Xcerion has continued to work toward the general release of its XML-based "Cloud OS," a service based on Xcerion XML Internet Operating System/3 (XIOS/3). The announcement of an official name for the service brings the company a step close to that goal; it also certainly reassures investors like Lou Perazzoli, one of the core architects of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows NT, and Terry Drayton, founder of HomeGrocer.com, that Xcerion's technology is almost ready for prime time.
Icloud relies on an XML virtual machine for local (and offline) operation. It thus combines the advantages of remote computing -- a central point for software distribution, storage, and updates -- with the advantages of local computing -- execution speed and user control without a bandwidth bottleneck.
Icloud offers an intriguing technology that Xcerion is calling "gesture-based computing." Jonas Thornholm, CFO of Xcerion, believes it may be the service's "killer app." Gesture-based computing is essentially real-time content sharing. It allows users to drag and drop documents from their computer to a friend's computer in real time, as if they two machines were dual monitors powered by a single machine.
Another point of differentiation between Icloud and other WebTop systems is the breadth of Xcerion's ambitions: It's aiming not just to move the desktop into the Internet "cloud" but also to reinvent the economics of software development. Icloud developers can look forward to an Internet-based marketplace for their Web applications that includes monetization technology. They will be able to offer free, ad-supported, or fee-based software with minimal hassle.
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January 16, 2009 (Computerworld)
Microsoft Corp. confirmed today that European Union regulators have formally accused the company of breaking antitrust laws by including the company's Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system. "Yesterday, Microsoft received a Statement of Objections from the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission," the company said in a statement on Friday. "The Statement of Objections expresses the Commission's preliminary view that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows since 1996 has violated European competition law." According to Microsoft, the EU claimed that "other browsers are foreclosed from competing because Windows includes Internet Explorer."
ZDNet Australia on Tuesday released updated browser speeds, as measured by the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript test, and the results should give pause to proprietary-browser makers Microsoft and Opera Software:
Every open-source browser completely obliterated the proprietary browsers in terms of performance, and by a huge margin.
The test compared Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1, Opera 10.00 Alpha, Firefox 3.1b1, Chrome 2.0.158.0, and the WebKit r40220 developer project included in Chrome and Apple's Safari.
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (along with WebKit) left the proprietary competition in the dust:
We just released the beta version of Adobe AIR for Linux on Adobe Labs!
This Labs release of AIR has all features implemented for Linux, except support for DRM and badge installations. Major new features include support for system tray icons, keyboard shortcuts, localization, internationalized input (IME support), filetype registration, SWF and PDF in HTML, multi-monitor support, fullscreen mode, encrypted local storage, support for V4L2 cameras and printing.
The list of supported distributions has also been updated to:
1. Ubuntu 7.10
2. Fedora 8
3. OpenSuSE 10.3
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has
published the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" as a
Proposed Recommendation, and published updated Working Drafts of
"Understanding WCAG 2.0," "Techniques for WCAG 2.0," and How to
Meet WCAG 2.0. WCAG defines how to make Web sites, Web applications,
and other Web content accessible to people with disabilities.
Comments are welcome through 2 December 2008. Read the announcement,
Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents, and about the Web Accessibility
Initiative.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-WCAG20-20081103/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20081103/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-WCAG20-TECHS-20081103/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2008OctDec/0091
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag20.php
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Symphony isn't based on Lotus 1-2-3 and AmiPro (WordPro). It's originally based on OpenOffice 1.1.4. And has since been updated by Sun's StarOffice group to OpenOffice 2 something.
The history here is that IBM ripped off the OpenOffice 1.1.4 code base when it was still under the dual SSSL-LGPL license. Here it languished as IBM "WorkPlace", finally to be released as Lotus Symphony.
Response to ZDNet article about Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice. Dana gets it terribly wrong, claiming that Lotus Symphony is "open Source". I respond by setting the record straight. Couldn't help myself though. I dove into the whole "rip out and replace", government mandates, ODF vs. OOXML thing. ending of course with the transition from client/server to client/Web-Stack/server and the future of the Web.
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The history of ECMAScript since its beginnings in November 1996 shows that when Microsoft was behind in the market (against Netscape in 1996-1997), it moved aggressively in the standards body to evolve standards starting with ES1 through ES3. Once Microsoft dominated the market, the last edition of the standard was left to rot -- ES3 was finished in 1999 -- and even easy-to-fix standards conformance bugs in IE JScript went unfixed for eight years (so three years to go from Edition 1 to 3, then over eight to approach Edition 4). Now that the proposed 4th edition looks like a competitive threat, the world suddenly hears in detail about all those bugs, spun as differences afflicting "JavaScript" that should inform a new standard.
