Boing Boing » transparency

Public Resource wants to liberate tax records for US nonprofits - converting 100lbs of scanned bitmaps on DVDs into searchable data on $1.5T worth of activity

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:06:09 +0000

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

On November 1, Public.Resource.Org released a new service which put 6,461,326 US nonprofit tax returns on the net for bulk download, developers, and search engines to access. We offered to give the working system to the government, and also sent them a few suggestions on ways they could better meet their mission and save themselves a boatload of money. Since then, we've been frantically trying to get the government's attention to take decisive action, but to no avail.

The way the government makes the nonprofit tax returns available to the public is broken in many ways. The IRS insists on selling the tax returns as a monthly feed of DVDs costing $2,580 per year. Each month, I get a stack of a dozen DVDs, each one has 60,000 1-page TIFF files on it. This is just so lacking in clue, and even simple suggestions like using Dropbox instead of mailing us DVDs have been ignored.

In terms of breakage though, the truly big problem is the deliberate dumbing down of tax returns for large nonprofits in order to avoid what an IRS official actually said to us would be "too much transparency." All the big nonprofits have to e-file their tax returns. E-filing means they submit actual machine-processable data encoded in XML.

The way the IRS releases that information is mind-boggling. They image the data onto tax forms and then release them as 200 dot per inch TIFF files. So, instead of having a computer program extract the gross revenue, or the CEO salaries, or whether or not the nonprofit operates a tanning salon on premises (an actual question on the form!), you get something that is so bad that OCR is difficult. Nonprofits are a $1.5 trillion chunk of the U.S. economy, yet we're deliberately dumbing down data that could make that sector more efficient and more vibrant. That's dumb.

Since November, we've been trying to get the IRS and the Obama Administration to release this information, but they've refused. We've met with all sorts of IRS officials such as Lois Lerner and Joseph Grant of Tea Party fame, and we've also met with a ton of boldface names in the White House, such as Todd Park (the President's CTO) and Steve VanRoekel (the Federal CIO). Nobody will release the data. The IRS is worried the big nonprofits will be upset if information such as multimillion-dollar CEO salaries is more readily available.

Since discussion hasn't worked so far, we've retained the services of Thomas R. Burke, an eminent First Amendment attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine and he's been working with our own counselor David Halperin. Today, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. One reason we picked the Northern District because they have a requirement that the parties try and work out their problems out of court using what is known as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), which includes techniques such as mediation and arbitration. The ADR rules in this District Court require each party to bring to the mediation an official who has the authority to resolve this issue.

So, I'm reaching out to my good friends Todd Park and Steve VanRoekel, the architects of the President's great new machine-processable data directive, and I'm personally asking them to help us resolve this dispute with the administration. We're all on the same side here, let's work this out and get on with the real job at hand!

Links:
Our complaint in district court
Copies of our letters back and forth to the White House and the IRS
Sunlight Foundation: Nonprofit E-file Data Should Be Open
Think Progress: How the IRS Could Make it Easier to Track Dark Money, Right Now
Forbes: IRS: Turn Over a New Leaf, Open Up Data

NSA leaks forcing more official transparency

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:25:51 +0000

Trevor Timm wrote a piece for Freedom of the Press Foundation about how much more we're learning not just from the NSA leaks themselves, but from the response to those leaks. "Both companies and the government have been forced into a corner where their only move is to release more information they previously fought to keep secret," Trevor says.

The Snowden Principle

John Cusack — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:23:36 +0000

At the heart of Edward Snowden's decision to expose the NSA's massive phone and Internet spying programs was a fundamental belief in the people's right-to-know. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he said in an interview with the Guardian.

From the State's point of view, he's committed a crime. From his point of view, and the view of many others, he has sacrificed for the greater good because he knows people have the right to know what the government is doing in their name. And legal, or not, he saw what the government was doing as a crime against the people and our rights.

For the sake of argument, this should be called The Snowden Principle.

When The Snowden Principle is invoked and revelations of this magnitude are revealed; it is always met with predictable establishment blowback from the red and blue elites of state power. Those in charge are prone to hysteria and engage in character assassination, as are many in the establishment press that have been co-opted by government access . When The Snowden Principle is evoked the fix is always in and instead of looking at the wrongdoing exposed, they parrot the government position no matter what the facts

The Snowden Principle just cannot be tolerated...

Even mental illness is pondered as a possible reason that these pariahs would insist on the public's right to know at the highest personal costs to their lives and the destruction of their good names. The public's right to know---This is the treason. The utter corruption, the crime.

