Confessions of a Mad Librarian

Sunshine Week
Government Secrecy webcast

Panel I: The Secret Executive - What can Congress & the Public Do?
Moderator - Patrice McDermott
Panelists:
Ann Beeson, Mickey Edwards and John Podesta

How does separation and balance of powers help ensure access to information?
JP: Genius of the constitution is the checks and balances; Congress has the right to seek information from the Executive Branch (EB) regarding its activities; Congress has let down on its ability to seek information
ME: Congress is not given rights in the Constitution, but responsibilities and burdens, one of which is oversight over Exec Branch - one way, which Congress hasn't done well, is oversight hearings; Congressional subpeonas are another way to open up the workings of the Exec Branch
AB: Courts have a vital role in enforcing accountability and hold the Exec Branch responsible when it doesn't act openly; courts also protect/ensure that their own proceedings are open

PM: Nearly 3/4s of Americans believe that the federal govt is very secretive - what should be done?
JP: Openness is integral to public trust in govt - Americans has to get information on what is being down and how/why decisions are made
AB: In the last 7 years, it's been a very mixed bag for the courts stepping up to perform its role as a check on govt secrecy
Good: courts have led to release/disclosure of thousands of pages of documents
Bad: courts have been seduced by "the secrecy trump" - state secrets doctrine, national security
Ex.: Patriot Act request on Library Connection: gag orders
Khaled El-Masri case - ACLU brought his case to court; govt argued national security to dismiss - won dismissal
ME: Congress has a tendency to pass the buck, especially in oversight
Congress has done a poor job of vetting/affirming federal judicial nominees
Constitution gives courts authority over "cases & controversies" - courts have too narrowly defined controversies and tossing out important suits over lack of standing

PM: Unitary Executive theory - why has Congress failed to assert its role against the exec?
ME: War does not expand the president's power unless Congress stays silent/does nothing - problem, war tends to chill congressional dissent; also, partisan loyalty has become pre-eminent
JP: More of a willingness in the past to cross party lines to provide oversight or challenge over-reaching of authority, even though when Congress is controlled by the same party as the Prez, Cong. tends to go easier on the EB
There are secrets worth protecting - but the secret trump has been used as a political weapon against Congress to prevent them from challenging Presidential actions

Q&A
What can we do to keep the next president's feet to the fire?
ME: Members of Congress of either party must take the oath of office seriously - Congress is a equal, independent and separate branch of govt
Acquiescence must be challenged by citizens

Signing statements?
AB: signing statements should have no weight
If there is one thing the parties should be able to come together on, it's the issue of govt accountability; a bipartisan accountability commission needs to be convened to re-address oversight of national security
JP: signing statements can be useful for the president to explain what they see as what the law means or highlight ambiguities; current admin has misused signing statements to ignore laws
ME: signing statements have no weight - goes against constitutional powers given to Presidency

Q&A: "FOIA is like using a rusty bucket to drain a spring-fed lake"
Congress is also making things secret
JP: Independent review of documents are important in promoting disclosure; classification and de-classification protocols need to be re-addressed in ways that promote disclosure
ME: Two issues - keeping things from the public and keeping things from the public's reps;

How do we stop the problem of White House destroy electronic records/emails
JP: Presidential Records Act - problem: no private right of action to prevent EB from destroying records; Congress needs to revise act

Where is the sense of urgency on this issue? Where is the outrage? Where are the pressure points?
AB: There is nothing more important than to figure out how to build a coalition devoted to issues of transparency and openness; we need to convince a range of other activists that these issues are relevant to their main issues
ME: We're dealing with a very disengaged public; we can't count on the general public at the point -- it's going to take activists to continue and build on the work
JP: Media consolidation and media groups don't seem to care as much about freedom of information; we need to challenge media to do a better job on this

Sean Moulton (Dir. of Fed Info - OMBWatch)
21st Century Right to Know Project
Long term goal - develop recommendations to change the underlying policies for accessible government information
Collaborative approach
To participate: contact Sean @ OMBWatch

Panel II: Citizen Self-Help - Finding the Information You Need
Moderator - Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation - effort to use tech/Internet/web2.0 for open up govt - is scraping and recontextualizing information from other websites with public info + making it feedable/findable)
Panelists
Daniel X. O'Neil (EveryBlock)
David Moore (OpenCongress.org)
Sean Moulton (FedSpending.org)
Sheila Krumholz (OpenSecrets.org)

