Freedom of Information

White House Regulatory Office Too Quiet About Its Activities, Study Finds
“A notable portion of meeting records, oral communications and public comments related to agency rulemaking are absent from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website, according to a new study that faults OIRA for less-than-full transparency during the last 12 years.”
http://www.govexec.com/management/2013/02/white-house-regulatory-office-too-quiet-about-its-activities-study-finds/61536/

Senator Tester Keeps Fighting the Good Fight for Transparency
“Today, Senator Tester announced that once again he has introduced the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, (not yet online) a bill that would bring the Senate into the 21st Century by requiring senators and Senate candidates to electronically file their campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission.”
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/02/26/senator-tester-keeps-fighting-the-good-fight-for-transparency/

Public Policy

E-rate’s looming Fiscal Cliff
“While Congress and the White House debate how to prevent the looming across-the-board budgets cuts known as sequestration, those of us in the E-rate world are worrying about our own “fiscal cliff.” For the past several years E-rate applicants have been biting their nails waiting to see what totals are going to be requested from the capped fund and if there will be enough money to fund their applications. In 2012, we heard a collective gasp when the school and library applications showed that for the first time in the 15 years of the program there was not going to be enough money to cover all the priority one requests, with a shortfall of some $2.8 billion. After shaking out the couch cushions and emptying the penny jars, USAC was able to make up the deficit so that all of these applications could receive funding and the first tier of priority two applications would also receive funding.”
http://www.districtdispatch.org/2013/02/e-rates-looming-fiscal-cliff/

Open Access

SLA Supports Open Access to Federally Funded Research
“SLA, along with 11 other library, publishing, research and advocacy organizations, wrote a letter thanking U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden for introducing legislation titled “The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act” (FASTR). This bill, introduced on February 13, will provide an important mechanism to ensure that manuscripts of peer-reviewed scientific articles reporting on research funded by the U.S. Government can be freely accessed and fully used by all American taxpayers – including researchers, teachers, students and businesses.”
http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_blog/2013/02/sla-supports-open-access-to-federally-funded-research.html

Internet Access

Internet Governance, Policy Up for Debate at UNESCO Meeting in Paris
“This week, Internet governance experts and advocates gather in Paris to start preparing for the ten-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2015. This week’s meeting is hosted by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); CDT’s Leslie Harris and Matthew Shears will be appearing on several panels addressing questions of privacy, free expression, and cybersecurity – key issues in Internet policy that will shape governance debates over the next few years. The WSIS+10 event will give government, industry, civil society, academics, and the technical community an opportunity to continue conversations about Internet governance and policy that were features of the WCIT debates.”
https://www.cdt.org/blogs/emma-llanso/2602internet-governance-policy-debate-unesco-meeting-paris

Digital History

Building the Digital Public Library of America
“The Digital Public Library of America will launch on April 18 after two and a half years of careful planning and preparation. The project known as DPLA is the first national effort that seeks to aggregate existing records in state and regional digital libraries so that they are searchable from a single portal. Up until now, the documents that tell the story of our nation’s history and cultural heritage have largely been siloed in state and local libraries, museums, and archives. Some institutions have the ability to digitize those valuable materials and put them online, but strained budgets mean that most do not. The project’s funding will also allow it to work with local communities to digitize their cultural-heritage—preserving them for the future and bringing them online as part of our first national digital library.”
http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/2/28/building-the-digital-public-library-america/

Intellectual Property

Copyright Alert System Launching Today
“The long-discussed Copyright Alert System (CAS) is launching today — but don’t expect any immediate fireworks.  It’s going to take some time to see how the system operates in practice; all that will happen this week is that some Internet users may receive initial informational alerts. Under the CAS, ISPs will send warning notices to subscribers that copyright holders have identified as engaging in copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks.  In the optimistic scenario, this notification-centric approach will serve a largely educational purpose, informing users that their file sharing activity may be both illegal and observable by rightsholders.  Some users may not have been fully aware of that.  And in some cases, notices may clue parents in to illegal behavior they weren’t aware of, such as file sharing by the household teenager.  This is why CDT has said that the CAS has the potential to help reduce peer-to-peer copyright infringement while sidestepping the serious concerns raised by approaches that involve (for example) government mandates or the adoption of new snooping or filtering technologies. There are risks, however.”
https://www.cdt.org/blogs/david-sohn/2502copyright-alert-system-launching-today

New German Law Will Allow Free “Snippets” By Search Engines, But Uncertainty Remains
“The good news for search engines like Google is a proposed German copyright law won’t require them to pay to show short summaries of news content. However, uncertainty remains about how much might be “too much” and require a license. The new law is expected to pass on Friday.”
http://searchengineland.com/new-german-law-will-allow-free-snippets-by-search-engines-but-uncertainty-remains-150131

Privacy Issues

Supreme Court Dismisses Challenge to FISA Amendments Act; EFF’s Lawsuit Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Remains
“Yesterday, the Supreme Court sadly dismissed the ACLU’s case, Clapper v. Amnesty International, which challenged the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the unconstitutional law that allows the government to wiretap Americans communicating with people overseas. Under the FAA, the government can conduct this surveillance without naming individuals and without a traditional probable cause warrant, as the Fourth Amendment requires. The court didn’t address the constitutionality of the FAA itself, but instead ruled that the plaintiffs—a group of lawyers, journalists, and human rights advocates who regularly communicate with likely “targets” of FAA wiretapping—couldn’t prove the surveillance was “certainly impending,” so therefore didn’t have the “standing” necessary to sue. In other words, since the Americans did not have definitive proof that they were being surveilled under the FAA—a fact the government nearly always keeps secret—they cannot challenge the constitutionality of the statute.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/supreme-court-dismisses-challenge-fisa-warrantless-wiretapping-law-effs-lawsuit

International Outlook

German National Data Portal Launched
“Wednesday saw the launch of the German national data portal. While the portal had been longtime expected, in the last days before the launch the German open data community has been vocal in its criticism of the introduction of a newly created national license framework, which includes the option to limit re-use to non-commercial use forms. The portal will also hold non-open data as well as data in closed formats. This in the expectation that once data is published in some shape or form the pressure on the data holder will rise to provide the data as really open data as well.”
http://epsiplatform.eu/content/german-national-data-portal-launched

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The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.