But as law professor Jonathan Turley reminds us, a lie told by everyone is not the truth. "The Republican and Democratic parties have achieved a bipartisan purpose in uniting against the public's need to know about massive surveillance programs and the need to redefine privacy in a more surveillance friendly image," he wrote recently.

We can watch as The Snowden Principle is predictably followed in the reaction from many of the fourth estate - who serve at the pleasure of the king.

Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC suggests that Glenn Greenwald's coverage was "misleading" and said he was too "close to the story." Snowden was no whistleblower, and Glenn was no journalist she suggests.

Jeffrey Toobin, at the New Yorker, calls Snowden "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison."

Another journalist, Willard Foxton, asserted that Glenn Greenwald amounted to the leader of a "creepy cult."

David Brooks of the New York Times accuses Snowden- not the Gov--of betraying everything from the Constitution to all American privacy ...

Michael Grunwald of TIME seems to suggest that that if you are against the NSA spying program you want to make America less safe.

Then there's Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, who as Gawker points out, almost seems to be arguing that a journalist's job is to keep government secrets not actually report on them.

The Snowden Principle makes for some tortured logic.

The government's reaction has been even worse. Senators have called Snowden a "traitor," the authorities claim they're going to treat his case as espionage. Rep. Peter King outrageously called for the prosecution of Glenn Greenwald for exercising his basic First Amendment rights. Attacks like this are precisely the reason I joined the Freedom of the Press Foundation board (where Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras also serve as board members)

As Chris Hedges rightly pointed out, this cuts to the heart of one of the most important questions in a democracy: will we have an independent free press that reports on government crimes and serves the public's right to know?

It cannot be criminal to report a crime or an abuse of power. Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder Daniel Ellsberg argues that Snowden's leaks could be a tipping point in America. This week he wrote "there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material," including his own leak of the Pentagon Papers.

The Snowden Principle, and that fire that inspired him to take unimaginable risks, is fundamentally about fostering an informed and engaged public. The Constitution embraces that idea. Mr. Snowden says his motivation was to expose crimes -spark a debate, and let the public know of secret policies he could not in good conscience ignore - whether you agree with his tactics or not, that debate has begun. Now, we are faced with a choice, we can embrace the debate or we can try to shut the debate down and maintain the status quo.

If these policies are just, then debate them in sunlight. If we believe the debate for transparency is worth having we need to demand it. Snowden said it well, "You can't wait around for someone else to act."

Within hours of the NSA's leaks, a massive coalition of groups came together to plan an international campaign to oppose and fix the NSA spying regime. You can join them here - I already did. The groups span across the political spectrum, from Dick Armey's FreedomWorks to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and longtime civil rights groups like ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press.

As more people find out about these abuses, the outrage mounts and the debate expands. Many in the mainstream media have shown that the public can't count on them to stand up to internal pressure when The Snowden Principle is evoked to serve the national interest, and protect our core fundamental rights.

The questions The Snowden Principle raises when evoked will not go away....How long do they expect rational people to accept using the word "terror" to justify and excuse ever expanding executive and state power ? Why are so many in our government and press and intellectual class so afraid of an informed public? Why are they so afraid of a Free Press and the people's right to know?

It's the government's obligation to keep us safe while protecting our constitution . To suggest it's one or the other is simply wrong.

Professor Turley issues us a dire warning:

"In his press conference, Obama repeated the siren call of all authoritarian figures throughout history: while these powers are great, our motives are benign. So there you have it. The government is promising to better protect you if you just surrender this last measure of privacy. Perhaps it is time. After all, it was Benjamin Franklin who warned that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

See what's happened already in the short time only because the PRISM program was made public, here.

[This essay was originally published at the Huffington Post.]

NYT profiles NSA leaker Edward Snowden

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:40:00 +0000

A lengthy profile in the New York Times of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who recently leaked information about the agency's secret domestic spying program, paints the young man as an self-driven but drifting autodidact.

From Mr. Snowden’s friends and his own voluminous Web postings emerges a portrait of a talented young man who did not finish high school but bragged online that employers “fight over me.”...“Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history,” he wrote online at age 20.

Sen Warren to US Trade Rep: release the Trans-Pacific Partnership docs - if they piss the people off, then we shouldn't be part of it

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:07:22 +0000

Senator Elizabeth Warren has written an open letter to Michael Froma, the nominee to run the US Trade Representative's office, calling on him to release the text and negotiating documents for the secretive, controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose sweeping and brutal copyright provisions make it clear that this is the next attempt to pass SOPA and ACTA -- the US law and international treaty that flamed out in 2012.

