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• News Archive: June 2009

News Archive: June 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 June 24, 2009

• $50K Reward Offered for Missing Clinton Administration Hard Drive
  ARMA Washington Policy Brief - June 2009
  "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of a Western Digital MY BOOK external hard drive (two terabytes) containing copies of backup tapes from the Executive Office of the President of the Clinton administration."

• Congress Mulls Online Privacy Law
  Forbes - June 18, 2009
  "Online giants like Google and Yahoo! like to brag that they allow privacy-conscious users to easily opt out with just a single mouse click from the data collection systems used to target ads at them. But how many people actually take advantage of the option?"

• Court Stiffs Veterans Caught in Privacy Breach
  Wired - June 18, 2009
  "Veterans suffering anxiety and paranoia following the theft of a government hard drive containing the medical histories and Social Security numbers of 198,000 of their brethren cannot recover financial damages, a federal appeals court says."

• Crafting a More Effective Keyword Search
  LAW.COM - June 24, 2009
  "The most admired figure in EDD search today -- the Sultan of Search -- is Jason Baron at the National Archives and Records Administration, and Jason would be the first to admit he has no training in search."

• Defense leaders stress importance of social networking
  NextGov - June 19, 2009
  "The widespread use of social networking technologies by Iranians frustrated with election results shows "it is increasingly difficult for an authoritarian government to maintain control of all the means of communication that are available to its citizens," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters during a Pentagon news briefing on Thursday."

• Don't Let Iran's 'Twitter Revolution' Make You Stupid
  InformationWeek - June 19, 2009
  "In two short years, Twitter has gone from a startup to celebrity plaything. Now, in the case of the election demonstrations in Tehran, it's apparently a serious tool of U.S. foreign policy."

• Government IT Expo: eGov and Open Standards
  Net Developer's Journal - June 19, 2009
  "[The] plan calls for the creation of a single point of access to all public federal information. The idea is to enable the data to be accessed by developers whose applications will open up federal data to the sunlight of millions of citizens by encouraging them to scrutinize how the Recovery Act's dollars will be spent."

• Is Your Company Clueless? A 10-Point Checklist
  AIIM: Electronic Records Management - No Date
  "Having worked for many companies in various industries over my career, I am always surprised when I ask to see a records retention schedule and I get a quizzical look."

• Legislation to Protect Access to Historic Records Introduced
  ARMA Washington Policy Brief - June 2009
  "In an effort to safeguard American historical records and make them more accessible to the public, Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and John McHugh (R-NY) introduced a bipartisan bill in the House that would authorize $50 million annually for preservation activities."

• Millions of immigrant files will go to National Archives
  Wichita Eagle - June 19, 2009
  "The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the National Archives and Records Administration signed an agreement earlier this month that deemed all 53 million A-files "permanent," meaning they cannot be destroyed."

• Privacy: does it actually exist?
  Gerson Lehrman Group - June 4, 2009
  "Being part of a global network, interconnected with each other, that not only provides us with Internet but also with Telephony and other services inevitably causes the risk of information leakage. Privacy related information in particular is very prone to leakage."

• Senate passes bill to withhold torture photos
  Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press - June 18, 2009
  "The Senate bill...included the Open FOIA Act, supported  by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.). Leahy said...that the Open FOIA portion of the bill will 'make certain that when Congress provides for a statutory exemption to FOIA in new legislation, Congress states its intention to do so explicitly and clearly.'"

THE SCOOP for June 18, 2009

• Army Reverses Policy to Allow Troops to Use Social Networking Sites
  FOXNews - June 11, 2009
  "American soldiers can now tweet, send friend requests and share photos and personal news just like the rest of the World Wide Web."

• Best Practices for Information Organization and Access
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "The quality of 'findability' is the ability of a user to find the information they need, regardless of whether he or she has touched it before, knows exactly where it is, or knows in which repository it resides. To manage unstructured content effectively and efficiently, it must be organized. Structure is needed to address the underlying challenge of managing content."

