LEGISLATIVE ADVOCACY * GOVERNMENT RELATIONS COMMITTEE

Activities, 2008

• 2008 Annual Committee Report
• July, 2008 - Kelly Browne, NOCALL President, and Michele Finerty signed letters to California representatives Barbara Lee and Mike Honda.  The letters were in support of the testimony Mary Alice Baish gave on funding GPO. Further letters to Barbara Lee and Mike Honda were sent in September, 2008.
• March 21, 2008: Sunshine Week Program - a webcast and panel discussion hosted by NOCALL and SLA SF Bay Region Chapter: "National Dialog on Open Government and Secrecy."
  • Location: Townsend and Townsend and Crew, Two Embarcadero Center, 8^th Floor, San Francisco

Sunshine Week is a national initiative about the importance of open government and the freedom of information.  NOCALL GRC and the SLA SF Bay Region are presenting a two part program, comprised of the national web cast from Washington, D.C., and a lunchtime panel of local speakers. 

The program begins at 9:00 a.m., with a Continental Breakfast.

Part I: National Web Cast. 9:30 – 11:00 a.m.

 The hour and a half web cast, entitled Government Secrecy: Censoring Your Right to Know, will consider two topics.

 The Secret Executive—What Can Congress and the Public Do?  The Executive branch, power, and secrecy; congressional rights and responsibilities; and the role of the press in combating government secrecy. 

 Citizen Self-Help:  Finding the Information You Need:  A discussion with creators of websites that make hard-to-find government information accessible.  The websites help the public avoid having to file official requests or go to government offices and meetings to learn what our government is doing. 

 Web cast panelists include: 

• Mickey Edwards, Director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership and former Republic member of Congress from Oklahoma (1977-92).
• Ann Beeson, Director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute and previously Associate Legal Director of the ACLU.
• John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for American Progress, Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton (1998-January 2001).
• Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, moderator.

Part II: Lunchtime Panelists. 11:30-12:30 p.m.

(There will be a break from 11:00 – 11:30)

The lunchtime panel of local experts, who are active in furthering open government, include:

• Marcia Hofman, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), working on government transparency, civil liberties, and intellectual property issues.  Ms. Hofman will speak about EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project.
• Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-Founder of the Internet Archive.
• Carl Malamud, President, Public Resource.Org, Inc.

Sunshine Week Program
NOCALL GRC and the Special Libraries Association, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, presented their annual Sunshine Week program on March 21^st, 2008, in San Francisco. The “Government Secrecy: Censoring Your Right to Know” web cast, sponsored by OpenTheGovernment.org and other sponsors, including AALL, comprised the first part of the NOCALL/SLA program.  It was followed by a luncheon panel of local invited speakers who are open government advocates. 

Carl Malamud, president of Public Resource.Org, Inc, covered a number public access issues, including how the courts are the most closed branch of the government.  Mr. Malamud’s organization is working with the Smithsonian Institution to release items from their photography archives.  His organization supports the web cast of congressional hearings and works toward making databases of public domain information available to the general public, not only the wealthy.

Marcia Hoffman, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), addressed the difficulty of obtaining information through the FOIA.  Ms. Hoffman reported that the  EFF has urged that the National Security Letter (NSL) provision be struck down, on the basis that the FBI can use NSLs to obtain private communication without court approval.  NSLs are an expansion of federal surveillance law, supported by the PATRIOT Act. 

Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-Founder of the Internet Archive, invented WAIS (Wide Area Information System) in 1989.  He is founder of the Internet Archive, which is part of the Open Content Alliance, an initiative to provide free digital access to works in the public domain.  Mr. Kahle called upon librarians to promote the development of a digital library and offered to work with librarians to build targeted digital collections.

~Michele Finerty