Kentucky State Police appeal sex offender database decision

The Kentucky State Police have gone to court to oppose giving us access to their sex offender database. You will recall the Kentucky Attorney General ruled in April that the KSP had violated the Kentucky Open Records Act by denying us the records.

A brief story in the CJ yesterday explains:

... the state police say the records are not kept in the format the newspaper has requested and they should not have to generate the records.

And, the state police argue that the records had been provided before “one time in an effort to assist” with a story. The state police determined “it was not possible to continue extracting data from the registry to provide these records to the public.”

The state police have also argued that the records are available already on their Web site, which The Courier-Journal could provide a link to.

The KSP's appeal in Franklin Circuit Court is embedded below.

KSP sex offender appeal - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: KSP sex offender appeal

Free Government Information

... was founded by librarians "to raise public awareness of the importance of government information and create a community with various stakeholders to facilitate an open and critical dialogue":

We believe that it is important to garner support for government information not just within our own community of federal depository libraries but with those organizations and citizens that actually need to know about the activities of our government in order to participate fully in the democratic process. This includes non-profit organizations, government watchdogs, academics and researchers, journalists, the business community, and individual citizens. By creating this nexus, we hope to facilitate collaboration among the various stakeholders and participate in the design of a truly robust system for the digital age where government information is freely accessible, fully functional and usable, and preserved in a distributed system of libraries.

Their blog is here.

Attorney General: Ky State Police violated open records law when it denied CJ sex offender database

The Kentucky Attorney General ruled April 17 that the Kentucky State Police violated the state open records law when it refused to give us an updated version of its sex offender database. Here's a copy of the decision, in Microsoft Word format, which the Attorney General's office just put online. And if you are reading this on the Depth Reporting site itself or have a feed reader that handles embedded objects, below is a Scribd version. Scribd is a much more elegant way to share Word, PDF and other documents than posting links to the originals.

The Attorney General's decision misspelled my name, but hey, you can't have everything. The decision itself was entirely in our favor.

Read this doc on Scribd: Kentucky sex offender database decision

"Agencies run more than a decade late on Freedom of Information requests"

So reports The Hill:

The Energy Department has the tardiest public record request, according to a review by The Hill of annual FOIA reports published by Cabinet-level agencies for the last fiscal year. It still has not answered one request from Dec. 6, 1991, although other departments are not far behind.

The Defense Department has a request pending from May 5, 1992, while the Treasury Department has not answered a request from March 8, 1993.

(via Michael Ravnitzky on FOI-L)

Open Government Data

Every journalist should read the Open Government Data Principles at the Open Government Data wiki. The principles where developed at a meeting of 30 open government advocates in October:

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete

All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary

Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely

Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible

Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable

Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory

Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary

Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free

Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

And if that interests you, you should sign up for the Open Government mailing list. Its members include Carl Malamud, whose most recent project is putting all federal court documents online, and Aaron Swartz, who founded theinfo.org, a Web site devoted to dealing with large data sets. theinfo, mentioned here previously, also has a series of mailing lists, for getting, processing and viewing corpulent data.

Webupon: "10 Extremely Useful Websites to Stop Big Brother From Snooping on You"

 From the intro:

If you are tired of receiving junk mail, spam and annoying telemarketing phone calls, then this list is for you. If you desire to take steps to stop the snooping from the government, hackers and marketing agencies, then this list will show you the way to privacy freedom.

GovernmentDocs.org: A FOIA'd document database

As of this writing this site hasn't even officially launched, but I love the concept:

The goal of the database is to create a central repository of government documents, promoting greater transparency into the inner-workings of our government.

Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:

• Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.

• A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.

• Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.

• Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.

• The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations’ documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.

The participating organizations are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation.

Points to remember when making a FOIA request

... from LLRX.com's FOIA Facts, including: 

When making requests provide as much information about the topic as possible. If you know facts about the subject of your request, you should provide them to the FOIA Office. FOIA people often don’t know very much, if anything, about the subject of the requests to their agencies. If you provide as much information about the subject of your request it will expedite the processing of your request as the search for responsive documents will be that much easier. This is true for almost all agencies, even those that use computerized databases. A computerized database is only as good as the search terms provided to it.

WikiFOIA

One of WikiFOIA's goals is "to build a comprehensive and collaborative How To Guide to provide very practical information about open records requests at the state and local level."

Features include:

• A primer for novices
• Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week
• Interviews with Sunshine Activists
• Hot button issues

There's a page for each state, which include links to open records laws, contacts, stories about local freedom of information battles, and blogs, web sites and other state resources related to open records. Here's Kentucky's page, and the page for Indiana. If you find any of the information inadequate, it's your fault, because you can contribute, and you're encouraged to adopt your state.

The founder, Leslie Graves, who goes by the online name "Maverick," works for a Wisconsin non-profit called the Lucy Burns Institute.

How to Publish Linked Data on the Web

... explained here.

