More than a dozen Washington Post journalists spent two years developing Top Secret America, a multimedia presentation put together by compiling hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private sector companies. From these records, the Washington Post identified a web of these organizations, both government and private,…
David Badertscher This posting is essentially a followup of two of our earlier postings on this topic which you can find here and here. It begins with two statements released by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on May 6, 2010 in partial response to the recent decision in the…
Many thanks to Luis Acosta of the Library of Congress for forwarding the following: Elena Kagan Nominated to the Supreme Court: http://go.usa.gov/ieT On April 9, 2010 Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he would retire after nearly 35 years on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama announced…
“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…
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…
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…
Mary Alice Baish, Director of Government Relations and Emily Feldman, Advocacy Communications Assistant (both of the American Association of Law Libraries, AALL), have been doing a tremendous job serving as advocates for high quality and highly accessible legal information on the web in a format that can be authenticated. The…
Summary The President’s health care proposal as released on February 22 purports to put “…American families and small business owners in control of their health care. To help those who are following this issue we are providing in this post, links to a 10+ page Summary prepared by the White…
The quest for health care reform continues. According to Roll Call the White House has developed its own version of a merged House-Senate health care reform package and plans to have it online for public review by Monday in advance of a bipartisan health care summit scheduled for Feb. 25.…
BY: Michael Chernicoff President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has promsed to make its statistical body free from political manipulation. In making an independent statistical body, James Lynch may hope to reverse that likelihood that the BJS and its official are, “inappropriately…