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• News Archive: March 2009

News Archive: March 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 March 25, 2009

• California privacy law challenged by banks
  AZCentral - March 9, 2009
  "The U.S. Supreme Court signaled interest in a banking industry challenge to a California law that restricts the ability of financial institutions to share information about consumers among company units."

  More coverage:
  Coalition Urges Obama to Defend California Financial Privacy Law
  Common Dreams - March 24, 2009
  "A coalition of privacy groups today urged the Obama Administration to defend California's landmark financial privacy law against the banking industry's legal efforts to overturn it."

• CIA Says Agency Has 3,000 Documents Related to Videotaped Torture
  The Intelligence Daily - March 23, 2009
  "The Justice Department said the documents include "cables, memoranda, notes and e-mails" related to the destroyed CIA videotapes."

• Defense digs out of documents in Bear Stearns case
  The Street - March 20, 2009
  "Lawyers for two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers charged with lying to investors about the collapse of the subprime mortgage market complained on Monday that the government has hampered their defense by burying them in an avalanche of documents."

• House Votes to Create Privacy Officers at DHS
  Common Dreams - March 24, 2009
  "The House of Representatives passed legislation today that creates a privacy official for each division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). If established by law, these new positions would be responsible for ensuring privacy laws and regulations are followed by DHS."

• Officials Hoard Valuable Databases Funded by Taxpayers
  Wired - March 19, 2009
  "[D]espite federal and state public records laws designed to make the data accessible, many agencies are fighting more ferociously than ever to keep data created with public funds out of public hands."

• Pentagon should establish fourth military service to wage cyberwars
  NextGov - March 23, 2009
  "The United States, engaged in a cyberspace Cold War in which government networks are under constant attack, must establish a fourth military service to conduct cyberwarfare, according to an article in the most recent issue of a Defense newsletter."

• U.S. Agencies Advised to Release Information to Public
  New York Times - March 19, 2009
  "Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued new guidelines fleshing out President Obama's order of Jan. 21 to provide more government records to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, whenever their release is not prohibited by another law."

  More coverage:
  A Test of the New FOIA Policy
  Secrecy News - March 24, 2009
  "In a test of the new... Freedom of Information Act guidelines that were announced by Attorney General Eric Holder on March 19, the Federation of American Scientists has asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence...to reconsider its refusal to disclose the budget total for the National Intelligence Program for fiscal year 2006."

• What Happens to the Archives of Defunct Newspapers?
  Slate - March 17, 2009
  "In the last quarter of the 20th century, when many cities lost one of their competing newspapers, it was common for the survivor to absorb the assets of the one that went out of business."

THE SCOOP for March 18, 2009

• Assault on Cologne's historical core
  Welt Online - March 6, 2009
  "There are certain words that tend not to engage very much sympathy in a person, and "archive" has traditionally been one of them. It is generally associated with something dried out and perhaps a little dull. Could it be that the collapse of the Cologne city archives building will mark a change in this mentality in Germany?"

• A Call to Legislate Internet Privacy
  New York Times - March 13, 2009
  "While he hasn't written the bill yet, Mr. Boucher said that he, working with Representative Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who is the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, wants to require Web sites to disclose how they collect and use data, and give users the option to opt out of any data collection."

• House Committee Passes Federal Records Bill
  ARMA Washington Policy Brief - March 2009
  "Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH) introduced legislation, H.R. 1387, the Electronic Message Preservation Act, that would require the White House to preserve all electronic communications. On March 10, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee marked up the legislation and passed it by a voice vote."

• House moves to make federal info more accessible
  usatoday - March 17, 2009
  "The legislation, approved by a voice vote, would require the Archivist of the United States to develop standards for the way federal agencies treat non-classified material in order to maximize public access."

• Leahy: Freedom of Information Act office receives funding
  Burlington Free Press (VT) - March 11, 2009
  "A new office to mediate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disputes has received funding necessary to establish its operations, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said today. The omnibus appropriations bill passed by the Senate...includes $1 million to establish the new Office of Government Information Services in the National Archives and Records Administration..."

• Microsoft-led Privacy Group Backs off Legislation
  PC World - March 13, 2009
  "A Microsoft-led group set up three years ago has backed away from its original goal of pushing for comprehensive U.S. privacy legislation."

• Mistrial by iPhone: Juries' Web Research Upends Trials
  New York Times - March 17, 2009
  "It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges."

• New EFF search tool opens up FOIA documents
  Industry Standard - March 16, 2009
  "Want to know what the feds have been up to? Anyone with Internet access can now search through thousands of once-classified documents that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has "has pried loose from secretive government agencies" through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)."

• Security vs. privacy? Reinterpreting the Fourth Amendment
  Ars Technica - March 11, 2009
  "A Yale legal scholar suggests a radical reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, in which "security" replaces "privacy" as the guiding principle."

