Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

How could the exit polls in this year’s presidential election have diverged so drastically from the results that election officials and the media announced?

Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a disturbing answer. Looking at the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, he concludes that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one.

“As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

Read Dr. Freeman’s well-reasoned, well-written argument, and make up your own mind. Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy

Susan Crawford blog :: Does the White House know?
Susan Crawford, Assistant Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, has an excellent overview of how the Federal Communications Commission is
attempting to arrogate to itself more power and the potential effects of this power over a broad range of consumer electronics.

The broadcast flag rule, distilled to its essence, is a mandate that all consumer electronics manufacturers and information technology companies ensure that any device that touches digital television content encrypt that content and protect it against unauthorized onward distribution….

The thing is, this rule doesn’t merely affect TV receiving equipment. It affects everything that RECEIVES digital files from TV receiving equipment as well — every device inside any home network. It affects the open-platform PC. It’s a sweeping rule.

Latest News and Financial Information | Reuters.com

Reuters news and television is now available through the Reuters RSS service. News feeds include:
Top News,
Business News,
US News,
International,
Politics,
Entertainment,
Technology,
Science,
Sports,
Health news,
‘Oddly Enough,’
and Life & Leisure.
Television feeds include:
World News,
Business,
Entertainment,
Life!,
and ‘Oddly Enough.’

ALA | In wake of Ashcroft departure, American Library Association renews call for return to privacy protections

That’s all well and good, but the library community shouldn’t count on a change of policy from Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s new nominee for Attorney General. This is the same person who wrote the memo to the president calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and did not apply to enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan.

For more on Gonzalez, see Disinfopedia and/or wikipedia.

We seize servers, you can’t complain - US gov,
By John Lettice,
The Register,
11th November 2004 12:22 GMT.

In case you haven’t been following the rather bizarre case of the seizure by the US Government of web servers in London, [yes, London, UK], here is
a bit of an update. The adjective “Kafkaesque” is overused, but if anything requires it, it is this episode.

You operate a web site which is hosted by an external company, and an unidentified agency of an unidentified government has the power to take data which you own, but which is situated on hardware hosted by the external company, and according to the US Government, it’s nothing to do with you

CFAC: California First Amendment Coalition

There’s some great information on CFAC’s website including the song, “You’ve Got a Right to Know”, an interview with Seymour Hersh at their most recent assembly, and tons of other information on first amendment rights and open government news.

OMB Watch - NRC Removes All Nuclear Information from Its Public Website

This just in: NRC Restores web docs. Thanks Jim!

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) pulled its entire public reading room offline (editor’s note: Oct 25th, and as of today, Nov10th, they’re still offline!) after stories broke about possibly sensitive material on the website. They agency defended its action by saying it is trying its best to balance security and right-to-know.

Here’s the NRC’s news item for October 25th explaining themselves. Strangely though, ” No classified or safeguards material is now or has ever been permitted on the NRC Web site.” So why are they pulling access to public information?

[Thanks OMBWatch!]

Week in Review > How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/weekinreview/07conn.html?ex=1257483600&en=d7d3c29173baef8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>The New York Times: How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait

Here’s an interesting article for you data wonks out there. See the historic portrait of the electoral from 1976 - 2004.

This portrait of the 2004 electorate emerges from interviews with 13,600 voters conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool, a consortium of ABC News, The Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. The large number of respondents makes it possible to measure the preferences of some groups, like Jews and Asians, whose share of the population is too small to be examined in typical telephone surveys.

To the Editor of the New York Times History News Network.

The History News Network web site invites historians
“If you write to the NYT and your letter isn’t published, please send it to us.”
Many do, and the results are here.

GovTrack.us

GovTrack.us is “a nexus of information about the United States Congress.” This site is a project of
a single person, Joshua Tauberer, a University of Pennsylvania first-year graduate student in linguistics. The site is not fast and is sometimes
not even reachable. But it is worth your time to take a look because it shows what can be done when information is marked up with XML.
Tauberer retrieves information daily from Thomas and the House and Senate websites. His programs convert all the information they retrieve to XML and then uses the XML files to produce statistics, track bills, create RSS-feeds, and more. He makes he XML files freely available, too!

This site is a crossroads for data on the status of legislation, the activities of representatives, campaign contributions and other statistics, and public commentary. Best of all, you can track Congress with personalized email updates.