Contact Us Search: All EPA Records

• You are here: EPA Home
• Records
• Records Management in the News
• News Archive: January 2009

News Archive: January 2009

The views represented in these articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editor, the Privacy Act Program, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

THE SCOOP for January 29, 2009

• All the President's IMs: Are Federal Record-keeping Laws Out of Step With Modern Communications?
  FindLaw - January 12, 2009
  "Obama appears to be losing the fight over his Blackberry partly because of legal concerns. Lawyers worry that whatever messages he sends or receives will eventually become a matter of public record under the Presidential Records Act ("PRA") of 1978."

  More coverage:
  Obama limits ex-presidents' discretion on records
  Breitbart - January 21, 2009
  "President Barack Obama issued an executive order Wednesday that limits the ability of former presidents to block the release of sensitive records of their time in the White House."

• Economic Stimulus Package Could Impinge on Americans' Health Privacy, Says Group
  Government Technology - January 19, 2009
  "'HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the 1996 HIPAA law never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records.' -- David Brailer, former national coordinator for Health Information Technology."

• National Archives Releases Initial 9/11 Commission Records
  National Coalition for History - January 15, 2009
  "On January 14, 2009, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) opened more than 150 cubic feet of records of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission, an independent, bipartisan commission created by Congress."

• A new kind of record-keeper
  Federal Computer Week - January 26, 2009
  "Allen Weinstein's resignation from the position of Archivist of the United States means that Obama can appoint a person to break out of the old box and bring real innovation to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)."

• Open government advocates praise Obama move toward greater disclosure of agency information
  StarTribune - January 22, 2009
  "Obama's instruction to federal agencies Wednesday to be more responsive to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act is not the first time a president has pushed for wider release of information."

• Thrift store MP3 player contains secret military files
  CNN - January 27, 2009
  "Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma about a year ago when he bought a used MP3 player from a thrift store for $9. A few weeks ago, he plugged it into his computer to download a song, and he instead discovered confidential U.S. military files."

• A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts
  New York Times - January 26, 2009
  "On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide."

• White House Web Site Revisits Privacy Policy
  InformationWeek - January 23, 2009
  "With the Obama administration now in place, White House media staff has been reviewing the WhiteHouse.gov Web site this week to address issues raised by privacy advocates."

THE SCOOP for January 22, 2009

• Audit: IRS ignored risks in deploying online filing system
  NextGov - January 15, 2009
  "The Internal Revenue Service launched the latest version of its online tax-filing system despite known security gaps that could put taxpayer information at risk, according to an inspector general report released on Thursday."

• The Balance of Secrecy and Privacy
  TPM Cafe - January 20, 2009
  "Obama at the moment has unequivocally embraced transparency, promising that his new Chief Technology Officer will ensure that administration holds open meetings with live webcasts, and uses blogging software and wikis to communicate with the public."

• Missing White House E-Mails Traced, Justice Aide Says
  Washington Post - January 15, 2009
  "A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files."

• Obama's big idea: Digital health records
  CNNMoney - January 12, 2009
  "President-elect wants to computerize the nation's health care records in five years. But the plan comes with a hefty price tag, and specialized labor is scarce."

• Presidential Records Reform Act Passed by New House
  ARMA Washington Policy Brief - January 2009
  "The end may finally be in sight to the seven-year battle historians and archivists have waged to overturn President Bush's Executive Order 13233 of November 2001 that restricted access to presidential records. 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."

• Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data
  New York Times - January 17, 2009
  "President-elect Barack Obama's plan to link up doctors and hospitals with new information technology, as part of an ambitious job-creation program, is imperiled by a bitter, seemingly intractable dispute over how to protect the privacy of electronic medical records."

• Research Reveals PDF is Format of Choice for Document Archiving
  .aiim.org - January 14, 2009
  "Recent AIIM research found that 90% of organizations are using the PDF file format for long-term storage of scanned documents, and 89% are converting Office files to PDF for distribution and archive."

• The ROI on a Records Manager
  CMS Watch - January 14, 2009
  "Retention Management was certainly a buzzword in 2008. And I found out through a number of conversations with buyers and technology users that it was a very misunderstood term."

• Ruling on Records Delivers a Win to Cheney
  Washington Post - January 20, 2009
  "A federal judge yesterday rejected the claim by a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups that Vice President Cheney intended to illegally discard some of his official records, and instead accepted the pledge of a senior White House aide that key Cheney documents and other materials will be transferred as required to the National Archives."

• Security Manager's Journal: Budget ax falls on disaster recovery
  ComputerWorld - January 12, 2009
  "Execs figure cutting DR for new projects will save half their cost. But to a security manager, it feels like living on the edge."

THE SCOOP for January 14, 2009

• Agencies Move to Restrict FOIA Access in Last-Minute Regs
  Pro Publica - January 5, 2009
  "Over the past few months, some federal agencies have issued rules that would eliminate public disclosure of information -- or, in some cases, make it more difficult for requesters to get information."

