Center on National Security and the Law Launches Online, Searchable Database of Foreign Intelligence Law Collection
“On May 23, Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security and the Law launched theForeign Intelligence Law Collection — a publicly available, online searchable database of all declassified and redacted U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Court of Review opinions; all Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) statutes; legislative history; associated regulations, guidelines, executive orders, and presidential directives; all publicly available reports on FISA implementation, and more.
“It was built as a resource for…anyone and everyone seeking to know more about foreign intelligence law,” said Nadia Asancheyev, the center’s executive director. The practitioners and academics who came to inspect the product clearly welcomed the new resource, which will also be useful to journalists, government lawyers, members of Congress and their staffers. Adjunct Professor Carrie Cordero, senior fellow and general counsel of the Center for a New American Security — who moderated the discussion with Professor Laura Donohue and Research Librarian Jeremy J. McCabe — called the collection “an incredible public service.”
“I was a FISA practitioner, and if only there had been a resource like this…,” Cordero said, adding that the practitioners, those who practice before the court, the judges, the law clerks…”not even to mention the academic and scholarly community, and journalistic community [will] be interested in this valuable collection.”…
The Digital Public Library of America has re-released the Mueller Report as a well-formatted ebook instead of a crappy PDF
BoingBoing: “Back in April, Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weeklywrote a column deploring the abysmal formatting in the DoJ’s release of the Mueller Report, and publicly requesting that the Digital Public Library of America produce well-formatted ebook editions, which they have now done! Albanese writes,
To me, this is an important development, because with the DPLA’s publication, a major barrier to access has been eliminated: unlike the DOJ’s poor quality PDF, the DPLA e-book edition is a good reading experience, flowing on any digital device, fully functional, searchable. And, of course, it’s free. I can’t imagine why every media outlet that links to the DOJ version, wouldn’t link to this version instead if they are actually interested in having people actually read the report.Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of how important of The Mueller Report will turn out to be. And citizens can now turn to the place they’ve traditionally turned when they need access to important, trustworthy information—the library. To me, this is a pretty big deal, that libraries have picked up where the government slacked off. I mean, we live in the e-book age. The technology is cheap, and ubiquitous. There is really no excuse for bad pdfs to be the standard for how important government information like this is released.