Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Category Archives: Legislation

Understanding the Changing Landscape of Data Protection Laws

Klinkner, Blake, Understanding the Changing Landscape of Data Protection Laws (February 11, 2019). The Wyoming Lawyer, February 2019, at 44-45.. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3332687 “As businesses and other entities have sought to collect more personal data on individuals, the public has pushed back, and lawmakers throughout the United States and elsewhere have responded by passing… Continue Reading

US Government Will Be Scanning Your Face At 20 Top Airports

BuzzFeedNews: “In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing US borders. That mandate stipulates facial recognition identification for “100 percent of all international passengers,” including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021. Now, the United States Department of… Continue Reading

New on LLRX – US takes tentative steps toward opening up government data

Via LLRX – US takes tentative steps toward opening up government data – At the beginning of this year, President Trump signed into law the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act, requiring that nonsensitive government data be made available in machine-readable, open formats by default. As researchers who study data governance and cyber… Continue Reading

In the Library’s Web Archives: Sorting through a Set of US Government PDFs

The Signal Blog – LC: “Today’s guest post is from Jesse Johnston, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress. The Digital Content Management section has been working on a project to extract and make available sets of files from the Library’s significant web archives holdings. This is another step to explore the web archives and make… Continue Reading

Library of Congress wants to attract more visitors, but will that undermine its mission?

Washington Post: “…Central to Hayden’s goals is a $60 million makeover of the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, the historic 1897 architectural wonder known for its Great Hall, which is open to the public, and the Main Reading Room, the hushed temple where scholars work. Hayden unveiled the first glimpses of the concept — with its… Continue Reading

LC Post New CRS Content Now Online

Library of Congress Blog – Carla D. Hayden: “Less than half a year ago, I announced that the Library of Congress is providing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports to the public for the first time. Since the launch of the CRS reports website, crsreports.congress.gov, the Library has made available all new or updated reports. Created for Congress by… Continue Reading

Vital Statistics on Congress Data on the U.S. Congress, Updated March 2019

Brookings: “Vital Statistics on Congress, first published in 1980, long ago became the go-to source of impartial data on the United States Congress. Vital Statistics’ purpose is to collect and provide useful data on America’s first branch of government, including data on the composition of its membership, its formal procedure (such as the use of… Continue Reading

Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

FastCompany: “It’s no secret that your personal data is routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do. Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve… Continue Reading

BillTrack50 is available for everyone to research state and federal legislation and legislators – free

“BillTrack50 is a free service for citizens to look up information about federal and state bills and legislators. Register for a free account to start searching right away. We also provide tools appropriate for professionals to help track bills, and to help organizations share important information on their own website. To see how the free… Continue Reading

Nancy Pelosi: The Rolling Stone Interview

RollingStone – article and video: “Pelosi is at the height of her power, having recaptured the House, dispatched an attempted coup of her leadership, and faced down the president in a very public, extremely high-stakes fight. Her approval rating has risen eight points since November, and now sits higher than it has been in more… Continue Reading

GINA, Big Data, and the Future of Employee Privacy

GINA, Big Data, and the Future of Employee Privacy Bradley A. Areheart & Jessica L. Roberts. Yale Law Journal, Vol. 128 2018-2019, Number 3, January 2019 544-871. “Threats to privacy abound in modern society, but individuals currently enjoy little meaningful legal protection for their privacy interests. We argue that the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA)… Continue Reading

Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018

AP: “All the bill needed to become law was President Donald Trump’s signature. It would create a national archive of documents from civil rights cold cases. Students had been working on the project for years, families waiting on it for decades. But time was running out. Legislation dies in the transition from one session of… Continue Reading