What Google's Transparency Report Doesn't Tell Us

Vijayan, Jaikumar. "What Google's Transparency Report Doesn't Tell Us." Computer World, January 25, 2013. 

From the article: "Google's Transparency Reports, released every six months, are interesting not just for what they reveal about government requests for Internet user data, but also for what they do not reveal...

The company's latest report, released on Wednesday, shows that the U.S. government again led other nations in submitting the most requests for user data with Google. In the second half of 2012, the U.S. put in 8,438 requests for Internet user data, up 6% from the 7,979 requests it placed in the first six months of the year.

Between 2011 and 2012, U.S. data requests from Google increased by more than 30%....

Google's transparency reports do not include requests for user data made by the government under the U.S. Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence SurveillanceAmendment Act or through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs). Most of the requests made via these statutes are tied to national security issues and often compel providers to disclose far more data than ECPA subpoenas and court orders permit." Read more

Building an Iconography for Digital Privacy

Sengupta, Somini. "Building an Iconography for Digital Privacy." The New York Times, November 19, 2012.

Web site privacy policies are usually long, vague and notoriously neglected by most of us. Or as Alex Fowler, chief privacy officer at Mozilla, put it, “We have long upheld that privacy policies suck.”

Now, an experiment is under way to make those privacy policies somewhat more palatable. The idea is to have lawyers and coders muddle through thousands of words of legalese and distill their meaning into a set of graphic icons. In effect, the pros will read those notoriously unreadable policies, so the rest of us don’t have to.

Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch

Ginsberg, Wendy, et al. "Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch." Congressional Research Service, November 8, 2012. 

From the report: "This report subsequently examines the statutes, initiatives, requirements, and other actions that make information more available to the public or protect it from public release. It also examines transparency and secrecy from the standpoint of how the public accesses government information, and whether the release of government data and information may make operation of the federal government more or, counter-intuitively, less transparent. Finally, this report analyzes whether existing transparency initiatives are effective in reaching their stated goals." Read more