Daily Archives: August 2, 2004

Administration Supports Increased Use of Lawyers

This entry was posted in bush Constitution Domestic Terrorism Law Enforcement on by

And the American Library Association is fighting back on our behalf:

Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not “appropriate for external use.” The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.
The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).
Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged asks:
Can you think of any reason why our current ruling party would be trying to keep americans from having access to information about our laws?
Let’s see, here are a few possibilities:
1) They think ordinary citizens are too dumb to be able to read federal statutes without a lawyer to interpret?
2) Citizens have been making effective use of the material to protect their rights without the aid of lawyers?
3) If the feds make it hard to fact check their asses they can make things up as they go along with less concern?
4) An uninformed citizenry will make it easier to to fight the “war on terror.”
5) To help pay for Iraq (see 2 above).
Any more ideas?

All the News that is Fit to Google

This entry was posted in Google Information Journalism on by

It’s not clear why Vin Cosbie is surprised about this:

But when I analyzed its choices of news sources, I was surprised by the results. Although Google spiders more than 7,000 news sources, only about a dozen sources account for the vast majority of stories displayed on Google News day to day, and two of those predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.
A commentor hits main point number 1: real estate. There is only so much space on a web page.
A second reason is that not all 7000 sources are going to be interested in every story and many that might be will not write about it as they have made other choices.
I suspect that these dozen or so sources are, in fact, the sources that rank highest in Google’s ranking methodology. This may be a self reinforcing result since most of us probably read and, if applicable, link only the first story or two thus strengthening rank for those sources. On a statistically meaningless note I have many times gone deeper into the source material and quickly tired of the repetitive and derivative articles.
Vin can do this as well. By doing just a bit more work he can click on Google New’s always available “and xxx related” link and find the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other sources that he was originally looking for.
Via E-Media Tidbits.