Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani are artists, archivists, and activists. Both have been involved in immigration rights activism, especially after 9/11, and they created the shifting exhibition Index of the Disappeared, now in its 10th year, to address the insidious surveillance, false narratives, and criminalization of dissent perpetrated by the U.S. government. I saw the “Secrets … Read more Radical Archives and Index of the Disappeared
Litwin Books will soon be publishing an English translation of Philippe Breton’s 2000 book, Le culte de l’Internet: Une menace pour le lien social?, under the English title: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies. Here is a bit from Chapter Four that comes to mind for … Read more Selection from Philippe Breton, relating to Wikileaks
Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney — A Book to Watch! By Ann Sparanese On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins. This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to … Read more Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney
It’s a new dawn in more ways than one. One of the things I hated most about the Bush administration, from a librarian’s point of view, was their ever increasing secrecy. Every year it seemed that more and more government information, information that people needed in order for democracy to function, was being hidden in … Read more Talk about government transparency and sunshine
Amy Goodman and David Goodman (of Democracy Now) have an article in the current Mother Jones magazine about the great Windsor, Connecticut librarians’ defiance of the FBI and the PATRIOT Act and ultimate court victory for all of us on constitutional grounds.
Another example of the Bush Administration’s information evil. Marjorie Heins has some commentary on the Free Expression Policy Project’s website about Guantanamo prisoners’ recantations of abuse charges in exchange for release from custody. The government knows they got the wrong guy, but won’t release him unless he signs off on a promise to back off … Read more Guantanamo secrecy through plea-bargains
This is so f-ing typical of the Bush Administration… White House staffers are using private internet domains for much of their work by email in order to avoid the accountability of a paper trail. White House correspondence is supposed to be part of the public record, eventually. Here’s a snippet: “…[I]t is better not to … Read more White House using private email to avoid the accountability of a public paper trail
The justice department has been abusing a provision in the PATRIOT Act allowing them to issue “national security letters” to obtain information on citizens (140,000 so far) without a court order and with the famous gag order imposed. The Washington Post has published a revealing article by one of these recipients of a National Security … Read more 140,000 National Security Letters
The Presidential Records Act of 2007 is a bill presently in Congress that would overturn Bush’s Presidential Order 13233 of 2001, which was one of many outrageous secrecy measures of the Bush Administration, this one case giving former presidents the power to prevent access to their papers for many years. Kathleen de la Peña McCook … Read more The Presidential Records Act of 2007
After his last address on Iraq, President Bush broke with precedent and refused to be photographed at the podium by journalists, instead distributing an official, government produced photo which he expected the media to publish. Some media outlets did publish the official photo, and some published still video captures from the address. Put it on … Read more Bush refuses to be photographed
Check out this informative, link-laded post on NARA’s reclassification of documents and a recent audit relating to it, over at LawLibrary Blog. We knew that the present administration was crazy for secrecy, and that U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein was a controversial choice because of signs of his willingness to fulfill the gov’t’s interest in greater … Read more Audit of NARA reclassification of documents
George Washington U. to Receive Jack Anderson’s Papers — but FBI Wants to See Them First By Scott Carlson Chronicle of Higher Ed, April 18th, 2006 During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government — sources who passed on information that allowed … Read more Government wants first crack at late journalist’s papers