recordsquest

Washington Post and Boing Boing report that a female Secret Service agent was held by the TSA for spilling the contents of her child's sippy cup at Reagan National Airport on June 14th, 2007. This is the video from the TSA website, along with the incident report.

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http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/3716844/6-17-07sippycup.3716844.TPB.tor...

The Spy Who Billed Me blog reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency has released a Powerpoint presentation about their budget that conflicts with earlier reports.

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http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3711790

Information Gleaned by: ACLU
Government Agency: Defense Department
Volume of Records: 496 Claims forms filled out by Iraqi and Afghani civilians.
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This volume contains claims by civilians who are requesting monetary damages from the United States for deaths, injuries and property destruction since the beginnings of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The claims of these citizens are written in their own handwriting and the amounts paid for deaths of family members are in the thousands. These forms read like W-2's, it is chilling to see how bureaucratized human life is made out to be. Only about 80 of the claims contain an admission of fault by the US, in the rest blame is systematically discharged by one legal exemption or another.

Your comments are welcome. The task of reviewing all of these documents will leave any researcher bleary eyed, but if enough people read through them we can synthesize the key points and report on what the most significant portions of these records are. Please include which documents you are referencing in your posts.

Public records are more difficult to get now "in the digital age" than they have been in the past. Investigative reporters and citizen journalists alike all need access to this crucial information, but bureaucratic hurdles make it hard to get even basic information from government agencies. Our goal is to provide solutions by collaborative public records gathering using web technologies and civic coalitions to keep information free.

RecordsQuest.org is a project to make the way people interact with our government more democratic. Our aim is to build a technological infrastructure and a civic coalition that will provide unfettered access to public records, databases, emails and other public information that is increasingly withheld by government agencies for no legitimate reason. There are two components to the project. First is is the civic component. Our aim is to build a broad coalition of media workers, lawyers, advocates, activists and citizens who have an interest in making public records more accessible. We would do this by uploading digital public records requests to a BitTorrent network with permaseed capabilities. Second, the legislative component will utilize our member base to advocate for more laws that require a standard of openness through web publishing for government agencies.