In my opinion the notion that we need to add features so that ajax programming would be easier is plain wrong. ajax is a hack and also the notion of a webapp is a hack. the web was created in a document centric view. All w3c standards are also based on the same document notion. The heart of the web, the HTTP protocol is designed to support a web of documents and as such is stateless.
the proper solution, IMO, is not to evolve ES for the benefit of ajax and webapps, but rather generalize the notion of a document browser that connects to a web of documents to a general purpose client engine that connects to a network of internet applications.
thus the current web (document) browser just becomes one such internet application.
the obvious conflict of interest between the standards-based web and proprietary platforms advanced by Microsoft, and the rationales for keeping the web's client-side programming language small while the proprietary platforms rapidly evolve support for large languages, does not help maintain the fiction that only clashing high-level philosophies are involved here.
Readers may not know that Ecma has no provision for "minor releases" of its standards, so any ES3.1 that was approved by TG1 would inevitably be given a whole edition number, presumably becoming the 4th Edition of ECMAScript. This is obviously contentious given all the years that the majority of TG1, sometimes even apparently including Microsoft representatives, has worked on ES4, and the developer expectations set by this long-standing effort.
A history of Microsoft's post-ES3 involvement in the ECMAScript standard group, leading up to the overt split in TG1 in March, is summarized here.
The history of ECMAScript since its beginnings in November 1996 shows that when Microsoft was behind in the market (against Netscape in 1996-1997), it moved aggressively in the standards body to evolve standards starting with ES1 through ES3. Once Microsoft dominated the market, the last edition of the standard was left to rot -- ES3 was finished in 1999 -- and even easy-to-fix standards conformance bugs in IE JScript went unfixed for eight years (so three years to go from Edition 1 to 3, then over eight to approach Edition 4). Now that the proposed 4th edition looks like a competitive threat, the world suddenly hears in detail about all those bugs, spun as differences afflicting "JavaScript" that should inform a new standard.
Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider
the future of search on the Internet.
Oracle White Paper - Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper.
getRelatedBoxOne("/article/09/03/24/Google_rolls_out_semantic_search_capabilities_1.html","spBoxOne")
The new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the
list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, the company announced in an official blog on Tuesday.
Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider
the future of search on the Internet.
The new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the
list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, the company announced in an official blog on Tuesday.
NSA spies need jobs, too. And that is why many covert programs could be hiding in plain sight.
Job websites such as LinkedIn and Indeed.com contain hundreds of profiles that reference classified NSA efforts, posted by everyone from career government employees to low-level IT workers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. They offer a rare glimpse into the intelligence community's projects and how they operate. Now some researchers are using the same kinds of big-data tools employed by the NSA to scrape public LinkedIn profiles for classified programs. But the presence of so much classified information in public view raises serious concerns about security — and about the intelligence industry as a whole.
“I’ve spent the past couple of years searching LinkedIn profiles for NSA programs,” said Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
On Aug. 3, The Wall Street Journal published a story about the FBI’s growing use of hacking to monitor suspects, based on information Soghoian provided. The next day, Soghoian spoke at the Defcon hacking conference about how he uncovered the existence of the FBI’s hacking team, known as the Remote Operations Unit (ROU), using the LinkedIn profiles of two employees at James Bimen Associates, with which the FBI contracts for hacking operations.
“Had it not been for the sloppy actions of a few contractors updating their LinkedIn profiles, we would have never known about this,” Soghoian said in his Defcon talk. Those two contractors were not the only ones being sloppy.
And there are many more. A quick search of Indeed.com using three code names unlikely to return false positives — Dishfire, XKeyscore and Pinwale — turned up 323 résumés. The same search on LinkedIn turned up 48 profiles mentioning Dishfire, 18 mentioning XKeyscore and 74 mentioning Pinwale. Almost all these people appear to work in the intelligence industry.
Network-mapping the data
Fabio Pietrosanti of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights noticed all the code names on LinkedIn last December. While sitting with M.C. McGrath at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, Pietrosanti began searching the website for classified program names — and getting serious results. McGrath was already developing Transparency Toolkit, a Web application for investigative research, and knew he could improve on Pietrosanti’s off-the-cuff methods.
