Privacy Issues:
Two Privacy Bills Move as Congress Returns From Vacation
After all its hard work this year Congress is almost done with its summer recess. Lawmakers are due back Sept. 8 and have much to tackle. Two bills are of paramount importance to EFF: one—the USA FREEDOM Act-must be passed by Congress, while the other-the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA)-must be killed.
The USA FREEDOM Act is a good first step to rein in the NSA’s "Business Records" program, which collects Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Since July, we’ve urged people to contact their senators to cosponsor the bill. We’ve even created a scorecard to help you figure out where your member of Congress stands. On the other side is CISA, a privacy-invasive cybersecurity bill written by the Senate Intelligence Committee to facilitate the sharing of computer threats between companies and the government. The bill grants companies broad legal immunity to spy on users and share their information with government agencies like the NSA. This zombie bill-just like previous cybersecurity bills-must be killed.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/two-privacy-bills-move-congress-returns-vacation.
Blocking Consumer Choice: Google’s Dangerous Ban of Privacy and Security App
As reported last week in the Wall Street Journal, Google has banned the privacy and security app Disconnect Mobile from the play store. By doing so, Google has shown once again that it cares more about allowing third-parties to monetize the tracking of its users than about allowing those users to ensure their own security and privacy. The banned app, Disconnect Mobile, is designed to stop non-consensual third party trackers on Android (much like EFF’s Privacy Badger does in Firefox or Chrome). Disconnect released their app in the Android Play Store and Apple’s App Store a little over a week ago. Google removed the app just five days after it was released, citing Section 4.4 of the Play Store developer distribution agreement. (The iOS version remains available in Apple’s App Store.) This section states that developers agree not to use the Play Store to distribute apps that interfere with or disrupt the services of any third party.
On its face this may seem like a reasonable rule, but on further inspection it’s obvious that this rule is overly vague, allowing Google to be selective in its enforcement. After all, any antivirus app or firewall could be considered to be violating these terms of service, since they would interfere with the services of a (malicious) third-party. Yet firewall and antivirus apps abound in the Play Store. Clearly enforcement of this clause is selective.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/blocking-consumer-choice-googles-dangerous-ban-privacy-security-app.
Secrecy Trumps Public Debate in New Ruling On LA’s License Plate Readers
In a ruling that will harm the public’s ability to engage in an informed debate over the use of automated license plate readers (ALPR) in California, a judge late last week rejected EFF and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California’s argument that the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department should hand over a week’s worth of license plate data. But the ruling isn’t what you might think—the court didn’t decide that location information is too private and too sensitive to release to the public. Instead, the court held that the ALPR data qualifies as the kind of investigative record police can keep secret and that the harm to law enforcement investigations from disclosing data outweighs the value to the public of seeing what data police collect on them. If you think that sounds like a big, blank check to California police to build surveillance programs outside of public scrutiny, you’re right.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/secrecy-trumps-public-debate-new-ruling-las-license-plate-readers.
———————————-
Libraries:
A Little Library Farce in the Golden State
I knew a few months ago that the governor of California had nominated an unqualified person to be the state librarian of California. Now it’s looking like the guy will be approved. A panel of five state senators has voted unanimously to send the nomination to the full senate. The story would make a potentially good movie, or at least a movie of the week. Supposedly the law requires the state librarian to be a "technically trained librarian," which makes some sense. Being in charge of the state library might also require some experience in managing large organizations.
So who better to be the state librarian than a reporter and blogger with no training as a librarian but great political connections?
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2014/09/02/a-little-library-farce-in-the-golden-state/
———————————-
Internet Access:
What can we learn from 800,000 public comments on the FCC’s net neutrality plan?
On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We’ve spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket. Here is a high-level overview, as well as our cleaned version of the full corpus which is available for download in the hopes of making further research easier.
Our first exploration uses natural language processing techniques to identify topical keywords within comments and use those keywords to group comments together. We analyzed a corpus of 800,959 comments. Some key findings:
- We estimate that less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality
- At least 60 percent of comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns (484,692 comments); while these make up the majority of comments, this is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets
- At least 200 comments came from law firms, on behalf of themselves or their clients
In-depth exploration of the topical keywords revealed several prominent recurring themes, both in form letter and non-form letter submissions.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/02/what-can-we-learn-from-800000-public-comments-on-the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan/.
———————————-
Freedom of Information:
Radio Television Digital News Association urges passage of FOIA Improvement Act
When the Senate reconvenes in September, RTDNA and dozens of other journalism and open government organizations are urging it to quickly act on a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The bill, S. 2520, the FOIA Improvement Act, is sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.). The two "Sunshine Senators" paired together to craft the 2007 amendments to FOIA and this new bill reflects their continued efforts to find bipartisan fixes to make FOIA work better. Specifically, S. 2520 would, among other changes, strengthen the FOIA ombudsman’s office, help curtail agencies’ rampant over-invocation of the "deliberative process" exemption (FOIA’s Exemption 5), encourage proactive disclosure of government information without the need for a FOIA request, and codify the current administration’s policy bolstering the presumption of disclosure at the heart of FOIA.
http://rtdna.org/article/rtdna_urges_passage_of_foia_improvement_act.
———————————-
Digital History:
Internet Archive Launches Flickr Commons Collection
The Internet Archive is best known for its historical library of the web, preserving more than 400 billion web pages dating back to 1996. Yet, its 19 petabytes include more than 600 million pages of digitized texts dating back more than 500 years. What would it look like if those 600 million pages could be "read" completely differently? What if every illustration, drawing, chart, map, or photograph became an entry point, allowing one to navigate the world’s books not as paragraphs of text, but as a visual tapestry of our lives? How would we learn and explore knowledge differently? Those were the questions that launched a project to catalog the imagery of half a millennium of books.
The Internet Archive processed more than 2 million volumes from its digital archive, compiling more than 14 million high resolution images spanning nearly every topic imaginable. Each image includes detailed descriptions, including the subject tags of the book it came from and the text immediately surrounding it on the page. The latter is especially powerful, as it allows to keyword search 500 years of images, instantly accessing particular topics or themes.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2014/08/29/welcome-the-internet-archive-to-the-commons/.
———————————-
This one defies categorization:
Joan Rivers – Honorary Librarian
"Can we talk?"
I only wish we had the chance, Joan.
Joan Rivers was known as many things. Relentless comedian. First woman to ever host a late night talk show. Reality star. Fashion critic. Lover of plastic surgery. QVC pitchwoman. Librarian?
As I graduated from USF in 2010 with a Masters in Library and Information Science, a comedian who decided to become a librarian, I watched Joan’s new documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and was reminded of the dreams I was giving up to pursue my love for literacy and what I hoped would be a more comfortable and normal life than the one I had for years as a struggling comedian in New York. People always compared me to Kathy Griffin and since it seemed only one redheaded female comic was allowed in the industry at a time, I thought my big mouth could be better utilized as a librarian, sharing my love of reading and how important libraries were.
But it was there on that documentary that I was reminded that Joan and I had more in common than a love of the stage and making people laugh. She too was an aspiring librarian! She had a card catalogue in her New York apartment where she organized all of her jokes. Thirty years of jokes stored in a gray card catalogue meticulously arranged by subject. I was so envious. First of her incredible talent, then for her bravery of never giving a shit what people thought, and now her card catalogue!
http://cltampa.com/artbreaker/archives/2014/09/04/joan-rivers-honorary-librarian.
Please feel free to pass along in part or in its entirety.
The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.