THE SCOOP for March 11, 2009

• Energy scrutinizes Los Alamos bookkeeping problems
  Government Executive - March 3, 2009
  "Record-keeping problems at the lab came to light after a Feb. 23 memo from Energy's site office manager to the laboratory director criticizing material control and accountability in plutonium operations was leaked last week to Project on Government Oversight."

• Google Health Enables Sharing Health Records
  InformationWeek - March 5, 2009
  "In keeping with its mission to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible, and confound privacy advocates, Google on Wednesday gave Google Health users the ability to share their online medical records."

• HOLD UP!
  AIIM - no date
  "A litigation hold is not a reason for ignoring your records retention schedule for the remainder of your records. Here are 5 steps to keep moving forward."

• Identity Theft Upgrades to "Identity Assumption"
  The Cutting Edge - March 10, 2009
  "The dark and increasingly dangerous world of identity theft is often presented to us as mere personal chaos revolving around fake credit card charges. While this is a valid concern, the emerging dimension of this threat is far more sinister."

• People Search Engines: Slam the Door on Info
  ComputerWorld - March 11, 2009
  "As we slowly put more and more pieces of ourselves online, specialized search engines are making it easier than ever to pull them together into a highly detailed (and potentially invasive) profile of our virtual lives."

• Review could relieve tension over cybersecurity leadership
  NextGov - March 10, 2009
  "The White House's 60-day cybersecurity review will determine which agency will take the lead in protecting federal computer networks, according to industry and think tank officials."

• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
  Wired - February 26, 2009
  "For more than a decade, Carl Malamud of public.resource.org has been angering government bureaucrats by setting government documents free using his online pirate printing press. But now, Malamud is campaigning to be The Man. Or, more accurately, the chief printer for The Man."

• What is the best technology for archiving data?
  Boston Globe - March 9, 2009
  "While it may sound a little primitive, paper and the written word have already stood the test of time quite well. The proof is in the fact that you can easily get and read books that are hundreds of years old. Playing an eight-track tape, on the other hand, is all but impossible now."

THE SCOOP for March 4, 2009

• A-Rod's steroid strikeout a lesson in e-discovery, preserving evidence
  IT Knowledge Exchange - February 12, 2009
  "What do professional baseball and e-discovery have in common? A perfect setup for a joke — and for this story. But I'll focus on crafting the story and leave the punch line to you (take your best shot in the comments)."

• Building 'Virtual USA' one state at a time
  Government Computer News - March 2, 2009
  "Federal and state authorities are collaborating on a project that would allow state and local caches of geospatial data to be interoperable, with the goal of creating a 'Virtual USA' for emergency response purposes."

• Court Considers Zubulake Factors, Denies Defendant's Motion to Shift Cost of OCR Processing
  Electronic Discovery Law - February 26, 2009
  "In this case, following the court's decision that all documents were to be produced electronically in TIFF format with Optical Character Recognition ("OCR"), defendant asserted that the cost of processing the documents should be shifted to the plaintiff."

• Digital files on presidential helicopter found in Iran
  NextGov - March 2, 2009
  "Tiversa Inc., a Pennsylvania company that scans file-sharing networks for government and corporate clients, first discovered the plans for the VH-60N Marine One presidential helicopter on peer-to-peer networks in the fall of 2008, said Keith Tagliaferri, operations director at Tiversa."

• File-sharing networks used to uncover thousands of medical records
  NextGov - February 27, 2009
  "Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems."

• How Enterprise Information Portals and Social Networking are Converging
  eWeek - February 23, 2009
  "The convergence of enterprise information portals and social networking is imminent. Enterprise adaptation rates will increase within the next few years as the new Web-savvy generation joins the work force."

• Law requires health data breach notifications
  FederalComputerWeek - February 27, 2009
  "The recently enacted economic stimulus law includes new requirements for how companies must notify people of breaches to their protected health information."

• Lieberman questions courts on information-sharing law
  FederalComputerWeek - March 2, 2009
  "The federal court system may be charging too much money for public online documents and may not be adequately protecting private information in those documents, according to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)."

• Probing Question: Can we save today's documents for tomorrow?
  PhysOrg - February 12, 2009
  "Even though your grandparents' old photo albums are yellowed and grainy, they're still there for you and your family to enjoy. But will your grandchildren be able to say the same of the digital photo albums you're compiling today?"

• Scientists claim big leap in nanoscale storage
  ComputerWorld - February 19, 2009
  "Nanotechnology researchers say they have achieved a breakthrough that could fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-size surface and might also have implications for displays and solar cells."

• Survey to check attitudes on privacy, services
  FederalComputerWeek - February 19, 2009
  "The General Services Administration wants to know if people want to receive information about the federal government via online services such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a GSA announcement on FedBizOpps.gov."

• White House E-mail Policy Clarification Requested
  ARMA Washington Policy Brief - March 2009
  "House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) sent a letter to the White House calling on the administration to clarify by March 4 its policies related to the preservation and retention of e-mails that fall under the authority of the Presidential Records Act (PRA)."

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