“I was, like, huh, maybe there’s more we can do with this — actually get a list of all these profiles that have these results and use that to analyze the structure of which companies are helping with which programs, which people are helping with which programs, try to figure out in what capacity, and learn more about things that we might not know about,” McGrath said.
He set up a computer program called a scraper to search LinkedIn for public profiles that mention known NSA programs, contractors or jargon — such as SIGINT, the agency’s term for “signals intelligence” gleaned from intercepted communications. Once the scraper found the name of an NSA program, it searched nearby for other words in all caps. That allowed McGrath to find the names of unknown programs, too.
Once McGrath had the raw data — thousands of profiles in all, with 70 to 80 different program names — he created a network graph that showed the relationships between specific government agencies, contractors and intelligence programs. Of course, the data are limited to what people are posting on their LinkedIn profiles. Still, the network graph gives a sense of which contractors work on several NSA programs, which ones work on just one or two, and even which programs military units in Iraq and Afghanistan are using. And that is just the beginning.
Click on the image to view an interactive network illustration of the relationships between specific national security surveillance programs in red, and government organizations or private contractors in blue.
What a giggle, public spying on NSA and its contractors using Big Data. The interactive network graph with its sidebar display of relevant data derived from LinkedIn profiles is just too delightful.
I've been using it for about a month as a Chrome extension, which at least at the time was still in beta. It hasn't caused any problems on either the Linux or Windows boxes. It appears to be working as intended on both systems. The sliders discussed in the article only appear if you are viewing a page that has identified or candidate cookie tracking characteristics. Some it blocks itself. Others, you have to use a slider on to set whether it will be blocked or wait until the program acquires enough data about that site to make a decision to block. The program does not use a blacklist of sites, although it comes with a white list built in of sites that honor the do not track browser setting. But once a tracking cookie is blocked, it's blocked for all sites you visit. So this isn't instant complete tracking cookie security. It's designed to improve your experience with the number of sites whose tracking cookies follow your tracks around the Web. But this is not a mature program. Its effectiveness will improve with each update.
I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.
I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one.
The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.
The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.
The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies. Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha
I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.
I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one.
The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.
The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.
The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies. Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Com
YouTube has decided it's had enough of Adobe's perenially-p0wned Flash and will therefore now default to delivering video with the HTML5 <video> tag.
A post by the video vault's engineering and development team says the move is now possible, and sensible, because the industry has invented useful things like adaptive bitrates, encryption, new codecs and WebRTC that make the <video> usable work in the real world.
Those additions mean HTML5 is at least as functional – or more so – than Flash, and if YouTube detects you are running Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, it'll now deliver video using <video> and flush Flash.
YouTube's also decided to can what it calls the “'old style' of Flash
YouTube seems not to care a jot that its actions are inimical to Adobe, saying it's just doing what all the cool kids – Netflix, Apple, Microsoft and its competitor Vimeo – have already done.
Which is not to say that Flash is dead: those who don't run the browsers above will still get YouTube delivered by whatever technology works bes tin their environment. And that will often – perhaps too often* – be Flash. ®
Bootnote * Until they get p0wned, that is: Flash is so horridly buggy that Apple has just updated its plugin-blockers to foil versions of the product prior to 16.0.0.296 and 13.0.0.264.
Verizon says it will soon offer customers a way to opt out from having their smartphone and tablet browsing tracked via a hidden un-killable tracking identifier.
The decision came after a ProPublica article revealed that an online advertiser, Turn, was exploiting the Verizon identifier to respawn tracking cookies that users had deleted.
Two days after the article appeared, Turn said it would suspend the practice of creating so-called "zombie cookies" that couldn't be deleted. But Verizon couldn't assure users that other companies might not also exploit the number - which was transmitted automatically to any website or app a user visited from a Verizon-enabled device - to build dossiers about people's behavior on their mobile devices.
Verizon subsequently updated its website to note Turn's decision and declared that it would "work with other partners to ensure that their use of [the undeletable tracking number] is consistent with the purposes we intended." Previously, its website had stated: "It is unlikely that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles.
However, policing the hundreds of companies in the online tracking business was likely to be a difficult task for Verizon.
And so, on Monday, Verizon followed in the footsteps of AT&T, which had already declared in November that it would stop inserting the hidden undeletable number in its users' Web traffic.
In a statement emailed to reporters on Friday, Verizon said, "We have begun working to expand the opt-out to include the identifier referred to as the UIDH, and expect that to be available soon."
