
House Democrats are reported to be making a final push this weekend to pass health care legislation. To that end a nearly final version of a bill, along with a report on the bill’s cost by the Congressional Budget Office, was unveiled yesterday. A final showdown regarding this legislation is…
Posted by : Joni L. Cassidy, Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc. 3/17/10 DEFINITION OF TERMS: OCLC WorldCat – the union database of bibliographic and authority records contributed by member libraries, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Agriculture Library, the U.S. Government Printing Office and several other…
Udated March 17, 2010. On Tuesday March 16, 2010 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a proposal to overhaul the U.S. broadband* policy by introducing a plan that would provide higher speed internet access and much faster internet connections thoughout the U.S. than are presently available. The plan sets…
On March 10, 2010 New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch released a fiscal reform plan which calls for a five-year plan to eliminate the State’s structural imbalance and introduces a process by which annual budget balance is mandated, minitored and maintained. The plan calls for up to $2 billion in…