The Tyee: We Should Be Archiving MPs’ Newsletters. “It is the collection of large and small acts of transparency, like MPs posting their householders online, that helps rank Canada as one of the best democracies in the world. Canadians might therefore expect that making householders readily available to anyone who requests one is normal. Not so.”
National Post (Canada): ‘Unacceptable level of risk’: Canada bans TikTok from federal government devices. “The federal government is banning Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from all government mobile devices on Feb. 28 because it presents an ‘unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security’ and the company’s data collection methods create vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.”
CNN: Ransomware attack on US Marshals Service affects ‘law enforcement sensitive information’. “A ransomware attack on the US Marshals Service has affected a computer system containing ‘law enforcement sensitive information,’ including personal information belonging to targets of investigations, a US Marshals Service spokesperson said Monday evening.”
Motherboard: The Company Helping the IRS Go Undercover Online. “Internal IRS documents obtained by Motherboard show the IRS paid Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tool that helps it monitor the web while undercover.”
Bureau of Transportation Statistics: BTS Updates Datasets to National Transportation Atlas Database. “The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics today released its winter 2023 update to the National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD), a set of nationwide geographic databases of transportation facilities, networks, and associated infrastructure.”
WIRED: AI Is Now Essential National Infrastructure. “Soon, a comprehensive digital infrastructure—which includes national computing power, a distributed cloud, and an interoperable set of applications and machine-readable legislation—will be as important to a country as roads, rail, and public water supply. In 2023, more and more countries will accelerate the building of such nationwide digital architectures, allowing them to deliver more AI-powered responsive services that cater to the individual and help the population at large.”
Globe Echo: Japan, Paradise Of Lost And Found. “If you misplace your wallet, smartphone, umbrella or something else in Japan, you have a good chance of being found. To further improve the management of the lost property system, the National Police Agency is in the process of developing a database covering the entire Archipelago – until now research has been done at the level of each department. Bringing together information on the depositions of lost objects on a national level, this new tool will make it possible to locate in a few minutes if it has been found.”
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Using CFPB complaint data to help cities and counties protect the public. “We wanted to increase the impact of our complaint data by sharing it with cities and counties so they can increase their efforts to protect consumers at the local level. Engaging with local governments is a win-win for consumers and the CFPB. It helps protect as many consumers as possible from predatory lending, barriers to credit, and other consumer harms.”
Federal News Network: NARA looks to double down on email records approach with texts, other messages. “The National Archives and Records Administration is looking to expand a successful approach for managing email records to text messages and other digital communications as part of a bid to help agencies with an ever increasing deluge of electronic records.”
Associated Press: How Archives went from ‘National Treasure’ to political prey. “It was the setting for ‘National Treasure,’ the movie in which Nicolas Cage’s character tries to steal the Declaration of Independence. It has long been among the most trafficked tourist destinations in the nation’s capital. But what the National Archives and Records Administration has never been — until now — is the locus of a criminal investigation of a former president.”
The Marshall Project: See If Police in Your State Reported Crime Data to the FBI. “Nearly 40% of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI’s national database in 2021 after the transition to a new collection system. The transition creates huge gaps in national crime stats sure to be exploited by politicians in this election year.”
Gizmodo: New Pentagon Budget Could Force the Military to Disclose When it Buys Americans’ Location Data. “The House of Representatives approved changes to next year’s military budget requiring the Department of Defense to start disclosing any purchases of smartphone or web browsing data for which a warrant would ordinarily be required last month.”
WIRED: The Family That Mined the Pentagon’s Data for Profit. “The Freedom of Information Act helps Americans learn what the government is up to. The Poseys exploited it—and became unlikely defenders of transparency.”
Department of Defense: DOD Releases First Departmentwide Social Media Policy. “The Defense Department today released a policy that for the first time spells out, from the highest levels of the defense community, how DOD military and civilian personnel should use official social media accounts to best advance the mission of the U.S. military and further instill trust in the credibility of the DOD.”
Bloomberg: DOJ Is Preparing to Sue Google Over Ad Market as Soon as September. “The US Justice Department is preparing to sue Google as soon as next month, according to people familiar with the matter, capping years of work to build a case that the Alphabet Inc. unit illegally dominates the digital advertising market.”
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