“I appreciate the willingness of the USTR to make various documents available for review by members of Congress, but I do not believe that is a substitute for more robust public transparency,” Warren wrote to Froman, who is now an assistant to the president. “If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.”

Senator Warren Presses White House to Release Pacific Trade Text [Mark Drajem/BusinessWeek] (via Reddit)

FBI's use of Patriot Act to collect US citizens' records up 1,000 percent

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:13:48 +0000

Michael Isikoff at NBC News reports that the FBI has "dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama." The FBI filed 212 requests for this kind of data in a national security court last year, which represents a 1,000-percent increase from the number of similar requests four years prior.

David Rohde on the ‘secrecy industrial complex’

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:36:16 +0000

"An odd thing is happening in the world’s self-declared pinnacle of democracy," writes David Rohde at Reuters. "No one — except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors — is allowed to know how America’s surveillance leviathan works."

Google to Attorney General: let us publish stats on the info we give to spies

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:18:29 +0000

Google has sent the US Attorney General a letter asking for permission to publish aggregate statistics on the number of gag-ordered-FISA requests it gets. These requests are secret and not included in Google's "Transparency Report" of government requests.

We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.
Google appreciates that you authorized the recent disclosure of general numbers for national security letters. There have been no adverse consequences arising from their publication, and in fact more companies are receiving your approval to do so as a result of Google’s initiative. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security.

Asking the U.S. government to allow Google to publish more national security request data

UK spies have access to NSA Prism, which has "direct access" to world's largest Internet companies' servers

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:16:28 +0000

A report by Nick Hopkins in the Guardian accuses the UK spy agency GCHQ of making use of the American NSA's Prism program, which was revealed in leaked documents earlier today -- a slide presentation claiming that the NSA had direct access to the servers at Google, Microsoft, Apple, and many other Internet giants.

According to Hopkins, GCHQ has been able to access Prism since Jun 2010. This is based on information from the same leaked slide deck, apparently:

Unless GCHQ has stopped using Prism, the agency has accessed information from the programme for at least three years. It is not mentioned in the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which scrutinises the way the UK's three security agencies use the laws covering the interception and retention of data.
Asked to comment on its use of Prism, GCHQ said it "takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the intelligence and security committee".
The agency refused to be drawn on how long it had been using Prism, how many intelligence reports it had gleaned from it, or which ministers knew it was being used.
A GCHQ spokesperson added: "We do not comment on intelligence matters."

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

Schneier: what we need the whistleblowers to tell us about America's surveillance apparatus

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:00:51 +0000

Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic to comment on the leaked court order showing that the NSA has been secretly engaged in bulk domestic surveillance, recording who everyone is talking to, when, for how long, and where they are when they do. Schneier points out -- as many have -- that this is the tip of the iceberg, and lays out a set of government secrets that we need whistleblowers to disclose in order to grasp the full scope of the new, total surveillance state:

We need details on the full extent of the FBI's spying capabilities. We don't know what information it routinely collects on American citizens, what extra information it collects on those on various watch lists, and what legal justifications it invokes for its actions. We don't know its plans for future data collection. We don't know what scandals and illegal actions -- either past or present -- are currently being covered up.
We also need information about what data the NSA gathers, either domestically or internationally. We don't know how much it collects surreptitiously, and how much it relies on arrangements with various companies. We don't know how much it uses password cracking to get at encrypted data, and how much it exploits existing system vulnerabilities. We don't know whether it deliberately inserts backdoors into systems it wants to monitor, either with or without the permission of the communications-system vendors.
And we need details about the sorts of analysis the organizations perform. We don't know what they quickly cull at the point of collection, and what they store for later analysis -- and how long they store it. We don't know what sort of database profiling they do, how extensive their CCTV and surveillance-drone analysis is, how much they perform behavioral analysis, or how extensively they trace friends of people on their watch lists.
We don't know how big the U.S. surveillance apparatus is today, either in terms of money and people or in terms of how many people are monitored or how much data is collected. Modern technology makes it possible to monitor vastly more people -- yesterday's NSA revelations demonstrate that they could easily surveil everyone -- than could ever be done manually.

What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know

DHS on border laptop searches: we can't tell you why this is legal, and we won't limit searches to reasonable suspicion

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:00:17 +0000

The DHS has responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU asking when and how it decides whose laptop to search at the border. It explained its legal rationale for conducting these searches with a blank page:

On Page 18 of the 52-page document under the section entitled “First Amendment,” several paragraphs are completely blacked out. They simply end with the sentence: “The laptop border searches in the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights as defined by the courts."

