Senator Lieberman has written a letter to the Judicial Conference asking why the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) online system is still charging a “per page” fee, when the goal of putting these records online in the first place was to make them “freely available to the greatest extent possible.” That was seven years ago.

PACER doesn’t seem to have made any progress since then. Apparently the public (still) agrees–PACER is one of the top vote getters at our Show Us the Data project. In addition, the barrier to accessing court records has inspired citizens to try to free the information in PACER.

PACER was instructed to charge access fees “only to the extent necessary,� in contrast to then-existing law allowing the Judicial Conference to prescribe fees that it deemed “reasonable�; and to protect privacy of persons named in court documents. More in-depth access to court records is only available through pricey third parties.

According to Stephen Schultze and Shubham Mukherjee PACER fees amount to almost double the cost of actually running the system, if not more. Governments should be in the business of sharing information in the interest of the people, not making money.

Access to these court documents may not seem like one of the most pressing gaps when it comes to online availability of government information, but these opinions and document often form the basis for our understanding of legislation and law. Congress’ original thinking on PACER was “greater access to judicial information enhances opportunities for the public to become educated about their legal system and to research case-law, and it improves access to the court system.” Currently, limitations of PACER and the fees it charges for access are a barrier to obtaining these records.

We’re glad to see that Senator Lieberman is following up on the requirements from the E-Government Act of 2002, and we hope to see free, publicly accessible court records online soon.

March 9th is the deadline for telling ShowUsTheData.org what unclassified government information you would like to see go online. This includes information, documents or data that you know exists–on paper or in government computers and databases–that would be of value to the public if posted and regularly updated on an agency’s Web site, but for whatever reason remain offline.

If you haven’t visited lately, go take a look, more than 150 documents have been requested and more than 1,100 votes cast. We’re very excited about the participation in this survey; but we want even more! Have you voted? What government information do you want to be able to get online?

Right now, Congressional Research Service reports have received the most votes. The first time we asked for suggestions, CRS reports were the clear winner of the “Most Wanted” title, so we’re excited to see that the public still wants to get these reports directly from the government.

Information about bailout funding is a close second. The public is clearly interested in keeping track of the money the government has given the banks; lucky for us, the stimulus bill has transparency built in at Recovery.gov. Other documents in the top “Most Wanted” category include information about how the Patriot Act is being used and why torture was allowed; an exhaustive list of Congressional votes; and free access to public court records.

It’s not too late to have an impact on the Show Us The Data poll and our report for Sunshine Week, either by submitting a new government document or voting for one already posted on the Web site. Do you know of unclassified federal documents or databases that aren’t freely available to the public online? Let Show Us the Data know today.

Some of the news coverage around the $787 billion stimulus bill has noted that legislators had only had 13 hours to read the final bill and conference report. Setting aside that most of those 13 hours were overnight, there are only 780 minutes in 13 hours, so legislators and their staff literally had one minute to read the final bill for each billion dollars they were about to vote on. Even the most heroic efforts of a legislator and their staff won’t allow them to understand an 1,100 page bill overnight. It’s even scarier that this is normal procedure.

It is usually impossible for lawmakers to read or evaluate legislation in the hours between a bill becoming available and its final consideration; worse, citizens usually have no access to bills under consideration at all. Current rules are supposed to require a waiting period between the time a bill is reported and consideration, but over the past few years both parties have routinely pushed this edict aside. This rule most is often cast aside for very important bills: appropriations bills, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Medicare Modernization Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, various bailout and stimulus packages. All of these were brought to the floor in less than 72 hours after their unveiling. These bills provided for vast increases in spending, a massive expansion of federal programs and tremendous growth in the authority of the executive branch to monitor, detain and spy on American citizens. And no one had time to fully read and analyze any of these bills.

It seems like common sense that legislators should read the bill before they vote on it. It also seems like common sense that legislators should make these bills available to the public, so that we can read the bill and let our legislators know what we think. Isn’t that the point of representative democracy, that we let our representatives know what we think and they use that to help inform their decisions?

