June 30th, 2004 | by Derek | published in Data
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune won its lawsuit against the Florida Department of Education, “which will have to give the newspaper databases that include the Social Security numbers of every teacher in the state.” The paper asked for the information so it can merge a database of teachers and their school assignment with another table of state [...]
June 30th, 2004 | by Derek | published in Data
As government excuses for not complying with records requests go, this is a new one: the Justice Department told my employer, the Center for Public Integrity, that a database of foreign lobbying activity we asked for was “so fragile” that simply attempting to make an electronic copy of the database “could result in a major [...]
June 10th, 2004 | by Derek | published in Data
Alisa Ulferts of the St. Pete Times has the story of a new database compiled by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement: it tracks the 372,644 tattoos on current and former state prisoners. “Combined with other information in the database, such as height, hair color, eye color and age, law enforcement can easily search for [...]
January 22nd, 2004 | by Derek | published in Data
Gary Price points out a pilot program involving seven federal courts that makes transcripts of court proceedings available via the PACER system. The courts are the district courts for the Southern District of Alabama, District of Columbia, District of Kansas, District of Maine, Eastern District of Missouri, District of Nebraska, and the Eastern District of [...]
January 1st, 2004 | by Derek | published in Data
This will come as little surprise to those folks who use federal procurement data, but the General Accounting Office dispatched a letter (PDF) on Dec. 30 to OMB “to convey our serious and continuing concerns with the reliability of the data contained in the Federal Procurement Data System” and to make recommendations for the eventual [...]