Archive for the 'Open Records' Category
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
The head of the Democratic Party said Wednesday that the best way to get presidential candidates to talk frankly about issues is to lock out the media. Dean said. “If you want to hear the truth from them, you have to exclude the press.”
This is an existential statement. Does it matter if a […]
Posted in Open Records, Government Corruption, Government Control of Information | No Comments »
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chavez, has taken over the the nation’s oldest private television network, Radio Caracas Television.
A state run television station will replace RCT.
Government control of the organs of information distribution is a symptom of the command and control society that Venezuela appears to approach. A government that cannot tolerate criticism is a government […]
Posted in Open Records, Government Corruption, Government Control of Information | No Comments »
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
Virginia Tech college student, Cho Seung-Hui had been judged mentally ill and a danger to himself and others yet his parents didn’t know. Virginia Tech was prevented from telling them by FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
FERPA was one of a series of “privacy” laws passed following Supreme Court Justice William […]
Posted in Open Records, Government Corruption, Crime, Education, Health & Medical | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, had an apparently troubled past that was kept secret in the interest of his privacy. Whether or not disclosure of his troubled past might have prevented some or all of the 32 deaths is an unknowable question. The answer would seem to be that it might have. […]
Posted in Open Records, Crime, Education, Government Control of Information | No Comments »
Thursday, April 12th, 2007
The oldest reported Freedom of Information Act request in the federal government resides at the Justice Department and is 18 years old — or, as the National Security Archive, a research group that tracks these things, likes to say, “old enough to enlist in the Army and go to Iraq.” So perhaps it should be […]
Posted in Open Records, Government Control of Information | No Comments »
Friday, April 6th, 2007
Giovanni Mola, 38, who claimed to have had 200 lovers, refused to wear condoms after starting a relationship with the woman in Edinburgh in 2003. His lover is now infected.
We have argued for several years that the AIDS epidemic can be brought to a rapid halt by publicizing the names of those infected with […]
Posted in Open Records, Sex Offenders, Personal Behavior, Health & Medical | No Comments »
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
According to Internet guru, John Gilmore, “The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”
The technologies that provide anonymity to the paedophile and the terrorist also protect the political dissident and the whistle-blower. In that sense, Internet open records is analogous to free speech. In order to be certain of hearing the […]
Posted in Open Records | No Comments »
Friday, March 30th, 2007
Sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich, the secret Nazi archive with millions of files on concentration camps and their victims is still being kept secret.
Two benefits of the open records process are:
- Changing human behavior and
- Building community trust.
Embarrassment and shame very effectively change individual’s behavior. The Nazi archives […]
Posted in Open Records, Government Corruption | No Comments »
Friday, March 30th, 2007
Kai Chen wants to establish a free speech corner in a city park in Alhambra, California, even though last month he demanded that a piece of art in a City Hall exhibit be taken down.
Societies that support free speech and open records must understanding that sometimes the speech is hurtful and sometimes the records embarrassing. […]
Posted in Open Records | No Comments »
Saturday, March 24th, 2007
A federal judge has ruled that The Child Online Protection Act is unconstitional.
Open Records Project activism against sex offenders dates nearly to the dawn of the Internet. However, trying to write a law limiting Internet publishing in any way is extremely difficult to do:
- In the United States, any such law must not violate […]
Posted in Open Records, Sex Offenders, Personal Behavior | No Comments »