LISNews: Librarian News

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction yesterday ordering Vice President Cheney and the National Archives to preserve all of his official records.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's order came in response to a lawsuit filed this month by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group, joined by several historians and open-government advocates, warned that Cheney might destroy or withhold important documents as the Bush administration winds down if he interprets the Presidential Records Act of 1978 as applying to only some of his official papers.

On the Media:
Email is the easiest and cheapest way to tell political lies. And you can’t blame the campaigns, or even journalists because these emails rarely cross the desks of editors. Bill Adair, editor of Politifact.com, weighs in on what’s true and what’s not from the latest crop of smear emails.
Full piece here.

On Wednesday, just as the Senate passed sweeping new legislation to modernize a 30 year old federal surveillance law, President Bush signaled that he would swiftly veto a bill approved by the House earlier in the day that would overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure emails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.

The measure was passed by a vote of 286-137, more than a year after several Senate and House investigations discovered that the Bush administration apparently purged millions of emails and that dozens of administration officials used email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct official White House business in what appeared to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

If you ever wanted concrete proof that the "Don't share my information with other companies" and "Stop emailing me" options on a web site are often useless, it's here. It's impossible to know which companies share data and which don't, but registering with the "do not share my e-mail" option ticked didn't appear to reduce spam in any way. Some of the bloggers reported a drop in the amount of spam they were receiving on a day-to-day basis when they unsubscribed from certain services, but the trend is not particularly strong.