In this issue...

1.  SLA Launches New Advocacy Service
2.  Supreme Court Date Set for Grokster
3.  NIH Open Access Publishing Policy is Delayed
4.  Texas Attempts to Stop Spammers
5.  EFF Demands Answers from DOJ about USA PATRIOT Act Surveillance
6.  DHS Changes Secrecy Policy
7.  FBI Tries to Limit Information Searches
8.  FBI Retires Controversial E-Mail Surveillance Tool
9.  German Court Finds Selective Filtering May Constitute an Offense
10.  GPO Issues New Information Dissemination (ID) Policy
11.  GPO Solicits for Web Discovery and Harvesting
12.  ERIC Resumes Acquisitions

NIH Open Access Publishing Policy is Delayed
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access sent a letter to Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), expressing disappointment in the delay of the scheduled NIH announcement of its policy on enhanced public access to NIH-funded research. 

Advocates had hoped the NIH plan would make peer-reviewed articles on taxpayer-funded research fully accessible and available online at no extra cost. In the long-awaited Enhanced Public Access Policy, NIH was expected to issue a call to action to each grant recipient to voluntarily submit her or his peer-reviewed scientific research results to PubMed Central at the National Library of Medicine. Letter.


Texas Attempts to Stop Spammers
The state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against two men believed to be among the world's top five spammers.  The civil case seeks millions of dollars in damages.  The Texas Attorney General reportedly started the legal action because messages sent by the alleged spammers broke three laws governing e-mail marketing. The company named in the lawsuit denied any wrongdoing and said it complied with all relevant laws. Read more. 

EFF Demands Answers from DOJ about USA PATRIOT Act Surveillance
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and other offices of the U.S. Department of Justice seeking the release of documents that would reveal whether the government has been using the USA PATRIOT Act to spy on Internet users' reading habits without a search warrant.

At issue is PATRIOT Section 216, which expanded the government's authority to conduct surveillance in criminal investigations using pen registers or trap and trace devices ("pen-traps"). Pen-traps collect information about the numbers dialed on a telephone but do not record the actual content of phone conversations. Because of this limitation, court orders authorizing pen-trap surveillance are easy to get -- instead of having to show probable cause -- the government need only certify relevance to its investigation. Also, the government never has to inform people that they are, or were, the subjects of pen-trap surveillance. Read more.


DHS Changes Secrecy Policy
In early January, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reversed a policy that required all employees to sign an oath that they will not disclose certain information without proper authorization, including material labeled as sensitive but unclassified. Department contractors and consultants are still, however, required to sign the nondisclosure agreement, which allows inspections to be conducted at any time or place, for the purpose of ensuring compliance. Full story.

FBI Tries to Limit Information Searches
The FBI is fighting in court to limit how hard it has to search for government documents requested by the public under the Freedom of Information Act. If the bureau prevails, people could have a diminished chance of getting documents from the nation's most famous law enforcement agency. Read more.

FBI Retires Controversial E-Mail Surveillance Tool
The FBI has almost retired its controversial e-mail wiretap system formerly known as Carnivore, turning instead to commercially available software. The monitoring system, developed to intercept the e-mail and other online activities of suspected criminals, was not used in fiscal years 2003 and 2002, according to the reports obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org) under the Freedom of Information Act. Read more.

German Court Finds Selective Filtering May Constitute an Offense
In the legal dispute between a university from the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg and one of its former academic assistants, the Higher Regional Court (OLG) in the Karlsruhe, Germany, found that selectively filtering out the e-mails of a specific sender may constitute an offense. In 1998 the assistant and his university did not part amicably, but the former employee did continue to stay in touch via e-mail through the university's mail server with scientists and friends still working there. The OLG’s ruling on the case -- the first of its kind on this topic by a higher regional court -- granted the complaint filed by the former employee. His former peers decided to filter out every message in which his name was mentioned without informing the ex-employee or his friends. Read more. News story. 

GPO Issues New Information Dissemination (ID) Policy
The Government Printing Office (GPO) has issued a new ID policy, "Withdrawal of Federal Information Products from Information Dissemination Collection and Distribution Programs."  The policy, ID 72, supersedes SOD 72 dated July, 22, 2002. The revised policy establishes conditions under which a document may be withdrawn, recalled, or restricted in access, and it outlines GPO and publishing agency responsibilities.  The new policy requires concurrence of the head of the publishing agency before any action is taken.  It also requires notification of professional library associations in order to assure support for the actions that are taken. 

GPO Solicits for Web Discovery and Harvesting
GPO has posted a Solicitation and Statement of Work for Web Harvesting on FedBizOpps for review and response by interested potential vendors. According to the Statement of Work, "GPO requires the services of a vendor that can provide a number of different products and/or services related to the discovery, harvesting, and assessment of documents and publications from Web sites using Web crawler and data mining technologies. GPO is involved in a project that is attempting to discover and retrieve publications from Federal agency Web sites in order to identify publications that have not been cataloged by GPO but fall within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) and the Cataloging and Indexing Program."

As a first step in learning about the services and technologies available, GPO will be working with the EPA Web site as a pilot project for web harvesting. While this pilot is being implemented, a set of long term requirements for web harvesting is being developed in conjunction with work that is being done for GPO's Future Digital System. Additional details.

ERIC Resumes Acquisitions
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, has resumed operations following a major system redesign. ERIC is the nation's premier digital library of education-related literature.  ERIC serves a broad audience of education researchers, practitioners, administrators, and all others with an interest in education. ERIC is currently establishing new acquisitions agreements and authorizations with all ERIC content providers – previous agreements and authorizations with ERIC are no longer valid.  Additionally, ERIC is ready to begin acquiring materials from January 2004 through the present. http://www.eric.ed.gov/

To Subscribe to SLA's Public Policy Connections Send an email to: Lyris@lists.sla.org with the SUBSCRIBE command in the body of the message: Subscribe SLA-GR your-e-mail_address FirstName LastName

If you have any questions or comments about Public Policy Connections, we would like your feedback. Please share your comments with Dnewcomb@sla.org.