More excellence from "the most transparent administration in American history." Also, the DHS rejected claims that it should limit searches to situations where it had reasonable grounds for suspicion, because then they would have to explain their suspicion:

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

Feds say they can search your laptop at the border but won’t say why [Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica]

Leaked top-secret court order shows that NSA engages in bulk, sustained, warrantless surveillance of Americans

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 05:25:03 +0000

In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed on Verizon's network, even calls that originated and terminated in the USA (the NSA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans). This kind of dragnet surveillance has long been rumored; Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall published an open letter to US Attorney General Holden saying that "most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted...the Patriot Act." Here, at last, are the details:

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".
The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold point out, this kind of surveillance is at the heart of several of its ongoing cases, and the Obama administration has done everything in its power to stop the American people from finding out how it interprets the Constitution:

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but it's predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted surveillance.

But at each step of the way, the government has tried to hide the truth from the American public: in Jewel, behind the state secrets privilege; in the FOIA case, by claiming the information is classified top secret.

Top UK government officials tamper with inquest into Brit assassinated by Russian spies in London, suppress evidence

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 18 May 2013 21:36:08 +0000

Marina Litvinenko, widow of Alexander Litvinenko (a British citizen who was assassinated in London by two former KGB agents who poisoned him with radioactive polonium) has accused the British government, Secretary of State William Hague, and PM David Cameron of sabotaging the coroner's inquest into her husband's death. Hague and Cameron intervened in the coroner's hearing to seal key evidence that implicated the Russian government in Litvinenko's killing.

Sir Robert Owen, who is leading the inquest and who has seen the material, characterised it as "documents that examined whether UK officials could have done more to prevent his murder." 's widow says that this is part of "a secret political deal with the Kremlin." This comes against a charm offensive by the UK government to increase Russian investment in Britain.

The former Labour government severed all contacts with Russia's FSB spy agency in 2007 after concluding it had played a leading role in Litvinenko's assassination. Putin is the agency's former chief.
Mrs Litvinenko added: "This is a very sad day, a tragedy for British justice which has until now been respected around the world, and a frightening precedent for all of those who have been trying so hard to expose the crimes committed by a conspiracy of organised criminals who operate inside the Kremlin."
In his ruling (pdf), Owen said the inquest scheduled to take place later this year might now result in an "incomplete, misleading and unfair" verdict.
The coroner said he would consider inviting Theresa May, the home secretary, to hold a public inquiry instead. The inquiry could hear the sensitive evidence buried by Hague in secret sessions.

Alexander Litvinenko widow accuses William Hague of sabotaging inquest

EFF beats the Trans Pacific Partnership to Peru, sounds the alarm about upcoming brutal, secret copyright treaty meeting

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:00:44 +0000

Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

The latest round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership starts today in Lima, Peru. Embedded in the trade agreement is an IP chapter that, according to leaks, exports the worst of US copyright law -- DRM blocks, extended copyright terms, ISPs as copyright cops -- without even of the judicial and constitutional counterbalances that US activists have fought so hard for.
In such a giant trade agreement, the Internet issues have sometime risked getting ignored by the mainstream press, and missed by the techies who'd be most affected.
But EFF's international rights director, Katitza Rodriguez, is Peruvian. She's spent the the last month working out of Lima's Escuelab hackerspace, talking to hackers, makers, journalists and artists about the dangers of IP chapter. The result has been petitions, memes, and videos, as well as meetings with politicians and articles in the Peruvian press.

We Beat Them to Lima: Opening a New Front Against Secret IP Treaties (Thanks, Danny!)

Law profs and librarians to Congress: government edicts should not be restricted by copyright

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:01:18 +0000

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "105 law professors and law librarians have endorsed a call to change U.S. Copyright law to exclude edicts of government. Edicts are "the law" and include all pronouncements of government that are binding on citizens and residents, including statutes, regulations, court opinions, and legally-mandated codes. If ignorance of the law is no excuse, then we must all be able to read, know, and speak the law without restraint. The text of the proposed amendment reads:"

“Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions, administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of public policy. This applies to such works whether they are Federal, State, or local as well as to those of foreign governments.”

The Edicts of Government Amendment (Thanks, Carl!)

