Interesting documents

[While I'm cleaning up my unpublished posts....]


Even the underworld needs accountants:



Via BoingBoing

Hawaii says "get lost" to birthers

Here's a cute line from Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily, who says he "would like to see Barack Obama's actual, long-form birth certificate as the first step toward determining if he is constitutionally eligible to serve as president. "

The first step? Not only is the official state record, attested by the State Health Director and the registrar of vital statistics, not sufficient to establish Obama's nativity, but even that fabled long-form birth certificate would still not settle the issue! I have no idea what further evidence Farah would require; he probably doesn't know, either, but figures he's bright enough to think up something quickly. It's a Sisyphean task, anyway. Presenting evidence to a birther is like speaking louder when someone doesn't understand English.

So, I'm completely sympathetic to the poor employees of the Hawaii Health Department who have to deal with persistent requests for Obama's birth certificate. Hawaii has just passed a special law that allows those harassed civil servants to ignore any repeat requests for the birth certificate and my first impulse was to agree. After all, the birther movement is a grade-A piece of lunacy and doesn't deserve a soft answer, especially when the soft answer only increases the wrath.

But on second thought, no, Hawaii should not have done this. Getting 10-20 emails a week is annoying, to be sure, but that level of inquiry shouldn't impede the real work all that much. Can't it be treated like a FAQ? Set up a web page with a canned response and respond to each email by pasting in the link. Surely that's as quick as searching through your email to confirm that you've heard from this particular nut before, isn't it?

The slippery slope argument may be overdrawn. This is a truly unusual case, over a fully-answered issue, and the level of stupidity far beyond the normal level of background stupid. Still ... these folks do elect their own and I hate to see the precedent established, allowing public records requirements to be ignored when you get frustrated with a particular issue. The wingnuts might not hesitate to copy this as soon as they have power and have something to hide. I hate to give them that much of an opening. Hawaii should suck it up and find the least cumbersome way of dealing with the birthers, without compromising their public records laws.

Cooking the sports books

Confessions of an NBA scorekeeper

The bias is plain to see. Just look at the home-road splits. Last season, home teams leaguewide scored 101.58 points per game; road teams, 98.32. That's to be expected: Teams play better at home. What's surprising is that assists and blocks rise disproportionately for home teams — assists by nearly 8 percent, blocks by more than 15 percent. Last year's Nuggets averaged 25 assists at home, only 19.4 on the road. They recorded 7.3 blocks per game at home and just 4.7 outside Denver.

Big Brother is still Big Brother

Obama Administration: Constitution Does Not Protect Cell-Site Records

The Obama administration says the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers.

* snip *

At issue is whether the government can require federal judges to order mobile phone companies to release historical cell-tower information of a phone number without probable cause — the standard required for a search warrant.

Ralph Maughn plausibly compares this to having a radio collar on almost every American, although the comparison isn't entirely apt: your cell phone records can plot your general location at a given time, but not with the same precision as a triangulated radio signal can. Still, is this really how we want to stand in relation to our government? They don't even have to prove probably cause to spy on us?

Forgetting how to make your bombs

This is why you keep records:

How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles

PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.

*snip*

But vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.

[via Peter Kurilecz]

Leaking sensitive information

From ComputerWorld, :

Classified data on president's helicopter leaked via P2P, found on Iranian computer

Classified information about the communications, navigation and management electronics on Marine One, the helicopter now used by President Barack Obama, were reportedly discovered in a publicly available shared folder on a computer in Tehran, Iran, after apparently being accidentally leaked over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network last summer.

The classified file appears to have been leaked from a computer belonging to a Bethesda, Md., military contractor and was discovered Thursday by Tiversa Inc., a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based P2P monitoring services provider.

[Thanks to Peter's RAIN (Records and Archives in the News) drops.]

White House and YouTube

From Tech_sassy, at the Fayette Observer:

White House stops using YouTube due to privacy concerns

The White House received quite a bit of criticism when they decided to use YouTube to host President Obama’s videos on a government Web site — and for various reasons. There’s the government-business relationship with Google and more importantly, privacy and security issues resulting from “Google’s insatiable thirst for detailed data on the browsing habits of web surfers.”

