Skip to main content

Information Must be Free!



The idea that information must be free, that is without restriction, is a mantra among open government folk and librarians. A companion quote is “. . .and this is especially true concerning cool information.”  I recently stumbled (hat tip to Boing Boing) upon some real cool information that, while not entirely free, is being let out of its cage to touch the grass for the first time.

The National Security Administration (NSA, aka “No Such Agency” or “Never Say Anything”) is responsible for the American intelligence community’s “Signit” (Signal intelligence) operations. They are America’s code breakers. These are the guys who “supposedly” listen to every long distance phone call out of the country and read everyone’s email. This agency is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign radio signals. They have a huge complex in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC on a heavily patrolled stretch of road where I used to drive my kids around so that they would nap. I have heard that the NSA hires more computer science and math majors than anyone else.  According to Wikipedia they are allowed to file for patents with the USPTO that “are not revealed to the public and do not expire.” If someone files for an identical patent, the USPTO will reveal the NSA’s patent and then let the NSA hold the patent for the entire term. 

Recently they have released back issues of their in-house magazine, Cryptolog. While the front-cover looks like a fanzine from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, these issues are packed with a lot of interesting information; as long as you don’t mind redaction; lots and lots of redaction.  The coverage begins in 1974 and ends in 1997. For an more information be sure to read the FAQ’s. 

If the reader can get past the huge amounts of redacted material, from authors and editor’s names to entire articles, a wealth of material still exists. I read a multipage article on slang in Soviet prisons. I skimmed multiple issues and found articles on Church-State relations in the Mexican state of Chiapas, packet radio (?), radar intercept systems used by the North Vietnamese, and an article titled, “Third Party Relationships” which sounds interesting, but I couldn’t tell because the whole thing was redacted. 

While I can’t verify it, this may just be an attempt to skim IP addresses, so visit the archive at your own risk.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.