Has your doctor taken money from drug companies?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:04:04 +0000

Mine hasn't. At least, he hasn't taken money from any of the 15 companies that have been forced to disclose information about gifts and cash they give to doctors. Pro Publica has put that information into an easily searchable database. It's not total transparency — the drug companies whose payouts are included here only represent 47% of the total market — but it's a good place to start if you want to know whether your doctor has any conflicts of interest that could affect your health.

HOWTO fix security after the Boston bombing

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:22:54 +0000

As we think about the postmortem on security procedures following from the Boston Marathon attack and plan on new procedures, Bruce Schneier has some crucial security design advice: don't forget transparency and accountability. Without these two crucial elements, security can't work:

Long ago, we realized that simply trusting people and government agencies to always do the right thing doesn't work, so we need to check up on them. In a democracy, transparency and accountability are how we do that. It's how we ensure that we get both effective and cost-effective government. It's how we prevent those we trust from abusing that trust, and protect ourselves when they do. And it's especially important when security is concerned.
First, we need to ensure that the stuff we're paying money for actually works and has a measureable impact. Law-enforcement organizations regularly invest in technologies that don't make us any safer. The TSA, for example, could devote an entire museum to expensive but ineffective systems: puffer machines, body scanners, FAST behavioral screening, and so on. Local police departments have been wasting lots of post-9/11 money on unnecessary high-tech weaponry and equipment. The occasional high-profile success aside, police surveillance cameras have been shown to be a largely ineffective police tool.
Sometimes honest mistakes led organizations to invest in these technologies. Sometimes there's self-deception and mismanagement -- and far too often lobbyists are involved. Given the enormous amount of security money post-9/11, you inevitably end up with an enormous amount of waste. Transparency and accountability are how we keep all of this in check.
Second, we need to ensure that law enforcement does what we expect it to do and nothing more. Police powers are invariably abused. Mission creep is inevitable, and it results in laws designed to combat one particular type of crime being used for an ever-widening array of crimes. Transparency is the only way we have of knowing when this is going on.

Transparency and Accountability Don't Hurt Security—They're Crucial to It

What happens when you mix global disease and authoritarian governments

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:10:00 +0000

When SARS emerged in China in 2002, the Chinese government tried to cover it up, waiting months to inform the World Health Organization. In fact, the WHO first heard about SARS from a Canadian monitoring service that picked up and translated Chinese reports of a "flu outbreak". Something similar happened this week. Only this time, the disease was a different coronavirus related to SARS and the transparency-deprived government was that of Saudi Arabia. Maryn McKenna writes about how the WHO (and everyone else) recently learned of seven new cases, and five deaths, via an Arabic language press release published at 10:30 at night ... likely weeks or even months after the deaths happened.

Truth about Beyonce's inauguration performance can't be published until 2122

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:56:08 +0000

Muckrock Michael sez, "Today MuckRock's Mara Berg chronicles the saga of a particular public records request I put in for the following: A copy of the backing track used during Beyonce's Inauguration performance, as well as copies of other backing tracks created in preparation for Inauguration events, whether or not they were actually used. Unfortunately, while we received (some) of the requested documents, two outside legal experts and the U.S. Marines Corps have warned us strongly against publishing what we have. The reason? Copyright."

Lessig's TED talk on fighting corruption in politics with campaign finance reform

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:46:28 +0000

Larry Lessig presented at TED his new project, an effort to curb the corrupting influence of money in American politics with a reform to campaign finance, so that the government depends on the people alone. It's a wonderful talk:

There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond.

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim

Government Attic: repository of noteworthy declassified/FOIA'd/public records access government docs

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:12:55 +0000

A reader writes,

GovernmentAttic.org, a noncommercial independent website, announces the publication of thousands of important government documents obtained through proper channels using public records access laws such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Government Attic includes fascinating historical documents, oddities and fun stuff about government programs, and government "bloopers". Browsing the site is like rummaging through the Government's Attic -- hence the name.
Among the notable holdings:
- Tens of thousands of pages of FBI files on important events and famous people;
- Weird items seized by customs inspectors at airports;
- A listing of movies, books and TV shows available on the International Space Station;
- Air Defense System audio recordings of the events on 9/11;
- Lists of investigations performed by dozens of agency Inspectors General;
- Internal newsletters from the National Security Agency;
- Complaints to the FCC about various television series, including The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and Law & Order; and
- Documents from most federal agencies, including those with responsibilities in law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense.