I learned about this page at this site, which tracks news about the Open Data movement:

Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

Lots of data breaches, little theft

The GAO reports (PDF) that "Data Breaches Are Frequent, but Evidence of Resulting Identity Theft is Limited":

The extent to which data breaches have resulted in identity theft is not well known, largely because of the difficulty of determining the source of the data used to commit identity theft. However, available data and interviews with researchers, law enforcement officials, and industry representatives indicated that most breaches have not resulted in detected incidents of identity theft, particularly the unauthorized creation of new accounts. For example, in reviewing the 24 largest breaches reported in the media from January 2000 through June 2005, GAO found that 3 included evidence of resulting fraud on existing accounts and 1 included evidence of unauthorized creation of new accounts. For 18 of the breaches, no clear evidence had been uncovered linking them to identity theft; and for the remaining 2, there was not sufficient information to make a determination.

The dangers of data reuse

Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about the dangers of "data reuse":

When we think about our personal data, what bothers us most is generally not the initial collection and use, but the secondary uses. I personally appreciate it when Amazon.com suggests books that might interest me, based on books I have already bought. I like it that my airline knows what type of seat and meal I prefer, and my hotel chain keeps records of my room preferences. I don't mind that my automatic road-toll collection tag is tied to my credit card, and that I get billed automatically. I even like the detailed summary of my purchases that my credit card company sends me at the end of every year. What I don't want, though, is any of these companies selling that data to brokers, or for law enforcement to be allowed to paw through those records without a warrant.

There are two bothersome issues about data reuse. First, we lose control of our data. In all of the examples above, there is an implied agreement between the data collector and me: It gets the data in order to provide me with some sort of service. Once the data collector sells it to a broker, though, it's out of my hands. It might show up on some telemarketer's screen, or in a detailed report to a potential employer, or as part of a data-mining system to evaluate my personal terrorism risk. It becomes part of my data shadow, which always follows me around but I can never see.

And since I'm still in the mood for sharing my vacation podcast diet, you should know that a 2004 recording of Schneier discussing his book "Beyond Fear" is one of the most listened to podcast at IT Conversations. The great thing about Schneier, as the title of his book suggests, is that he is not a fear monger. That's in contrast to most so-called security experts, who have a vested interest in exaggerrating threats.

Citizen Watchdog column

Jennifer LaFleur, a computer-assisted reporting expert at the Dallas Morning News, is writing a "Citizen Watchdog" column. She "writes about open records so you can use government information to improve your life." A recent column was on "Do-it-yourself background checks."

Open record adultery?

Mark Hebert of Louisville's WHAS11 reports on a Kentucky man locked in an open records battle with state lawyers over his wife's email:

Steve Malmer suspected his wife was fooling around with a co-worker at the Kentucky State Justice Cabinet.

His wife basically dared Malmer to go get her work e-mails to the suspected lover. So Malmer tried. Now the Justice Cabinet is suing Steve Malmer, trying to keep him from getting his wife's state government e-mails under the Kentucky Open Records Act, saying it could impact every state workers personal e-mail.

Prisoners and electronic records

The FOIA blog reports that the federal Bureau of Prisons must release records to an inmate in electronic format, even if he lacks the means to read them electronically.

Scrubbing online reputations

A company wants to profit by scrubbing your online reputation, Wired reports:

The mistakes you make on the internet can live forever -- unless you hire somebody to clean up after you.

A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender's modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

The company produces monthly reports on its clients' online identities for a cost of $10 to $16 per month, depending on the length of the contract. The client can request the removal of any material on the report for a charge of $30 per instance.

Is metadata a public record?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian explores how metadata has become a public records issue there:

Metadata entered the realm of public discussion in San Francisco after citizens started making requests of electronic documents with a specific plea for metadata. Activists Allen Grossman and Kimo Crossman wanted copies of, ironically enough, the city's Sunshine Ordinance, in its original Microsoft Word format. Grossman and Crossman wanted to use the advantages of technology to follow the evolving amendments the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force members were considering for the city's public records law. These "tracked changes" are a common function in Word, and are, technically, metadata.

Explaining FOIA to bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the Freedom of Information Act to bloggers, in the hope they will put it to good use.

Lawsuit over FBI's "Investigative Data Warehouse"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing to learn more about an FBI database it says contains "hundreds of millions of entries of personal information":

According to the FBI, the IDW was developed to collect a wide swath of personal information -- like "photographs, biographical information, physical location information, and financial data" -- for use in anti-terrorism investigations. The FBI said earlier this year that there were over 560 million items in the IDW, and that nearly 12,000 law enforcement agents had access to the information. EFF filed its suit after the FBI failed to respond to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records disclosing the criteria for inclusion in the database and the current privacy policy protecting this sensitive information, among other critical issues.

The FBI has failed to file a public notice describing the database and the criteria for including personal information, as required by the Privacy Act of 1974.

Those Privacy Act notices are published in the Federal Register, by the way, and are a great way to learn about federal government databases and what's in them. Here, for example, is a notice published yesterday about the Comptroller of the Currency's "Consumer Complaint and Inquiry Information System."