• Back-Button to the Future
  Technology Review - December 5, 2008
  "A new tool makes it easier to see the Web changing over time. A user can peer back in time through Zoetrope in several ways. Simply pulling a scrollbar at the bottom of the browser winds a Web page back to show what it looked like hours, days, or months ago."

• E-Discovery Ruling Gives Companies Another Data Worry
  Enterprise Storage Forum - January 12, 2009
  "[A] U.S. District Court ruled that metadata associated with e-mails and electronic files must be preserved, maintained and produced in the course of legal discovery, particularly when sought by the requesting party in its initial request."

• Enterprise RIAs modernize today's business processes
  Enterprise Management Quarterly - January 2008
  "By integrating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) into everyday processes as part of Enterprise 2.0 strategies, companies are boosting employee productivity and service levels, while lowering overall operating costs. RIAs access local and remote data stores, run online and offline, and use Web services to provide rich and powerful user experiences."

• How private is your personal information?
  Washington Examiner - January 12, 2009
  "Would you be alarmed to know that even when you think things are private, a perfect stranger can look you up online, see your address, birth date, past addresses, and even see a photo of your home, down to the detail of your child's play set out in the back yard? Alarmed yet? You should be."

• Judge Orders White House To Open Visitor Logs
  AllHeadlineNews - January 12, 2009
  "A federal judge has ruled that visitor logs at the White House are not exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and should be opened, and that the Bush administration had illegally destroyed some of the records."

• New Data Breach, Privacy Bills in Congress
  Small Business Computing - January 9, 2009
  "One year after trying unsuccessfully to introduce legislation on data breaches and protection of individual privacy, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is trying again. This week, she introduced Bills S.139, the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act and S.141, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act."

• Prepare for E-Discovery Before a Lawsuit Is Filed
  Baseline - January 12, 2009
  "A well-organized records management program is the foundation for an effective electronic discovery program."

• Search Privacy Issue Goes Mobile
  PCMag - January 13, 2009
  "Two D.C.-based interest groups argue that regulators are ignoring phone-based data mining activities, and are asking that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) open an investigation."

THE SCOOP for January 7, 2009

• Careful what you search for
  Fortune - January 6, 2009
  "Google recently released its annual rundown of popular searches for 2008 - what they call the "zeitgeist" list - and it's a reminder, once again, of how much we reveal about ourselves every time we type into a search bar."

• Healthcare compliance gets boost from national HHS privacy framework
  SearchCIO - December 30, 2008
  "The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) may soon cover not just healthcare organizations but also providers of electronic personal health records (EPHRs), which belong to the patient rather than the medical establishment and are hosted by a number of commercial services."

• Image Fortress Launches Online Archive of World's Space Exploration Imagery
  Reuters - December 29, 2008
  "Image Fortress today announced that it has launched the International Space Archives, an online digital library (www.internationalspacearchives.com) organizing the vast collections of still and video imagery produced by the manned and unmanned space programs of the world."

• NARA Cannot Assure Complete Transfer of Bush Records
  Secrecy News - January 5, 2009
  "The impending transfer of Bush Administration records to the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will challenge the capacity of the Archives to absorb them because of their enormous volume and the diverse formats of various electronic records."

• Obama expected to revoke Bush order on presidential records
  Austin American-Statesman - January 4, 2009
  "Historians and open-records advocates say they are counting on President-elect Barack Obama to undo an executive order by President George W. Bush giving ex-presidents unprecedented control over the release of White House records."

• Open Document Format Has Been Accepted By 16 Governments
  InformationWeek - January 2, 2009
  "The Open Document Format continues to gain ground with governments as the format in which they wish to create important documents, despite Microsoft...Office format, OOXML, being recognized as an international standard as well."

• Rescue plan renews health IT privacy debate
  Government Health IT - December 24, 2008
  "The plan to add health information technology to the multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package legislators are developing has renewed the debate over how to protect patient privacy in a nationwide health IT system."

• Web 2.0: Hot technology for 2009
  NetworkWorld - January 5, 2009
  "The Web 2.0 phenomenon is unstoppable. Employees are turning in droves to blogs, wikis, mash-ups, social networking, crowdsourcing and other variations on the Web 2.0 theme."

• Who will Preserve Your Digital Data?
  ReadWriteWeb - December 13, 2008
  "Many people assume that their data will be available whenever they need to access it, but most of us have had a hard drive crash; we've seen various forms of storage media such as floppy disks and zip drives become obsolete, some of us have even had problems accessing content in the cloud, as evidenced recently when Gmail was down..."

Local Navigation

• Records Home
• Policy & Guidance
• Laws & Statutes
• Schedules
• Tools
• Frequent Questions
• Related Links
• Glossary

• EPA Home
• Privacy and Security Notice
• Contact Us