Sunlight Foundation has launched a Read The Bill (#readthebill) campaign, and CDT is one of many endorsers. We’re asking Congress to post bills publicly for 72 hours before a vote is taken, so that everyone – Congress, their staff, and the public – has a chance to read the legislation. We want everyone to have an opportunity to consider and debate bills with full knowledge and consideration of the implications of the legislation with considered feedback from the public. You can sign a petition on the site to show your support, too (and Sunlight will add you to their mailing list for future alerts).

How do you say very dangerous in Italian? How about Italian prosecutors filing criminal charges against four Google executives for the content of a video posted by a user. By all accounts, the video – an ugly three minute display featuring teenagers bullying a boy with Down’s syndrome – was quickly removed from the site and Google helped identify the perpetrators. But the prosecutors taking the extreme position that YouTube is legally responsible for all third parties content posted on its site, charged the Google executives with criminal defamation and privacy infringement.

While the United States and Europe may have different legal views about the scope free expression and protection of privacy, both have recognized that importance of protecting so-called intermediaries, ISPs and online platforms from liability for content posted by third parties. That legal protection has been crucial to the health and growth of the Internet. Without it, sites like YouTube would have to review each video before posting and make a legal judgment as to whether each complied with the laws of hundreds of countries. This is an undoable task that would write an end to the open Internet. We already have a medium where platform owners get to pick and chose among content and government gets to punish them for getting it wrong. Its called television.

It’s bad enough that Italian prosecutors are putting Google and every other online content platform at risk with their shenanigans. They are also setting a dangerous precedent, which can only strengthen the hand of repressive regimes that already exert iron-fisted control over the Internet.

This is not the first time a zealous European prosecutor tried this stunt. Germany went after a CompuServe manager for porn posted on the site and of course France charged Yahoo officials for permitting the sale of Nazi paraphernalia. In both cases, cooler heads ultimately prevailed. We can only hope that happens here. Until then, it’s molto pericoloso out there in cyberspace.

CDT joined EFF and Public Knowledge in a legal brief yesterday arguing that data that is fleetingly held in RAM shouldn’t be subject to discovery, the process by which parties to litigation can demand access to records and documents. Sound arcane? Maybe. But the principle is actually pretty simple.

Litigants have to share relevant records with each other. These days, many records are electronic. So in 2006, the rules of civil procedure were amended to state specifically that electronically stored information must be shared as well. That’s all well and good, for electronic data that is truly stored — if you have a word processing document stored on your computer, it should of course be subject to discovery just like a paper document stored in a file cabinet.
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The online advertising industry took a collective deep breath Thursday as the Federal Trade Commission issued its much-anticipated report outlining self-regulatory guidelines for the online behavioral advertising. Although behavioral ad networks already follow their own voluntary guidelines in the Network Advertising Initiative (which was updated just two months ago), we think it’s pretty clear from the report, and from comments from the Commission, that the FTC does not find existing self-regulatory efforts to be sufficient.

As Commissioner Jon Leibowitz noted in his statement endorsing the report, this could be the industry’s “last clear chance to show that self-regulation can – and will – effectively protect consumers’ privacy.�

In her concurring statement, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour noted legislation’s place in a “comprehensive privacy agenda� and expressed doubts about the efficacy of self-regulation. Having a regulatory agency issue self-regulatory guidelines is essentially the last step before regulation comes into play. The question is whether the industry will step up.
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Today, CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org launched Show Us The Data: Most Wanted Federal Government Documents, a website created with lots of help from our friends at Sunlight Labs. CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org are setting out to identify the ten most wanted government documents, reports or data sets that should be on the Web – but are missing because the government hasn’t put them on the Internet.