Previously, users who opted out from Verizon's program were told that information about their demographics and Web browsing behavior would no longer be shared with advertisers, but that the tracking number would still be attached to their traffic.
For more coverage, read ProPublica's previous reporting on Verizon's indestructible tracking and how one company used the tool to create zombie cookies.
European officials are demanding answers and investigations into a joint U.S. and U.K. hack of the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile SIM cards, following a report published by The Intercept Thursday.
The report, based on leaked documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealed the U.S. spy agency and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, hacked the Franco-Dutch digital security giant Gemalto in a sophisticated heist of encrypted cell-phone keys.
The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on the European Union’s data protection law, Jan Philipp Albrecht, said the hack was “obviously based on some illegal activities.”
“Member states like the U.K. are frankly not respecting the [law of the] Netherlands and partner states,” Albrecht told the Wall Street Journal.
Sophie in ’t Veld, an EU parliamentarian with D66, the Netherlands’ largest opposition party, added, “Year after year we have heard about cowboy practices of secret services, but governments did nothing and kept quiet […] In fact, those very same governments push for ever-more surveillance capabilities, while it remains unclear how effective these practices are.”
“If the average IT whizzkid breaks into a company system, he’ll end up behind bars,” In ’t Veld added in a tweet Friday.
The EU itself is barred from undertaking such investigations, leaving individual countries responsible for looking into cases that impact their national security matters. “We even get letters from the U.K. government saying we shouldn’t deal with these issues because it’s their own issue of national security,” Albrecht said.
Still, lawmakers in the Netherlands are seeking investigations. Gerard Schouw, a Dutch member of parliament, also with the D66 party, has called on Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch minister of the interior, to answer questions before parliament. On Tuesday, the Dutch parliament will debate Schouw’s request.
Additionally, European legal experts tell The Intercept, public prosecutors in EU member states that are both party to the Cybercrime Convention, which prohibits computer hacking, and home to Gemalto subsidiaries could pursue investigations into the breach of the company’s systems.
According to secret documents from 2010 and 2011, a joint NSA-GCHQ unit penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks and infiltrated the private communications of its employees in order to steal encryption keys, embedded on tiny SIM cards, which are used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the world. Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year.
The company’s clients include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers. “[We] believe we have their entire network,” GCHQ boasted in a leaked slide, referring to the Gemalto heist.
While Gemalto was indeed another casualty in Western governments’ sweeping effort to gather as much global intelligence advantage as possible, the leaked documents make clear that the company was specifically targeted. According to the materials published Thursday, GCHQ used a specific codename — DAPINO GAMMA — to refer to the operations against Gemalto. The spies also actively penetrated the email and social media accounts of Gemalto employees across the world in an effort to steal the company’s encryption keys.
Evidence of the Gemalto breach rattled the digital security community.
“Almost everyone in the world carries cell phones and this is an unprecedented mass attack on the privacy of citizens worldwide,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit that advocates for digital privacy and free online expression. “While there is certainly value in targeted surveillance of cell phone communications, this coordinated subversion of the trusted technical security infrastructure of cell phones means the US and British governments now have easy access to our mobile communications.”
For Gemalto, evidence that their vaunted security systems and the privacy of customers had been compromised by the world’s top spy agencies made an immediate financial impact. The company’s shares took a dive on the Paris bourse Friday, falling $500 million. In the U.S., Gemalto’s shares fell as much 10 percent Friday morning. They had recovered somewhat — down 4 percent — by the close of trading on the Euronext stock exchange. Analysts at Dutch financial services company Rabobank speculated in a research note that Gemalto could be forced to recall “a large number” of SIM cards.
The French daily L’Express noted today that Gemalto board member Alex Mandl was a founding trustee of the CIA-funded venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Mandl resigned from In-Q-Tel’s board in 2002, when he was appointed CEO of Gemplus, which later merged with another company to become Gemalto. But the CIA connection still dogged Mandl, with the French press regularly insinuating that American spies could infiltrate the company. In 2003, a group of French lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to create a commission to investigate Gemplus’s ties to the CIA and its implications for the security of SIM cards. Mandl, an Austrian-American businessman who was once a top executive at AT&T, has denied that he had any relationship with the CIA beyond In-Q-Tel. In 2002, he said he did not even have a security clearance.
AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon could not be reached for comment Friday. Sprint declined to comment. Vodafone, the world’s second largest telecom provider by subscribers and a customer of Gemalto, said in a statement, “[W]e have no further details of these allegations which are industrywide in nature and are not focused on any one mobile operator. We will support industry bodies and Gemalto in their investigations.”
Deutsche Telekom AG, a German company, said it has changed encryption algorithms in its Gemalto SIM cards.
“We currently have no knowledge that this additional protection mechanism has been compromised,” the company said in a statement. “However, we cannot rule out this completely.”
Update: Asked about the SIM card heist, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he did not expect the news would hurt relations with the tech industry:
“It’s hard for me to imagine that there are a lot of technology executives that are out there that are in a position of saying that they hope that people who wish harm to this country will be able to use their technology to do so. So, I do think in fact that there are opportunities for the private sector and the federal government to coordinate and to cooperate on these efforts, both to keep the country safe, but also to protect our civil liberties.”
Watch for massive class action product defect litigation to be filed against the phone companies.and mobile device manufacturers. In most U.S. jurisdictions, proof that the vendors/manufacturers knew of the product defect is not required, only proof of the defect. Also, this is a golden opportunity for anyone who wants to get out of a pricey cellphone contract, since providing a compromised cellphone is a material breach of warranty, whether explicit or implied..
Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only 40 percent of
agencies have followed the law's instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms, according to a new
FOIA Audit released today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org to mark Sunshine Week.
The Archive team audited all federal agencies with Chief FOIA Officers as well as agency components that handle more than 500 FOIA requests a year — 165
federal offices in all — and found only 67 with online libraries populated with significant numbers of released FOIA documents and regularly updated.
Congress called on agencies to embrace disclosure and the digital era nearly two decades ago, with the passage of the 1996 "E-FOIA" amendments. The law
mandated that agencies post key sets of records online, provide citizens with detailed guidance on making FOIA requests, and use new information technology
to post online proactively records of significant public interest, including those already processed in response to FOIA requests and "likely to become the
subject of subsequent requests."
Congress believed then, and openness advocates know now, that this kind of proactive disclosure, publishing online the results of FOIA requests as well as
agency records that might be requested in the future, is the only tenable solution to FOIA backlogs and delays. Thus the National Security
Archive chose to focus on the e-reading rooms of agencies in its latest audit.
Even though the majority of federal agencies have not yet embraced proactive disclosure of their FOIA releases, the Archive E-FOIA Audit did find that some
real "E-Stars" exist within the federal government, serving as examples to lagging agencies that technology can be harnessed to create state-of-the art
FOIA platforms. Unfortunately, our audit also found "E-Delinquents" whose abysmal web performance recalls the teletype era.
E-Delinquents include the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, which, despite being mandated to advise the President on technology
policy, does not embrace 21st century practices by posting any frequently requested records online. Another E-Delinquent, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, insults its website's viewers by claiming that it "does not maintain records appropriate for FOIA Library at this time."
"The presumption of openness requires the presumption of posting," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "For the new generation, if it's not online, it does not exist."
The National Security Archive has conducted fourteen FOIA Audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI
Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous
Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction,
assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often
embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
The federal government has made some progress moving into the digital era. The National Security Archive's last E-FOIA Audit in 2007, " File Not Found," reported that only one in five federal agencies had put online all of the
specific requirements mentioned in the E-FOIA amendments, such as guidance on making requests, contact information, and processing regulations. The new
E-FOIA Audit finds the number of agencies that have checked those boxes is now much higher — 100 out of 165 — though many (66 in 165) have posted just the
bare minimum, especially when posting FOIA responses. An additional 33 agencies even now do not post these types of records at all, clearly thwarting the
law's intent.
The FOIAonline Members
(Department of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Archives and Records
Administration, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Department of the Navy, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration, U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Federal Communications Commission) won their "E-Star" by making past requests and releases searchable via
FOIAonline. FOIAonline also allows users to submit their FOIA requests digitally.
THE E-DELINQUENTS: WORST OVERALL AGENCIES
In alphabetical order
Key Findings
Excuses Agencies Give for Poor E-Performance
Justice Department guidance undermines the statute.
Currently, the FOIA stipulates that documents "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests" must be posted by agencies somewhere in their
electronic reading rooms. The Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy defines these records as "frequently requested records… or those which have been
released three or more times to FOIA requesters." Of course, it is time-consuming for agencies to develop a system that keeps track of how often a record
has been released, which is in part why agencies rarely do so and are often in breach of the law. Troublingly, both the current House and Senate FOIA bills include language that codifies the instructions from the Department of
Justice.
