Obama Relaxes Presidential Secrecy

Check out the story here on American Libraries.

More War? Help the ACLU Stop Mukasey

http://action.aclu.org/mukasey
Attorney General Mukasey wants Congress to issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe -including the US- a "battlefield." Under the proposal, the current or next president could declare anyone an enemy combatant and lock them up indefinitely without a trial. Can you tell Congress they should pass over this dangerous plan? Click here. Thank you.

Shameless plug and kudos

For those interested in investigating government information further, one of your greatest resources is hosted by the Government Publications Library at University of Colorado at Boulder (full disclosure: I work for CU Boulder's Libraries).

Not only have the librarians and staff of CU's Gov Pubs department produced an excellent blog on all matters of government information, found here: http://cubgovpubs.blogspot.com/

The blog includes weekly updates of Congressional Research Service reports released (where many of us find out about the Executive Branch's misadventures), GAO releases, and information about how to research topics in the news. It is one of the most frequently linked blogs in the Government Publications world.

On top of that, a few weeks ago, ResourceShelf a blog where "dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information" highlighted the Gov Pubs subject guides as well:

Resource of the Week: Subject Guides from the UC-Boulder Government Publications Library
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

If you’re one of our regular readers, you already know how fond we are of government documents. So you can imagine how our virtual pulse quickened when we encountered this large and beautiful collection of government-oriented subject guides covering everything from Acronyms to Worldwide Demographic Information.

Mixed in with the actual guides are links to such key resources as The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and earthquake/seismic info from the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes, when you expect a direct link to a resource, you get a nice surprise. For example, click on the link for the Government Accountability Office, and you are taken to a page that explains what it is, what it does, and how to use it, including integration with the local OPAC.

The subject guides themselves comprise collections of links to agencies, databases, reports and other items, with brief annotations. There are some unusual collections here, including:
+ Ask an Expert!, including links to “Ask an Expert” pages at many different agencies, including the Census Bureau, the National Park Service, and NASA. This unusual aggregation is a clever idea.
+ Kids Pages from various agencies (including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Who knew?)
+ Declassified Documents, from the U.S. and other countries.
+ Statistical Information by State
+ Technical Reports — a nice compendium, which also includes links to subscription databases accessible to the university community.

Just cruising through some of these guides, we reacquainted ourselves with valuable resources that we haven’t visited for awhile. For example, in the Charities guide, we found a link to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, which we’d quite forgotten about. And the Religion Statistics guide is an excellent compendium of sites we know about and use regularly — e.g., Adherents.com — and The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, which we think is new to us. (Look at this collection of “in-depth profiles of individual religious centers,” which can be sorted by state or by religious tradition.)

Be aware that not every link in every subject guide is to an official government agency. But research institutions, think tanks, etc., also provide valuable information, and we’re glad to see that they were included as well.

And don’t leave this site without checking out the ginormous database of library-created research and subject guides and tutorials. Says here that the three “most request[ed] guides” are:
+ History Course Web Pages
+ Aerial Photography and Satellite Imagery
+ Religious Studies Subject Guide

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FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge

Gag Order Lifted on Internet Archive, Allowing Founder to Speak Out for First Time

An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails

I'm surprised there isn't more buzz on the net about this:

A federal magistrate judge on Thursday chastised the Bush administration for failing to fully answer questions related to a long-running dispute over missing White House emails.

Story at ars technica:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/bush-lost-e-mails.ars

Feds Searching Laptops @ US Borders

Yahoo Tech is running a story about virtual rummaging at the US border. The scoop's here.

FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity

I found this one on News.com:

WASHINGTON--The FBI on Wednesday called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for "illegal activity."

The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad "omnibus" authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well.

The surveillance should include all Internet traffic, Mueller said, "whether it be .mil, .gov, .com--whichever network you're talking about." (See the transcript of the hearing.)

The rest of the story is here:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9926899-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20