|
National Stories
Conservative public interest lawyers sent letters Monday giving the District of Columbia, Iowa and Colorado 90 days to prove they are taking steps to delete from their registration lists dead voters and former residents, or else face a lawsuit. Judicial Watch said the District has more people registered to vote than the Census Bureau says would be eligible, based on age. Counties in Iowa and Colorado face the same situation — an indication, the conservative group said, that those jurisdictions need to clean up their rolls.
Washington Times
While the “best” municipality using open data is still yet to be known, a new census has identified 36 cities making progress opening their data. The census, officially named the U.S. Open Data Census, has scored 36 cities based on the type and quality of their open data efforts. San Francisco was listed with the highest score, and was followed by Sacramento, Calif., in second place and Salt Lake City in third. The project — a collaboration among the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and Code for America — reviewed cities based on 17 categories of data sets that included information on crime, transit operations, construction permits, emergency management, GIS zoning and more. (Virginia Beach is ranked 18th)
Governing
“It won’t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,” Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. “For better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.” The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference (links below), so I’m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to sources, and how much, if any, protection would a federal shield law give them? New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”
Poynter
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a ruling that shut down Delaware's novel program to have judges hear private arbitration cases, which critics blasted as "secret courts". The U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled last year that having state judges decide arbitration cases in secret violated the U.S. Constitution. "We believe that our nation and Delaware have lost an important opportunity to provide cost-effective options to resolve business-to-business disputes to remain competitive with other countries around the world," said Andrew Pincus, a Mayer Brown attorney who was hired by the state.
Reuters
Yale graduate students were urged to respect the “confidentiality” of an upcoming lecture by controversial Ford/ Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, according to an email sent by an administrator and forwarded to Salon. “Dr. Kissinger’s visit to campus will not be publicized, so we appreciate your confidentiality with respect to this exciting opportunity,” states an all-bold paragraph sent by Larisa Satara, the associate director of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, to a private listserv for Yale history graduate students.
Salon
According to The New York Times, the Obama administration is planning to reveal new legislative proposals this week that could curb some of the NSA's most controversial practices. Civil liberty activists, tech companies, and several lawmakers have been up in arms about the NSA's mass surveillance programs that were exposed by Edward Snowden's top-secret document leaks beginning last year. This leak uncovered the NSA's Section 215 and PRISM programs, which were geared toward collecting data on US residents via cellular records and metadata from Internet companies.
CNET News
|