Welcome to governmentattic.org

Studios regret sending Google a list of every pirate site on the Internet for publication

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:12:04 +0000

The movie studios send a lot of takedown notices to Google, demanding that the search engine remove links to sites and files they don't like. Google publishes all the notices they receive, and this has Fox and other studios upset. Now, they're sending takedown notices demanding removal of their takedown notices.

Free US court records service RECAP gets two major features, in Aaron Swartz's memory

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:56:22 +0000

One of Aaron Swartz's more epic hacks was the liberation of $1.5M worth of caselaw from PACER, the US government's proprietary court-records database, pushing them into RECAP, the free/open alternative that gives everyone access to American law.

The Think Computer Foundation produced a set of grants in Aaron's memory to accomplish a pair of long-sought features to RECAP, and they've announced that these features have been added:

Ka-Ping Yee, a Canadian software developer living in Northern California, has created a version of RECAP for Google’s Chrome browser. This gives RECAP a much larger base of potential users. Previously, RECAP had only been available for the Mozilla Firefox browser. The RECAP Chrome extension can be downloaded at recapthelaw.org.
Filippo Valsorda and Alessio Palmero Aprosio, both from Italy, have improved RECAP to support the version of PACER used by the U.S. appellate courts. This new functionality helps to dramatically expand the scope of citizens’ free access to United States case law. This improved Firefox version of the extension is also available at recapthelaw.org, and appellate functionality will be available soon for Chrome as well.
These awards recognize work that furthers Swartz’s ideals of information freedom and openness. The remaining grant involves visualizing data available on Think Computer Foundation’s PlainSite web site (the deadline for which has been extended to May 31, 2013 as work on PlainSite continues).

Two RECAP Grants Awarded in Memory of Aaron Swartz (via Freedom to Tinker)

Municipal codes of DC, free for all -- liberated without permission

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:12:37 +0000

Today, I was luck enough to get another one of rogue archivist Carl Malamud's boxes of awesome. It's a copy of the municipal codes of DC, which are laws that you're required to follow, but aren't allowed to see without paying. As with the last time I got one of these packages, it's because Carl has scanned and OCR'ed and cleaned up these codes, and has now published them for all to see. Here's the unboxing pics.

PROCLAMATION OF DIGITIZATION

“No Codification Without Promulgation”

WHEREAS, the District of Columbia has published the OFFICIAL CODE, containing the laws, general and permanent in their nature, relating to or in force in the District of Columbia; and

WHEREAS, the OFFICIAL CODE is only available for purchase for $803.00, plus tax and shipping, from the designated official publisher, the West Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Thomson Reuters Corporation, a foreign corporation; and

WHEREAS, the OFFICIAL CODE contains a prominent notice that the material is “COPYRIGHT 2001 by the District of Columbia” and “All Rights Are Reserved”; and

WHEREAS, the only online version of the OFFICIAL CODE available to the public is accessible from the official publisher, which limits access through outdated technical mechanisms and poor design, such as a lack of a permanent Internet address (“permalink”), and further limits access through terms of use which prohibit the public from making copies of the code; and

WHEREAS, in a nation governed by the rule of law and founded on the principles of freedom of expression, due process, and equal protection, people must have the right to freely read, know, and speak the laws by which we as a people choose to govern ourselves; and

WHEREAS, the Supreme Court of the United States has unequivocally ruled that the law cannot be subject to copyright in Wheaton v. Peters (33 U.S. 591, 1834), when the Court unanimously held that “no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered” by the Court; and

WHEREAS, the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly reaffirmed this principle, stating for example in Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888) that “the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute”; and

WHEREAS, the United States Copyright Office has unequivocally stated “Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions, administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of public policy. This applies to such works whether they are Federal, State, or local as well as to those of foreign governments.”

THEREFORE, it is hereby proclaimed by this notice that any assertion of copyright by the District of Columbia or other parties on the District of Columbia Code is declared to be NULL AND VOID as a matter of law and public  policy as it is the right of every person to read, know, and speak the laws that bind them.