• Can you transform the compliance burden into an asset?
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "The bedrock challenge in complying with corporate reporting requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley and the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is learning what information you need to supply and how technology can help you supply it."

• Finding the Right Information, Right Now
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "When we need information, typically we need it NOW. We don't have time to search through every folder and document. The paper-centric world required only that we know the general location of what we needed; as long as we knew the right file drawer, file cabinet, or file room, it was relatively easy to locate the right document."

• Good Government Group Sues for White House Visitors' Logs
  ABC News - June 16, 2009
  "The good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit today to force the President Obama to share White House visitors logs with the public."

• Green ECM: The Real Deal
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "When it comes to going green, enterprise content management offers real solutions. A lot of other things don't."

• Information Security: Employee Errors Put Data at Risk
  Government Technology - June 8, 2009
  "If you work in IT, recent goings-on in the security realm could be enough to make you throw your arms up in despair and kiss the safety of your data goodbye. Reports make it seem downright hopeless."

• New Impetus for Going Paperless
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "Whether you call it scanning, imaging, capture, or digitization, there's been a sharp uptick in the number of organizations seeking to reduce the amount of paper in their business processes."

• On Edge?
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "Every year, businesses around the world create more than 7.5 billion documents. Many of these documents live 'on the edge'--in laptops, wikis, cell phones, USB drives, instant messages, etc.--floating on the Internet or other hard-to-reach places well out of control. While few of these constitute true business records, many organizations are learning that they can have a huge impact on litigation, regulatory discovery, and privacy breaches."

• Poor E-Mail, Text Manners Could Create Problems
  CIO Insight - June 12, 2009
  "If you didn't think bad communications etiquette could harm you or your organization, just look at what happened when a government coup took place in New York."

• Realize a Rapid Return on Investment by Eliminating "Edge Content"
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "Despite the effectiveness of content/document/records management solutions, only five to 10 percent of unstructured files are actually stored in managed repositories. The remainder represents a huge portion of your organization's knowledge."

• Sensitive information protection remains tough
  Federal Computer Week - June 15, 2009
  "The government's ability to share sensitive but unclassified information data securely has become central to coordinating counterterrorism efforts, in part because many local officials don't have the security clearances needed to make use of classified information."

• U.S. Court Weighs E-mail Privacy, Again
  Information Week - June 12, 2009
  "In a replay of a court decision from two years ago, civil liberties groups are again trying to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that e-mail messages deserve the same privacy protection as telephone calls."

THE SCOOP for June 10, 2009

• CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed
  Washington Post - June 10, 2009
  "The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts."

• Deep Packet Inspection Here to Stay, Say Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference Experts
  BroadbandCensus.COM - June 4, 2009
  "The problems with so-called "deep packet inspection" are too big to ignore, a panel of broadband experts said on the third and final day of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference at George Washington University here."

• Electronic Health Records and Privacy Law
  LAW.COM - June 9, 2009
  "Health information of a particularly sensitive nature, such as records concerning an individual's treatment for mental illness, drug addiction or alcohol abuse, creates uniquely complicated legal and practical problems with respect to interoperable EHR technology."

• Hidden Camera Case Turns on Expectation of Privacy in Workplace
  LAW.COM - June 5, 2009
  "Does the mere attempt to videotape an individual qualify as an invasion of privacy or must there be an actual intrusion -- such as the taping of an innocent person changing clothes -- for liability to come into play?"

• House Dems Want Hearings On Detainee Photos Bill
  Huffington Post - June 9, 2009
  "Antiwar Democrats who oppose the IMF funding can compromise on that issue, Frank said, but Lieberman-Graham, which would supersede the Freedom of Information Act, is different."

• Obama Administration Spreading Message Via Web 2.0
  InformationWeek - June 4, 2009
  "Like the White House, a number of federal agencies have found that it is most effective to get information to the public by using the tools that they use, and not just official lines of communication on official Web sites."

