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The dark side of ‘sunshining’ government data online

FAC June 28, 2011

The  “Death of Open Gov” was predicted last week in the Washington Post when Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra (Data.gov) resigned: The program was off to a great start, with hundreds of thousands of data sets becoming available, and entrepreneurs building thousands of innovative applications. Then the ill-considered race to slash the Federal deficit started. The Obama Administration agreed to cut e-government initiative funding from $35 million to $8 million. Never mind that Kundra’s

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CA violent video game law author responds to Supreme Court decision

FAC June 27, 2011

Although the Supreme Court shot down the violent video game law authored by California state senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), AP has reported that Yee will review “the dissents in hope of finding a way to reintroduce the law in a way it would be constitutional.” Video: Court: Calif. Can’t Ban Violent Video Game: The Associated Press Yee published a written response to the Supreme Court decision on his website stating that “While we did not

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Second Circuit rules: Making ‘hot news’ does not give right to control distribution

FAC June 21, 2011

Online news aggregators can breath a little easier after yesterday’s ruling by Judge Robert D. Sack who authored the opinion in Barclays Capital v theflyonthewall.com.  The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the flyonthewall.com blog  can report on the securities brokerages’ stock recommendations as soon as it learns of them, as long as it does not violate federal copyright law. The “Hot Law Doctrine,” based on a 1918 Supreme Court decision,

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Famed journalism project a target of prosecutors

FAC June 20, 2011

Prosecutors in Chicago are investigating the renowned Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University, famed for helping free 12 wrongly convicted defendants and prompting former Gov. George Ryan to empty the state’s death row. The Cook County state’s attorney asserts that project students and the founder, David Protess, behaved more like advocates than journalists, and thus cannot claim a journalist’s privilege against subpoenas under the Illinois shield law. The controversy over the project’s tactics led Medill dean

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Obama administration presses to stop leaks

FAC June 20, 2011

The Obama Administration is unrelenting in its campaign against leaks of classified information, despite its failure to uphold its case against a former National Security Agency official who allegedly fed secrets to the Baltimore Sun. Now, the New York Times says, the government is pursuing an arms expert who provided information to Fox News. The administration has prosecuted five criminal cases, compared to a total of three under all previous administrations, the Times said. A

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