National Stories
A bill to force government agencies to get warrants before they access the email of people under investigation advanced in the U.S. House of Representatives after a majority of lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors. Advocates of the reform, which have included large tech companies such as Google, welcomed the news of 218 lawmakers signing on to the bill in the Republican-controlled House.
Reuters
As the importance of data to efficiency in the public sector becomes increasingly clear, one of the models for integrating new uses of it into government operations stands out. This model relies on two seemingly opposing factors: strong central leadership in setting policy and implementation accompanied by a broadly distributed ability to use the data throughout the organization. The city of Chicago has been a pioneer of this strategy. Its Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), led by CIO Brenna Berman and with strong mayoral support, is ensuring that data use spreads throughout the city. DoIT is developing an advanced analytics platform while at the same time engaging users across departments to identify problems they can solve with better data. A recent pilot project, for example, enabled the Department of Streets and Sanitation to target rodent-baiting to areas where data predicted infestations. And the model is spreading. In March, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence issued an executive order creating a state Management and Performance Hub (MPH) to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and transparency of state government by dramatically simplifying and increasing the use of data across agencies.
Governing
A U.S. District Court in Texas ruled that Texas’ anti-SLAPP law applies in federal courts and then dismissed a defamation claim under that statute. The district court judge ruled on June 11 that defendants, broadcast companies operating under the name KRIS Communications, could apply the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA) to a lawsuit brought by Christopher Williams.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
It's been said often that government is behind industry in many ways, that the public sector needs to change — and for a handful of government officials, industry players and citizens who've connected with government at hackathons, there are some concrete changes they'd like to see. If You Could Change One Thing About Government … Take Dahl Winters, a Colorado-based research and development scientist and recent winner at Google’s first GovDev Challenge, who would change the fact that government seems so far away. "I would like the government to be a little closer to me in terms of how I interact with it," he said. "In order to find any information at all, I have to search on the Web, and go to a government website and find this and find that. It’s just so far removed from me other than when I go to vote," which he said is basically the only government interaction he has. In that same vein, Kelly Shuster, a Colorado-based software developer and first place winner of Google’s first GovDev Challenge, said she would change increased transparency in terms of "it being what we call a push system instead of a pull system," she said. "I think a lot of society right now is just used to that — people get their news that way, people get a lot of things that way.
Government Technology
Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview. It may just be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant because some lawmakers and observers thought there was a way that tech experts could revive Lerner’s emails after they were washed away in a computer crash in the summer of 2011.
Politico
A list of potential bidders for the federal government's multimillion-dollar bitcoin auction was released in error Wednesday by the U.S. Marshals Service, media reports say. The Marshals Service confirmed that it distributed the names in an email to update interested parties on the auction's guidelines, the New York Times and other news organizations reported. "The U.S. Marshals Service inadvertently sent an email today revealing the email addresses of people who had submitted questions about the bitcoin auction to a general USMS mailbox that had been created for the auction," Lynzey Donahue, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals, said in an email. "The USMS apologizes for this mistake which was in no way intentional."
USA Today
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