• Records management roadblocks and Web 2.0 initiatives
  Federal News Radio - June 3, 2009
  "'These are the records, the artifacts of the business decisions and of the policies . . . of our time and so it was a bit of a call to action that some of our customers asked us to look into. What are the implications, if I am a records manager, to get to know what's going on in this new world of electronic content?'"

• Twitter: Where the Elite Mete Neat Tweets
  Digital Trends - June 5, 2009
  "A Harvard study finds that an elite 10 percent of Twitter users create 90 percent of all tweets...and the median number of tweets over the lifetime of a Twitter account is just one."

• Virtualization Delivers on Health Records Project
  CIO Insight - June 8, 2009
  "Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center combines a big virtualization project with a critical electronic records rollout.

• When does disaster recovery kick into action?
  IT World - June 8, 2009
  "A study by Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal earlier this year asked how often business continuity plans are actually invoked, and got some surprising results."
  

THE SCOOP for June 3, 2009

• E-discovery policy goes beyond ordinary storage
  IT World - June 2, 2009
  "If your backup volumes and archives are searchable, are they ready for e-discovery? Not necessarily. E-discovery is a highly specialized field that transcends the technology itself, and is guided by...protocols and extra precautions. The collection phase of e-discovery...calls for an e-discovery policy to be created and adhered to ahead of time."

• EPA adds Web 2.0 to Regulations.gov
  Federal News Radio - May 29, 2009
  "The agency wants public feedback to help shape on-going updates of Regulations.gov, explore the impact of emerging Internet technologies on the rulemaking process, foster government and citizen collaboration and promote government transparency and openness."

• Small-town thinking leads to a healthcare privacy smashup
  BetaNews - May 27, 2009
  "I swear I don't mean for Lockdown to turn into the 'What The Hell Are They Thinking?' weekly security rant, but as that legendary site used to say, a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun. This week, we travel to Yakima, Washington, which on further reflection may turn out to have been our first mistake."

• Essential Records Could Mean Life or Death for First Responders
  Government Technology - June 1, 2009
  "Whether an emergency involves a single structure or regionwide destruction, first responders depend on critical records to facilitate their response. Maps, building plans, infrastructure and utilities plans may be needed to direct the response and determine the safety of affected structures."

• Government Wrestles With Social Media Records Retention Policies
  InformationWeek - May 28, 2009
  "At the National Archives and Records Administration's annual conference Thursday, one keynote speaker asked the crowd of several hundred how many of the archivists in attendance were sold on the use of social media. Only a smattering raised their hands."

• National Cyber-Security Report Is a Call to Action
  Government Technology - May 29, 2009
  "A report released Friday by the White House says the nation must get serious and coordinate action to secure the government's vulnerable computer infrastructure, and calls upon state, local and tribal governments to elevate cyber-security as an issue."

• The Obama Administration's Silence on Privacy
  New York Times - June 2, 2009
  "Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor who served on the Obama transition team, offered one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy. There is a split...between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world."

• Senate panel weighs Privacy Act update
  NextGov - May 28, 2009
  "The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is exploring potential updates to the 35-year-old Privacy Act and could advance legislation this Congress, a top panel aide said today."

• Small-town thinking leads to a healthcare privacy smashup
  BetaNews - May 27, 2009
  "I swear I don't mean for Lockdown to turn into the 'What The Hell Are They Thinking?' weekly security rant, but as that legendary site used to say, a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun. This week, we travel to Yakima, Washington, which on further reflection may turn out to have been our first mistake."

• Twitter At The Vanishing Point
  InformationWeek - June 1, 2009
  "[O]f all the misfortunes to have befallen the chirping social network, the much-bandied stat that Twitter tweeters throw in the towel quickly might be the worst. As cell phone companies will attest, you can only achieve so much growth when your customer base is churning out from under your feet."

• Why More Russian Archives are Likely to Close
  moldova.org - June 3, 2009
  "Decisions regarding the declassification of archived materials belonging to Soviet institutions that have continued to exist are made by those institutions' own officials, who often find reasons not to release information."

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