In the last ten years, the Internet has come a long way- just check out the website for our first Ten Most Wanted survey. The federal government has made great progress in their use of the Internet too, but we know that they still aren’t putting the information that we want online as proactively and as usably as we would like. Last year, we talked about how hard it can be to find government information through search.

We’re hoping that you, as part of the open government community, can help us make a list of the unclassified information that you’d like access to online. We want to know about documents, data sets, databases, and raw information that you can’t find or you can’t use the way you’d like to, and what the government could do to make it easier. The Internet offers an easy way to distribute public information- for free, and in open formats. The data could be used by interested third parties to make incredible mashups and use the information in ways that the government doesn’t.

To bring pressure to bear on the government to make better use of the Internet, CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org are asking for information that would significantly benefit researchers, reporters, communities and individuals- but that isn’t online. Send us your nomination: a report written by a federal agency, maps or data sets created through government research projects, or judicial decisions and court proceedings that are available on paper but not online.

What you can do: Check out Show Us The Data, and vote on your Most Wanted document- or nominate a new one! We’re taking nominations and votes until March 9th, 2009.

Yesterday’s Senate passage of its version of the big economic stimulus bill sets the stage for final negotiations between the House and Senate to come up with a final bill. As is often the case with major packages of legislation, there’s a risk of eleventh-hour additions for which the policy implications have not been clearly thought out.

Case in point: content filtering by ISPs. The Senate’s provisions to stimulate broadband deployment say that recipients of federal assistance should comply with interconnection and nondiscrimination requirements. Senator Feinstein has been pushing hard to add language specifying that ISPs may engage in “reasonable network management” — and here’s the kicker — “such as” efforts to combat illegal activity like “child pornography and copyright infringement.”
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Over the weekend Wikileaks.org released thousands of Congressional Research Reports that have not been on the Internet in the past. It also seems that Wikileaks now has found a source to get all new and updated reports.

For years CDT has run the Open CRS project as a way to provide access to CRS reports. OpenCRS has aggregated the non-classified, non-confidential reports posted by our partners, including the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment, as well as those submitted directly to Open CRS. Through these means, we estimate that Open CRS has been getting about 80% of new reports. Thanks to Wikileaks, which provided Open CRS with a full download of all the reports they collected, the project now houses the most up-to-date and historical record of these reports.

American taxpayers spend nearly $100 million a year to fund CRS, which acts as Congress’ own “think tank.” The reports, however, aren’t made directly available to the public for a variety of arcane and political reasons. This is despite the fact that Congress has a direct pipeline to these reports via an online computer system.

Now that Wikileaks has put these documents up, we see little reason for Congress to keep up its façade that artificially restricts public access to these critically informative reports despite the fact that pay services have had all of these reports available to those with the money for years. Perhaps now Members will move quickly to pass legislation to provide quick and easy access to these reports and bring a halt the ridiculous cloak-and-dagger atmosphere that to-date has surrounded their release.

Digital advertising displays with the ability to collect information about consumers are proliferating in stores, airports and public places. It is time for the companies involved to pay attention to privacy.

The digital signage industry is aggressively pushing for ways to track consumers. By using facial recognition cameras and other devices, the industry seeks to measure viewership and to tailor ad content to consumers’ profiles. Tens of millions of people have already been exposed. But in its eagerness to learn about its audience, the digital signage industry is deploying invasive technologies without adequate privacy protections. Only a few of the companies even have published privacy policies and those that exist are pretty bare-bones. Currently, none of the digital signage trade associations has published privacy policies related to tracking technology.

(What is digital signage? Please see my earlier post, Digital Wallpaper.)

Digital signage companies are tracking consumers in a number of ways. The most common method may be itsy-bitsy cameras hidden in the signs that record the age, race, and gender of passersby. Other companies use Bluetooth or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Some are also using consumers’ mobile phones to trigger ads; the signage system can then deliver coupons to the phones. All of these technologies have the potential to identify individual consumers and gather personal data about them, without giving consumers any choice in the matter.
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