Showing posts with label FOIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FOIA. Show all posts

Friday, May 18, 2018

States Offer Information Resources: 50+ Open Data Portals; Forbes, April 30, 2018

Meta S. Brown, Forbes; States Offer Information Resources: 50+ Open Data Portals

"The United States federal open data portal, data.gov, launched in May, 2009, with just 47 datasets. It was not an instant hit.

 Today, with more 200,000 datasets, it’s a lot more popular. Still, real-life demands for information about our governments, people and economy exceed the supply of available data.

The creation of a centralized portal for federal government data has fostered open data initiative across the country. Dozens of cities have established their own open data portals (here are 90 examples).

 In the 50 years since the federal Freedom of Information Act was passed, US states have been gradually introducing similar laws (see freedom of information laws by state). Likewise, many are now developing state-level open data portals.


These state data resources vary in style and depth. Some look much like data.gov, and include a wide variety of datasets. But not every state has a comprehensive data portal yet, let alone deep selections of data.

Here’s a listing of general and geographic open data portals for US states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico..."

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The Coat of Arms Said ‘Integrity.’ Now It Says ‘Trump.’; New York Times, May 28, 2017

Danny Hakim, New York Times; 

The Coat of Arms Said ‘Integrity.’ Now It Says ‘Trump.’


Britain’s trademark office would not initially acknowledge the earlier application by Mr. Trump. It provided a copy last month only after The New York Times made a Freedom of Information request, and would not say why the application was rejected, citing a law restricting its ability to release information.

The College of Arms, which oversees coats of arms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, provided more detail. The emblem originally submitted in 2007 by Mr. Trump to Britain’s trademark office matched one that had been granted to Mr. Davies, an American of Welsh descent who once served as ambassador to the Soviet Union.

“It couldn’t be a clearer-cut case, actually,” said Clive Cheesman, one of the college’s heralds, who oversee coats of arms, their design and their use.

“A coat of arms that was originally granted to Joseph Edward Davies in 1939 by the English heraldic authority ended up being used 10 or 15 years ago by the Trump Organization as part of its branding for its golf clubs,” said Mr. Cheesman, a lawyer by training. “This got them into difficulty.”"

Monday, April 18, 2016

Obama’s Secrecy Problem; Slate, 4/15/16

Fred Kaplan, Slate; Obama’s Secrecy Problem:
"Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told me Thursday, “This is a time of particularly promising ferment over secrecy policy. There is a recognition, even within the national-security apparatus, that the classification system has overreached and needs to be pruned back.” Yet by all measures, the bureaucracies persist in resisting this pruning, Congress won’t allocate the money for the shears, and the president hasn’t mustered the full attention and commitment that the task requires. Information may want to be free, but Washington has it wrapped in a tangle."

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Access denied: Reporters say federal officials, data increasingly off limits; Washington Post, 3/30/15

Paul Farhi, Washington Post; Access denied: Reporters say federal officials, data increasingly off limits:
"Tensions between reporters and public information officers — “hacks and flacks” in the vernacular — aren’t new, of course. Reporters have always wanted more information than government officials have been willing or able to give.
But journalists say the lid has grown tighter under the Obama administration, whose chief executive promised in 2009 to bring “an unprecedented level of openness” to the federal government.
The frustrations boiled over last summer in a letter to President Obama signed by 38 organizations representing journalists and press-freedom advocates. The letter decried “politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies” by spokesmen. “We consider these restrictions a form of censorship — an attempt to control what the public is allowed to see and hear,” the groups wrote.
They asked for “a clear directive” from Obama “telling federal employees they’re not only free to answer questions from reporters and the public, but actually encouraged to do so.”
Obama hasn’t acted on the suggestion. But his press secretary, Josh Earnest, defended the president’s record, noting in a letter to the groups that, among other things, the administration has processed a record number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, established more protection for whistleblowers and posted White House visitor logs for the first time."

Monday, October 19, 2009

ACTA Text Revealed To 42 Select Insiders; Intellectual Property Watch, 10/15/09

Intellectual Property Watch; ACTA Text Revealed To 42 Select Insiders:

"In the weeks leading up to the next negotiating session (first week of November in Seoul) of the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, 42 Washington, DC-area insiders, mostly from industry, were invited by the United States Trade Representatives to see copies of its text on the internet, according to a new report.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request to the USTR, think-tank Knowledge Ecology International received copies [pdf] of the non-disclosure agreements the insiders signed prior to viewing the ACTA text.

The list included several members of software industry group the Business Software Alliance, online auction site eBay, internet media giant Google, conservative media conglomerate News Corporation, and nongovernmental group Public Knowledge, among others.

A full list of names of those who saw the draft, and their affiliations, is available on the KEI website here."

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/10/15/acta-text-revealed-to-42-select-insiders/

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets?!?, TechDirt, 3/13/09

Via TechDirt: Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets?!?:

"Plenty of folks are quite concerned about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being negotiated in secret. This is a treaty that (from the documents that have leaked so far) is quite troubling. It likely will effectively require various countries, including the US, to update copyright laws in a draconian manner. Furthermore, the negotiators have met with entertainment industry representatives multiple times, and there are indications that those representatives have contributed language and ideas to the treaty. But, the public? The folks actually impacted by all of this? We've been kept in the dark, despite repeated requests for more information. So far, the response from the government had been "sorry, we always negotiate these things in secret, so we'll keep doing so...

Can the US Trade Representative please describe the damage to national security if the public gets to see what's being proposed that would require governments around the country to enact significantly more draconian intellectual property laws?"

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090313/1456154113.shtml