They looked like they had walked off a film set, the two men standing at the door of the Library Connection in Windsor, Connecticut, as they flashed FBI badges and asked to speak to the boss. Director George Christian courteously shepherded them into the office. By the hum of the Xerox machine, one agent explained to Christian that the bureau was demanding “any and all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person or entity” that had used computers between 4 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. on February 15, 2005, in any of the 27 libraries whose computer systems were managed by the Library Connection, a nonprofit co-op of library databases. He handed Christian a document called a national security letter (NSL); it said the information was being sought “to protect against international terrorism.”
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in information and government.
Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by email, and post on the Web. Federal agencies have rushed to embrace the internet and new information technology, but their record-keeping efforts lag far behind. Moreover, federal investigators have found widespread violations of federal record-keeping requirements.
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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008
in knowledge management and government.
This year’s Knowledge Management Conference was held, as it has been since the year 2000, in April at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, DC. As we have done at all these events, we surveyed the attendees in relation to their agencies’ knowledge management (KM) initiatives. There were close to eight hundred participants in attendance at the conference and exhibits. They were mainly knowledge management practitioners from the public sector at large, but primarily from the federal government. While the survey clearly is not a scientifically representative sample of the public sector, the results do enable us to understand a bit better what the current state of knowledge management is within the federal government.
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President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released recently. The program, known as Reading First, drew on some of Mr. Bush’s educational experiences as Texas governor, and at his insistence Congress included it in the federal No Child Left Behind legislation that passed by bipartisan majorities in 2001. It has been a subject of dispute almost ever since, however, with the Bush administration and some state officials characterizing the program as beneficial for young students, and Congressional Democrats and federal investigators criticizing conflict of interest among its top advisers.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in government and environment.
Japanese government website crashed as people raced to take up an offer of a half-price McDonald’s hamburger in exchange for pledging to fight global warming. The Japanese unit of the US burger giant Tuesday offered a Big Mac for 150 yen (1.3 dollars), about half the normal price, to anyone demonstrating a commitment to preventing climate change. People were asked to check up to 39 boxes on a form they could download from the environment ministry’s website, each listing a way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in blogs and government.
IBM’s e-Government Series has published a ~100-page report titled The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0. The report relates blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments including a case study and lessons learned. This Dr. Dobb’s article includes a link to the report (and comments from readers):
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