But now the White House has done away with YouTube videos and, instead, is using a Flash-based video player:

“This solution, which appears to use Akamai’s content delivery network, does not make use of tracking cookies.”

However, they are still posting copies of the videos to their official YouTube channel for everyone to see. This is fine, considering the main issue before was running the Google tracking cookies on a government website.

Regardless, I still operate under the assumption that the government is always watching us. Not because I’m paranoid, but because I just give them way too much credit.

I like that last line.

Transparent government? Nope.

Distracted as he may be by the economic crisis, Obama is fast running out of excuses for why he talked a good game about open government, but in reality his DOJ is backing Bush positions on concealing records at every turn. The latest:

Obama’s DOJ quietly sought dismissal of missing White House emails lawsuit

But despite it all, the newly minted Obama administration said in court papers that the issue revolving around the missing emails is “moot” because some steps, however incomplete, had been taken by the Bush White House to preserve and restore missing emails, even though the work has been conducted under the cover of secrecy by an unknown outside contractor hired by Bush administration officials.

*snip*

In a mid-January court filing that sought dismissal of the lawsuit, the Justice Department claimed that the 14 million emails were never actually “missing,” rather the emails were simply unaccounted for due to a “flawed and limited” internal review by the Office of Administration in 2005. The documents were retrieved, the Justice Department claims, “through a three-phased email recovery process.”

*snip*

Obama’s Justice Department appears to have taken the Bush administration on its word that a good faith effort has been made to restore missing emails, according to CREW’s 24-page motion arguing against having the case dismissed.

“One day after the Bush administration ended, defendants filed a motion to dismiss that reflects an incredibly cynical and narrow view of defendants’ obligations under the Federal Records Act (“FRA”),” the watchdog group’s court filing says. “According to defendants, because they have taken some action -- no matter how flawed, incomplete or limited -- the first four counts of plaintiffs’ complaints are now moot. Hiding behind technical jargon and theoretical constructs, defendants attempt to obscure three basic facts: we still do not know how many emails are missing; we still do not know the source of the problem that caused emails to be missing in the first place; and we still do not know if the problem has been fixed.

Changing the culture

Among the sort of writers that I read, there has been great excitement about some of the new President's comments regarding open government, especially the Executive Order which places limits on former Presidents' ability to restrict their records. The National Coalition for History also links me to these two memos which don't have the force of law, but do make promises that are somewhat binding, politically:

Transparency and Open Government
Freedom of Information Act

The key phrase in the latter is:

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

In the transparency memo, this paragraph caught my eye:

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

Government 2.0! The President with a Blackberry! And to highlight the contrast with the previous Administration, I heard Bush say in one of his farewell interviews, "People wanted Barack Obama in their living rooms explaining policy." That's a very Government 1.0* outlook: for Bush, the role of the people after Election Day was to simply listen to what they were told. Obama is claiming a different approach and, while we have yet to see how he'll really govern, he's making some promises that he'll find it hard to renege on. Unlike Bush & Cheney, his power is his popularity and he stands to take more damage if he's seen as a liar.

This is all very welcome to us liberal, open-society types. Obama was always rather vague and cautious on the campaign trail and didn't always challenge the Bush methods as openly as some of us would have liked. Perhaps this is a sign that he's going to be as aggressive about dismantling the secretive, unitary executive


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* Not that I really use these phrases; please don't think I go around talking like this all the time.

Is metadata part of a document? AZ court says no.

Here's an interesting article picked up by Peter on the archives listserv: the Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled that metadata is not part of a document and therefore not a public record. At issue was whether a Word file's hidden "properties" could be demanded, in order to prove that the creation date was the same as the date printed in the document text; the Court ruling says that it cannot. Only the document as it would appear in a printed version is public.

This strikes me as a wrong decision, or at least the wrong outcome (there may not be any case law on this issue to make a ruling either way technically incorrect). But then archivists have an expansive view of what comprises a document and may not see things the same way that a politician or other public official would. I expect this topic to get revisited, eventually at the federal level, before too many years pass.

Those VP records

This came down a few days ago: Ruling on Records Delivers a Win to Cheney

The judge has lifted an injunction against the OVP handling their records as they see fit because she sees no basis for presuming ill intent. The lawsuit in question was arguing exactly that: that an injunction to preserve all records was necessary because there's such a high suspicion that there will be inappropriate destruction of documents. Given that the judge herself comments on the Justice Department's "constantly shifting arguments" that have been rejected at every turn, it seems her decision could easily have gone the other way, but that's not what happened. As it stands now, the OVP is free to do as they please and be judged after the fact.

