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Obama Edicts Boost FOIA and .gov Websites
Ian Lamont writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Security Archive are praising President Obama's executive orders to make the federal government more open. Yesterday, Obama issued two memos and one executive order instructing government agencies to err on the side of making information public and not to look for reasons to legally withhold it. The moves are expected to make it easier for people to file Freedom of Information Act requests, and should also boost the amount of information that agencies place on their websites. The general counsel for the National Security Archive (an NGO that publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) even predicts that agencies will use blogs to share information. Obama's directives reverse a 2001 memo from former US Attorney General John Ashcroft instructing federal agencies to generally withhold information from citizens filing FOIA requests."
Now we can get the information about the Roswell / Area 51 connection!
I don't think the linked article provides links directly to the memos, but propublica did, so here they are:
Memo on Transparency and Open Government
Memo on the Freedom of Information Act
And here's the Executive Order on Presidential Records, which makes clear that claims of secrecy by the former president and his subordinates will be evaluated, and accepted or rejected, by the current president.
One idea to make their websites more transparent would be to use 32-bit PNGs.
I agree with your first point, but IMHO soldiers who committed torture do not deserve protection. They could and should have refused to execute their orders.
Anyone who commits murder is entitled to protection from the lynch mobs. Why not soldiers who commit torture?
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Hmmm, I don't know - being allowed to just "know" what the government is doing seems a little fishy. How are they supposed to keep us terrified and docile if they can't pretend that they always, just barely, have the boogeyman on the point of a knife -- but it's too dangerous to let us see him? And if we are not terrified and docile, how can they maintain their lack of accountability? The lack of accountability that is the very hallmark of the modern United States political system.
Honestly - the ideas this guy comes up with...
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Let's play Situation Replacement, shall we?
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Location: Germany
When: December 1945
>> Can we get all the ugly from the Holocaust in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?
Help the victims. Heal them physically and mentally. Pay them. Acknowledge wrongdoing. Admit guilt. State the facts. Do this all extremely publicly.
But burn those goddamn pictures. All they will do is piss people off, no matter how hard you try to make things right.
----
Sometimes the ugly needs to be seen.
My hand to God. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled.
This is different from Bush's Executive Order 13233 which states:
In Bush's Order, a former President can keep his records from being disclosed indefinitely simply by objecting to the release. No claim of privilege is required and no provision is made to override the objection. Under Obama, only executive privilege can keep records from being release and even then that claimed is reviewed. IANAL but that's how I interpreted it. Any lawyers care to comment.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This has been debunked on reddit and probably other places.
1) Bush's robots.txt began very similarly to Obama's, it grew later. Obama's robots.txt file starting small proves nothing. Look again in a year and see what it looks like then.
2) The pages disallowed by Bush's robots.txt file were (almost?) all printer-friendly versions of pages which were not excluded. The information was still there and accessible to spiders.
I'm no Bush fan, but let's limit the bashing to things that are actually true and meaningful, shall we?
Well said.
Same as Japan. Currently their education ministers are trying their damnest best to hide all the torture and massacre information.
Japanese children grew up not knowing the crimes against humanity that their forefathers did 65 years ago.
And if true they should be tried in a court of law not the court of public opinion. Protecting their identities allows prosecution at a later date. Predisposing the entirety of the populace to their assumed guilt does a disservice to the innocent as well as making prosecuting the guilty more difficult.
None of this explains how this absolves them of guilt. The same could be said of Nazi prison camp guards. They were told the jews and other political prisoners were dangerous and were destroying German society.
It's not sufficient to be willing to die following orders. You must also be willing to die for disobeying immoral orders. Otherwise you're just a mercenary.
Immoral orders? By whose morality? The victor's. If the Germans had won, a completely different measure of morality would have been applied.
At the risk of being called a troll or something, the guards working the concentration camps probably thought they were protecting their homeland. I'm no expert, and assuming they were drawn from the ranks (one could technically make the leap and consider lower ranking SS to also be ignorant). They were told these people were dangerous to their society. Did they have any reason not to believe it (I'd wager that the guards had no way to disprove their superiors in this matter). It wasn't clear-cut as if the jews, gypsies, and others were taking up arms.
Be wary of moral relativism. You may consider your enemy immoral for wanting to kill you, but I'm entirely sure he considers it quite moral. The reverse is also true.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
When I was in the Marine Corps, assigned to a raid unit, we were informed that during a wartime assignment, any failure to obey a direct order is a crime whose maximum penalty is summary execution.
Essentially, if you disobey the lieutenant or a sergeant, the guy can technically shoot you dead and give the order to someone else.
It's a motivator...
Does anyone else think his executive order freezing the pay of those White House workers making more than $100,000/year is a frightening preview ...
No.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.