The National Security Archive believes the addition of this "three or more times" language actually harms the intent of the Freedom of Information Act as
it will give agencies an easy excuse ("not requested three times yet!") not to proactively post documents that agency FOIA offices have already spent time,
money, and energy processing. We have formally suggested alternate language requiring that agencies generally post "all records, regardless of form or
format that have been released in response to a FOIA request."
Disabilities Compliance.
Despite the E-FOIA Act, many government agencies do not embrace the idea of posting their FOIA responses online. The most common reason agencies give is that it
is difficult to post documents in a format that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, also referred to as being "508 compliant," and the 1998
Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act that require federal agencies "to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with
disabilities."
E-Star agencies, however, have proven that 508 compliance is no barrier when the agency has a will to post. All documents posted on FOIAonline are 508
compliant, as are the documents posted by the Department of Defense and the Department of State. In fact, every document created electronically by the US
government after 1998 should already be 508 compliant. Even old paper records that are scanned to be processed through FOIA can be made 508 compliant with
just a few clicks in Adobe Acrobat, according to
this Department of Homeland Security guide
(essentially OCRing the text, and including information about where non-textual fields appear). Even if agencies are insistent it is too difficult to OCR
older documents that were scanned from paper, they cannot use that excuse with digital records.
Privacy.
Another commonly articulated concern about posting FOIA releases online is that doing so could inadvertently disclose private information from "first
person" FOIA requests. This is a valid concern, and this subset of FOIA requests should not be posted online. (The Justice Department identified "first party" requester rights in 1989. Essentially agencies cannot use
the b(6) privacy exemption to redact information if a person requests it for him or herself. An example of a "first person" FOIA would be a person's
request for his own immigration file.)
Cost and Waste of Resources.
There is also a belief that there is little public interest in the majority of FOIA requests processed, and hence it is a waste of resources to post them.
This thinking runs counter to the governing principle of the Freedom of Information Act: that government information belongs to US citizens, not US
agencies. As such, the reason that a person requests information is immaterial as the agency processes the request; the "interest factor" of a document
should also be immaterial when an agency is required to post it online.
Some think that posting FOIA releases online is not cost effective. In fact, the opposite is true. It's not cost effective to spend tens (or
hundreds) of person hours to search for, review, and redact FOIA requests only to mail it to the requester and have them slip it into their desk drawer and
forget about it. That is a waste of resources. The released document should be posted online for any interested party to utilize. This will only become
easier as FOIA processing systems evolve to automatically post the documents they track. The State Department earned its "E-Star" status demonstrating this
very principle, and spent no new funds and did not hire contractors to build its Electronic Reading Room, instead it built a self-sustaining platform that
will save the agency time and money going forward.
(AP) -- Federal regulators are urging consumers to go through their phone bills line by line after they accused T-Mobile US of wrongly charging customers for premium services, like horoscope texts and quirky ringtones, the customers never authorized. The Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that it is suing T-Mobile in a federal court in Seattle with the goal of making sure every unfairly charged customer sees a full refund. The lawsuit, the first of its kind against a mobile provider, is the result of months of stalled negotiations with T-Mobile, which says it is already offering refunds. "It's wrong for a company like T-Mobile to profit from scams against its customers when there were clear warning signs the charges it was imposing were fraudulent," FTC Chair Edith Ramirez in a statement.
The practice is called "cramming": A third party stuffs a customer's bill with bogus charges such as $10-per-month horoscopes or updates on celebrity gossip. In this case, the FTC said, T-Mobile was working with third-party vendors being investigated by regulators and known to be the subject of numerous customer complaints. T-Mobile then made it difficult for customers to notice the added charge to their bill and pocketed up to 40 percent of the total, according to the FTC.
The FTC told reporters in a conference call Tuesday that it had been in negotiations with T-Mobile for months in an attempt to guarantee refunds would be provided to customers but that the two sides couldn't reach an agreement. T-Mobile appears to have been laying the groundwork to head off the federal complaint. Last November, the company announced that it would no longer allow premium text services because they were waning in popularity and not all vendors had acted responsibly. In June, it announced it would reach out to consumers to provide refunds. But the FTC says that in many cases, the refunds are only partial and T-Mobile often refers customer complaints to the third-party vendors.
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