Still looking for those lost emails

Court Orders Search of White House Computers

Before they leave their offices next week, White House employees must allow their computers to be searched, and they must turn over any devices that may contain some of the possibly millions of e-mail messages that have apparently disappeared, a Federal District Court judge ordered Wednesday.

** snip **

Ms. Hong lamented the additional logistical burdens being imposed on members of the White House staff, who are packing up and making way for the Obama administration.

Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola said that the burden would have been lighter if the White House had taken action last year when he recommended preservation of e-mail.

“You rolled the dice that you’d win,” Judge Facciola told the lawyers, “and you lost.”

Well said.

LIttleSis

As a response to Big Brother, the Public Accountability Initiative has launched a new website called - naturally - LittleSis. LittleSis describes itself as "an involuntary facebook for powerful people." It's a data aggregator which takes lists of public officials, Fortune 1000 companies, lobbyists, and the like, and then traces their connections by noting who has shared membership in a group with other people in the database. As an example Henry Paulson is automatically linked to people who've also worked in the Treasury Department, Goldman Sachs, or the Nature Conservancy (didn't know that!).

LittleSis is intended to be nonpartisan and the automatic linking of names from various lists will go a long way in ensuring that it remains so. The bias they have is their antipathy to the link between economic and political power. So far, no Screen Actors Guild listings, but they particularly like to assemble lists of who a person has donated money to, and from whom they've received donations (of the kind that would show up on public lists, anyway). If SAG is an active enough lobbyer, they'll surely show up.

It's early and incomplete, but this site has great potential for helping investigative types of all stripes. It works more or less automatically, once a name or a list of names has been added to the database; names and lists can be added by any registered user in a wiki-like fashion. Therefore, it's techno-economically* viable. Having just finished reading Gellman's book about Dick Cheney, I'm keenly aware of the power of information and just how difficult it is to maintain control of it. Now the common man can mine data, too. A more transparent world is likely to be a better world.


[PS. Major blogging faux pas - I forgot to link to my source for this. I learned about LittleSis from if:book, a terrific blog where I routinely find postings that are creative, thoughtful, and substantive. Be sure to check it out.]

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*Is that a word? Sounds like something Neal Stephenson or William Gibson might already have used.

Reforming the PRA

Maarja, on the archives listserv, points out that the new Congress is already taking some much-needed action:
Presidential Records Reform Act is the First Bill Passed by the New House

On January 7, 2009, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009,” by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 359-58. H.R. 35 was chosen by the House leadership as the first piece of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.

President-elect Obama has already committed himself to revoking EO 13233. However, the hope is that the Senate will move swiftly to pass the bill in time for the new president to sign it soon after his inauguration.

Keeping good books

Via The Devil's Archivist comes this perspective on our economic woes:

Records-level view of the financial crisis (Part 1), and
Records-level view of the financial crisis (Part 2)

In working as an information and document auditor I was in position to witness the convergence of the “buy-now-pay-later” and “quantity-over-quality” mentalities indicative of the mortgage industry boom and bust. I’ve mentioned this before, but you can tell a lot about people’s motivations through the records they create. Though most of the records, files, and groupings were completely legitimate and probably have happy endings awaiting somewhere, one with my job couldn’t help but notice a great deal of the haste, sloppiness, and underhandedness that characterizes the mess in general.

This is where the sub-prime phenomena started to become a problem, simply because if broker’s chose to, they could fudge the documentation process for the scads of people willing to walk into situations they couldn’t afford. No amount of oversight was able to detect the subtle ways that companies met recordkeeping requirements without really thinking of larger consequences beyond the law. And at all levels - from broker to funder, to wholesaler, to other wholesaler, to final buyer - there was this notion that you could pass the buck and that someone else would be responsible for collecting the final bill.

Having worked in accounting (sort of), I know that people hate all those pesky rules and record-keeping requirements that slow things down. And I also know that when you make it easy to do things, a lot of things get done that ought not to have. It's really hard to work out a scheme where only the good activities are facilitated.