Public records are documents that are made available to the general public under the Freedom of Information Act. The information contained within these documents is commonly utilized for making assessment of an individual or affairs of the state.

Theoretically speaking, any document that is covered by taxpayer funds should be made available to the public. However this is not always the case, as some states have specific laws that dictate which records are open and which have restrictions imposed for particular reasons. These reasons often include the cases where the file in question will jeopardize national security, infringe on an individual’s privacy or interfere with a trial. Continue reading →

We’ve had  irrefutable proof  for a while now that the NSA collects and stores all of Verizon’s telephone call records. We now know, thanks to documents recently  declassified by President Obama that the government snooping extends to tens of thousands of emails and other online communications, dating all the way back to 2008, and against the will of the secret court that oversees the NSA’s data collection program. We know that they have built a network which monitors and records up to  75 percent of all web traffic. There are two things, though, that we don’t really know. We don’t know to what ends exactly the NSA is using all of the data it stores on us, though we can be pretty confident it isn’t to target ads at us, a la Google. We also don’t know exactly how much  Internet privacy  they intend to infringe upon and revoke from us for whatever exactly those (presumably nefarious, they are overseen by a secret court after all) ends are. Continue reading →