Government Executive: Citizenship Agency Removed Website Pages on Asylum Policy Training. “In the latest in its ongoing monitoring of Trump administration alterations of agency website content, a transparency group found that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services removed 26 website documents of training material for its officers dealing with asylum seekers.”
digital impermanence
PR Newswire: ASPCA Files Federal Lawsuit Against USDA for Suppressing Critical Animal Welfare Records (PRESS RELEASE)
PR Newswire: ASPCA Files Federal Lawsuit Against USDA for Suppressing Critical Animal Welfare Records (PRESS RELEASE). “The ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), with the assistance of Cooley LLP, today filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for refusing to release critical animal welfare records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In February 2017, the USDA abruptly removed thousands of documents related to the inspection of facilities licensed under the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), including zoos and commercial dog breeders. These inspection and enforcement records had been available to the public in a searchable online database for years, and their removal made it impossible for the public to know which facilities were operating in violation of federal animal protection laws.”
Motherboard: The Wayback Machine is Deleting Evidence of Malware Sold to Stalkers
Motherboard: The Wayback Machine is Deleting Evidence of Malware Sold to Stalkers. “The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a service that preserves web pages. But the site has been deleting evidence of companies selling malware to illegally spy on spouses, highlighting the need to diversify digital archives.” WHAT?
Columbia Journalism Review: Digital journalism’s disappearing public record, and what to do about it
Columbia Journalism Review: Digital journalism’s disappearing public record, and what to do about it. “Institutions from banks to hospitals struggle with digital record-keeping now that much of the information that used to live on paper exists primarily in digital form. News organizations find it particularly challenging to keep the proverbial first draft of history from vanishing, and to figure out how to keep that draft continuously available to readers. It’s an area in which tech companies and newsrooms need to find common ground, and soon. ‘Publishers aren’t doing archiving,’ says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, a tool developed by the Internet Archive for preserving Web content. ‘Archiving is simply not a business priority.'”
Washington Post: EPA’s climate change website went down a year ago for ‘updating.’ It’s still not back.
Washington Post: EPA’s climate change website went down a year ago for ‘updating.’ It’s still not back.. “The news came on a Friday evening in late April last year: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had removed an informational website about climate change, taking down a page that had been up, in some form, for nearly two decades and under three presidents…. But a year later, the agency’s climate page is still down, and would-be visitors are redirected to a notice saying that ‘this page is being updated.'”
Motherboard: Motherboard Made a Tool That Archives Websites on Demand
Motherboard: Motherboard Made a Tool That Archives Websites on Demand. “Archiving services, such as the Wayback Machine, may be a staple of online journalism, but they sometimes have a problem. While, say, Archive.is might preserve one particular webpage, perhaps the Wayback Machine can’t, depending on what sort of restrictions the website developer has put in place. For example, someone stopped copies of MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog, which hosted a stream of homophobic comments, from displaying in the Wayback Machine. With that in mind, I made a quick tool that can push a single webpage or URL to multiple archiving sites at once, and fire back the newly minted digital copies in response. Hopefully it will help reporters and researchers more efficiently figure out which service will work best for that particular site.”
BuzzFeed: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual
BuzzFeed: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual. “Since the fall, the US Department of Justice has been overhauling its manual for federal prosecutors. In: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies. Out: A section titled ‘Need for Free Press and Public Trial.’ References to the department’s work on racial gerrymandering are gone. Language about limits on prosecutorial power has been edited down.”