Q&A
If fed, state and muni govt was transparent enough, would it put you all out of a job
DO: Yes, and that's a good thing; actually, just getting the data is the start of the process
DM: No ... people want a mix of details and the big picture; there should be a lot of different interfaces to help people find what they want in the form they want
SK: No ... a lot of room to add, mix and re-present info
SM: If govt became more transparent, it would make our jobs easier, and it would allow for more innovation

How do we engage the young population with these tools?
DO: We're interested in people in general
DM: OpenCongress.org has a variety of republishing tools that aid with dissemination; when the site added socialnetworking features, site popularity went up
SK: We've seen major upticks in hits during election days, after scandals have broken, etc ...
SM: FedSpending.org has gotten 6 million search hits;

Are there plans to apply any of your services as part of school curricula?
SK: Close relationship w/ journalism schools; need for more integrated approach

Comment - set up alerts for people to
How can we create state-based websites to make government info available?
DM: OpenCongress.org is open source - the source code can be taken and used by states, like OpenMass (?)
SM: States are starting to mirror federal govt efforts to release spending info

Challenges?
SM: Biggest challenge is avoiding information overload

What would you change?
SK: Gov needs to embrace info disclosure; we are continually hamstrung by delays in releasing data

DM: LoC needs to adopt open data policies; Open House project; Change Congress

DO: OpenBlock going to open source; biggest challenge - lack of standards, lack of acceptance that this is our data

Local Panel!

Marcia Hoffman - EFF
Carl Malamud - public.resource.org
Brewster Kahle - Internet Archive

CM: I work in the bread and butter area of access to gov data/info; courts are the most closed branch of govt, ironically
It currently costs $1 million to get one complete copy of federal law
Has gotten all of F.1 online
We work on access, not secrecy/closed vs open systems - making material available to the public ... and the public does care and does have a stake in these matters

MH: specializes in FOIA requests, getting data out of the govt regarding national security/sensitive issues
Currently working on FOIA case regarding national security letters
NSLs were around prior to the PATRIOT Act, but the Act widened the scope of persons who could be objects of a NSL and lowered the standard needed to procure one
2005 - Congress revisited NSL provision, added some strictures and directed Inspector General to investigate how NSLs were used - IG report came out finding systematic abuse of NSL
EFF filed FOIA request to FBI to get underlying data - eventually sued to get the data

BK: The Hoover Boys are back - what's going on out there is stuff we thought we left behind
The best strategy - don't keep stuff - don't keep IP addresses in logs, etc.
As you're starting to make digital services available - be careful of what information you keep on usage ...
Work really hard to protect users' privacy
Libraries are/can be a $12 billion industry ... we need to use our power and our funding
What the Archive is trying to do - make all information universally available
Let's build a digital library that's by us, for us - or we'll end up buy digital library services that aren't by us and for someone else ...
There's a vacuum that traditional organizations have left (where's ALA, ACLU, etc.?)
IA - 501(c)(3)
35 people at IA as programmers and the like
100(?)-500(?) people scanning books at 10 centers
Public snapshot of the web every 2 months
Archive-IT - subscription service for libraries to build targeted web collection: $10K a year
$0.10 a page to scan a book; 1K books a day
Project to digitize gov docs
Bulk access to gov docs is very important - only the non-profits tend to allow bulk access (and even some nons balk at bulk)
Problem with Google project: Google has put public domain material under contractually restricted access in perpetuity
Having monopolies in whole domains of knowledge/printing could really be disastrous
Public access vs. public/private partnerships
Free, bulk access needs to be built into the contracts that govt. goes into with industry - if such Ks are entered into at all
Keep the public domain public as it goes digital
Gov thinks that because there is commercial end-user value, it shouldn't have to pay for digitizing
IA examples: LoC, NASA (will launch July 2008), NARA
IA starting to digitize and loan out-of-copyright and out-of-print materials
Many libraries, many publishers, many search engines

What to do:
10 cents not that much
Raise a stink ... make these materials publicly available
Trying to put a user interface on what is already available
Support the new orgs that are trying to help libraries
EFF, Public Knowledge, Internet Archive

And just for fun:
Brewster, re Google on requests for open bulk access to Google's digitized books: "Screw you, fuck you, we're great, we're Google ..."
Carl: "They don't say that to me!"