By the People and For the People on March 25, 2013

Even though ignorance of the law is no excuse, the District of Columbia laws are highly restricted. The official copy costs $803, copyright is claimed by the District with ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, and the only on-line version available to the public is a totally awful site that won't let you go to a section of the code, has no permalinks, and times out after 5 minutes of no activity. In an effort to bring the law to the people, Public.Resource.Org bought the official code, scanned it, and has made it available on the net. A gaudy box including a thumb drive with the scanned copy and a PROCLAMATION OF DIGITIZATION, were sent to the District of Columbia Codification Counsel. The box was festooned with rubber stamps of radical sayings like "DUE PROCESS!" and "EQUAL PROTECTION!" Copies of the box were also sent to prominent members of the mainstream media, including (of course) our friends at Boing Boing.
Developers who work in open government may wish to pay attention to the subdirectory text.for.apps which includes full text for Title 1 and a powerpoint presentation explaining how the code was retrieved. We're hoping innovation will flourish with new ways of looking at the code once the laws are let out of their walled garden and allowed to roam free in our nation's capitol.
Source code for this release is on law.resource.org.
You may also view this material on the Internet Archive.
Low-cost print editions of select volumes are available on Lulu.
A nice post on this subject was written by Tom MacWright.
Pictures of the box construction are available on Flickr.

Petition: force Congress to display logos of their corporate backers on their clothes

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:21:04 +0000

The idea of forcing Congresscritters to wear NASCAR-style coveralls with the logos of their financial backers has been bandied about before, but here it is in official White House petition form.

Since most politicians' campaigns are largely funded by wealthy companies and individuals, it would give voters a better sense of who the candidate they are voting for is actually representing if the company's logo, or individual's name, was prominently displayed upon the candidate's clothing at all public appearances and campaign events. Once elected, the candidate would be required to continue to wear those "sponsor's" names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. For example, a $1 million dollar contribution would warrant a patch of about 4" by 8" on the chest, while a free meal from a lobbyist would be represented by a quarter-sized button. Individual donations under $1000 are exempt.

As funny as this is, it would be easy-ish to turn this into a browser plugin that looked for politicians' names in the pages you looked at, and automatically surrounded them with a semi-opaque halo of corporate logos that you could click on to see more.

Require Congressmen & Senators to wear logos of their financial backers on their clothing, much like NASCAR drivers do. (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Bobby Labonte, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mulsanne's photostream)

Erin Brockovich: the real-life unhappy ending of Hinkley, California, and a tale of science for sale

Miles O'Brien — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:45:56 +0000

[Video Link. BB Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared at the PBS NewsHour site. Miles investigated this story for PBS NewsHour in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). Go to their site for an in-depth look at how industry scientists stalled government action on chromium-6.]

HINKLEY, CALIFORNIA—We all love a neat, tidy Hollywood ending to a David and Goliath story. Sadly, in the real world, they are hard to come by. More often than not, the little guy might win a battle, but Goliath prevails over the long haul -- winning the war.

Before I went to Hinkley, I did, of course, watch the movie once again. As it turns out, Erin Brockovich is accurate in many respects.

Water that is heavily contaminated with chromium-6 turns bright yellow. Public utility testing shows more than 70 million Americans drink tap water tainted by chromium-6. Photo by Cameron Hickey.

You might remember the woman who gets a big check at the end of the movie after the down-on-her-luck, crusading legal assistant has brought a giant utility to its knees for polluting the groundwater beneath the tiny desert town half way between L.A. and Las Vegas.

In the movie, she was known as Donna Jensen (and played by Marg Helgenberger). There is no real-life Donna Jensen -- the details of her story are a composite of several real-life travails.

But Roberta Walker was the main inspiration. Naturally, it was not long after I met her that I asked her what she thought of the movie.

“Oh, it was a piece of crap,” she said. “The only true thing about the movie is that [Pacific Gas and Electric] poisoned us. We didn’t bring a giant to their knees obviously; we just woke them up -- woke up the dragon.”

Roberta is not allowed to say how much she got from the $333 million dollar settlement that gave the screenwriters such a nice bow to wrap up the movie. It was, however, enough to allow her and her husband to build a new home on a hill overlooking Hinkley.

“We loved it here, everything about it,” she told me. “The peace, the quiet, the privacy, and we built it. We had our well tested…and there was no chromium.”

But there is now. And Roberta is looking to move again -- out of Hinkley. But that does not guarantee she will find chromium-6 free water.

For the past 60 years, water polluted with chromium (VI) has plagued Hinkley, Calif., the desert town made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich." Although residents there won their lawsuit against the polluter, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., there’s still a debate over whether the compound causes cancer in drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency says yes, but industry scientists disagree. Image: PBS NewsHour

The real-life Erin Brockovich has moved onto the national stage as a consumer advocate and now curates a crowd-sourced map of reported cancer clusters. It is a real eye-opener. And it makes you wonder why environmental regulators don’t do this kind of thing.

A few years ago, The Environmental Working Group did a study of U.S. tap water, and it found a chrome-plated, potentially carcinogenic mess. They tested tap water samples from 35 cities and found chromium-6 in 31 of them.

