Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), the publicly-searchable online database of federal court records, today announced that access has been restored to search case information in four appellate courts: the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th and Federal Circuits. Access to those court records had controversially been removed with little public notice on August 10th.
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Established by the OPEN Government Act of 2007 and opened in 2009, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) oversees federal agencies’ compliance with FOIA, serving as a mediator between citizens requesting records and the agencies responsible for furnishing them. A glance at OGIS’ case logs shows that they address the full variety of roadblocks one might encounter in the FOIA process.
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The Wall Street Journal has turned a tried and true Freedom of Information Act tactic on its head with some interesting results. In an instance reported in today's Journal, the paper used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain letters written by companies and individuals who wrote to the Federal Aviation Administration requesting that their private jet flight plans be excluded from public flight tracker databases.
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The Digital Public Library of America was launched today. Led by Executive Director Dan Cohen, the DPLA may very well become the modern answer to the Library of Alexandria -- the ancient world's most extensive knowledge center. At present, the library contains over two million items in multiple formats (texts, pictures, movies, etc.) drawn from the collections of multiple partner institutions including the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution and the Minnesota Digital Library.
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As expected the City of San Jose has appealed a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge's ruling on the applicability of the California Public Records Act to communications contained on private devices maintained by elected and other government officials. (For background on the ruling, see our entry here.) The City is basing its appeal on a number of arguments ranging from the practical (i.e., applying a search requirement across an entire city workforce would be overly burdensome) to the purely legal argumentative (e.g., individual government officials are not governmental entities as defined under the California Public Records Act.)
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Records maintained by educational institutions are little understood and often overlooked. Long the bastion of student journalists, school-based records are often erroneously believed to be completely off limits due to student privacy restrictions. While it is true that more and more colleges are brokering degree verification through the National Student Clearinghouse (which requires a student release in most instances) and student transcripts are generally private, there are a number of education-related records that are available upon request.
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A Santa Clara County (CA) Superior Court judge has issued an opinion that could have wide ranging effect on how governmental and elected officials communicate about public business. If the opinion stands up on appeal, officials will be obligated to turn over public records that are stored on their private handheld devices (as text or other electronic messages) and in their private (non-governmental) e-mail accounts.
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The Association of Health Care Journalists has launched a new site allowing any member of the public to conduct a search for certain federal inspection reports related to acute-care and critical access hospitals since January 1, 2011. This is, of course, a welcome development in terms of access to this data which was formerly accessible only by submitting a FOIA to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
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