Gaining Access to ICE's Varick Detention Center
Just wanted to flag a MFIA victory – journalist Jacqueline Stevens, who writes for the Nation, will be given a tour of the Varick Detention Center in NYC next week (ICE had denied her previous requests for access). Approval came a day after the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to [...]
FOI Fee Fraud?
The Globe has an interesting article up about the prohibitive costs of government records requests.
According to the story, one Boston reporter was given
an estimate of $6,600 by a large state agency in response to his requests to review the e-mails of several senior officials. The agency justified the price as the cost of finding the [...]
Networking and Information Sharing
Hello from Betsy, new ISP fellow and blogger.
Perhaps this is old news, but I found this fascinating. A new Boston University study shows that the people with the largest social networks are not necessarily the best idea spreaders. Instead, the best ideas spreaders are those at strategically placed nodes, even if they are less well [...]
ISP Fellow Comments on the OSTP’s Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies – Post 3
The following comments were posted by ISP Fellow Victoria Stodden in response to the OSTP’s call, as announced here: http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/default-file/RFI%20Final%20for%20FR.pdf. The first wave, comments posted here, asked for feedback on implementation issues. The second wave requested input on Features and Technology (our post is here). For the third and final wave on Management, Chris Wiggins, [...]
what we do and why terrorism matters
Our projects include a lot of national security-oriented topics, including Guantanamo, fusion centers, and the like. One might wonder — hell, we’ve wondered — how this intersects with our core mission to support newsgatherers. In an Information Society Project Ideas Lunch last week, Jack Balkin hit the nail on the head: the current onslaught of [...]
Can Judicial Openness Initiatives Disqualify Judges from Access Cases?
The Supreme Court has refused to indulge a stay sought by the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corporation which would have kept 12,000 pages of court records and depositions in a long-running CT clergy abuse case from public view.
The judgment sought to be stayed, Rosado v. Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp., raises some fascinating access issues, [...]
General shout-out to the Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation is committed to exactly the kind of transparency principles that journalism traditionally serves. Their projects include: compiling a list of people seeking tax breaks on imports from Congress; building a completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents; running the numbers on sources of Congressional wealth; opening bills to online, public review.
“The [...]