The highest concentration EWG discovered, came from Norman, Oklahoma. But at nearly 13 parts per billion, the water there is still considered safe according to the 22-year-old EPA standard (100 ppb). It is, however, more than 600 times greater than the public health goal established by the California Environmental Protection Agency in the wake of the Hinkley well poisoning scandal.

Naturally, I was wondering about the tap water in my office/apartment in Bethesda, Maryland. Turns out it is .19 parts per billion (ppb.) That is ten times more Chromium-6 than the Cal/EPA public health goal.

I am a big proponent of tap water. I think the widespread use of bottled water is an environmental disaster. So I bought myself a countertop filter. And now I won’t drink anything straight from the tap anymore. I might soon upgrade to an under-sink model.

It is a shame that we cannot be more confident about the water that flows into our homes. Regulators at the state and federal level say they have to weigh public health concerns against the economic realities of tougher drinking water standards.

In the U.S., we have a Food and Drug Administration to ensure that any chemicals we ingest in the form of drugs are safe before they are allowed on the market.

Should we apply the same burden of proof to chemicals that are widely used by industry, which all too frequently poison our wells?

David Heath of the Center for Public Integrity contributed to the report.

Nominating Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:26:15 +0000

Various politicians -- MPs and former MPs from Iceland and Tunisia, two Pirate Party MEPs from Sweden -- have nominated Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Anyone can nominate anyone else for the prize, but this is a particularly good one, especially given the torture Manning faced for his brave efforts, and the ongoing persecution he is experiencing. As the nominating letter points out, Obama has already publicly announced his belief that Manning is guilty, which makes rather a mockery of a fair trial.

Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and a lack of respect for the sovereignty of other democratic nations by the United States government in international dealings.
These revelations have fueled democratic uprisings around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on the foreign and domestic policies of European nations, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.
Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more then 1000 days by the U.S. Government. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which expert worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions.

Bradley Manning is nominated for a 2013 Nobel Peace Prize

(Image: Wikimedia Commons/Anubis3 - Public Domain)

Yochai Benkler: The dangerous logic of the Bradley Manning Case

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:40:10 +0000

Yochai Benkler, in The New Republic, on an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in January during pre-trial hearings in the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case:

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: 'Yes Ma'am.' The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating.

That "Yes ma'am," argues Benkler, makes Manning's prosecution "a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena." Read the rest.

BB archives: Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning's statement

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:21:08 +0000

Alexa O'Brien transcribed the statement that Pvt. Bradley Manning read to the court yesterday. Manning pleaded guilty to exfiltrating classified documents, but not to a more serious charge of aiding the enemy. In his statement, Manning described his motivations for leaking the information, and said that he tried to contact other news media before Wikileaks, but was ignored.

Bradley Manning military trial updates: live-blogs, who to follow on Twitter, and analysis

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:29:05 +0000

Army private Bradley Manning pleaded guilty on Thursday to 10 of the 19 total charges made by the US that he leaked unprecedented amounts of classified material to Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy organization run by Julian Assange.

Manning entered a not guilty plea to the government's more serious charge of "aiding the enemy," which carries a possible maximum sentence of life in prison. In a statement before the military court today, Manning said he leaked the classified information to "spark a domestic debate."

Liveblog coverage of his trial: Mother Jones, Reuters.

Ed Pilkington at the Guardian reports Manning first contacted the Washington Post about providing them with some of the classified material while he was on leave in January 2010; the the woman who answered the phone said the "paper would only be interested [in the documents] subjected to vetting by senior editors."

Kevin Gosztola has an analysis here of Manning's claims that he first attempted to leak the material to WaPo and the New York Times, before connecting with Wikileaks. A related article at Huffpo explores this further.

At New York magazine, a roundup of tweeted coverage from the courtroom. The New York Times told them they have no record of having been contacted by Manning before he reached out to Wikileaks.

Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Daily Intelligencer, "This is the first we're hearing of it. We have no record of Manning contacting The Times in advance of WikiLeaks."

It appears Manning uploaded many of the classified documents from a Barnes and Noble location near Rockville, Maryland.

Matthew Keys has a curated list of who to follow for live coverage from the courtroom in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Bradley Manning's statement before the court today has not been published online in entirety, but here's a Storified series of tweets from trial observer Alexa O'Brien.

#Manning corrected Judge Lind on the correct pronunciation of the Tor anonymizer. It was awesome.
— Andrew Panda Blake (@apblake) February 28, 2013