Freedom of Information Act Performance, 2012: Agencies Are Processing More Requests but Redacting More Often

A building block of American democracy is the idea that citizens have a right to information about how their government works and what it does in their name. However, citizen access to public information was only established by law in 1966 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The law has since been strengthened and improved over the years, and FOIA currently requires federal agencies to formally respond to requests for information within 20 working days or potentially face a lawsuit. While there are exemptions that agencies can use to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information or information that violates privacy rights, agencies processed over half a million FOIA requests in 2012. In about 41 percent of these cases, the information requested was released "in full" with no parts "redacted" -- i.e., clean, complete documents with no blacked-out parts were provided to the person who requested the information. How does this compare to past years and past administrations? How well has President Obama met his goal of being the most transparent administration in history with regard to access to public information? This report examines the processing of FOIA requests from 25 major federal agencies in 2012 and reviews the processing of FOIA requests by agencies since 1998

Essays on corporate disclosures, innovation, and investments

This dissertation comprises three essays investigating corporate disclosures and their impact on corporate investments, particularly investments in innovation. The study delves into the critical role of innovation, a driver of economic growth and business success, which also sparks debates on the value-relevance of accounting disclosures.The first essay develops a text-based innovation measure based on financial statement text, filling the gap of inability of conventional proxies, such as R&amp;D investments and patents, in measuring the broad array of firms’ innovative activities. This measure proves valuable in understanding firms’ strategic assets and predicting future growth, market performance, and net income. The second essay explores the implications of innovation-related disclosures on managerial decisions and how the separation or bundling of information releases affects firms’ ability to gather information from stock prices. The third essay investigates firms’ incentives to disclose innovation-related investments while considering proprietary costs and their potential benefits for rival firms. Overall, this dissertation contributes to understanding the dynamics of corporate disclosures, their effects on capital markets and firms’ investment choices, and the complexities surrounding proprietary costs of these disclosures.<br/

Screen Capture for Sensitive Systems

Maintaining usable security in application domains such as healthcare or power systems requires an ongoing conversation among stakeholders such as end-users, administrators, developers, and policy makers. Each party has power to influence the design and implementation of the application and its security posture, and effective communication among stakeholders is one key to achieving influence and adapting an application to meet evolving needs. In this thesis, we develop a system that combines keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) capture with automatic text redaction to produce precise technical content that can enrich stakeholder communications, improve end-user influence on system evolution, and help reveal the definition of ``usable security.\u27\u27 Text-redacted screen captures reduce sensitivity of captured material and thus can facilitate timely data sharing among stakeholders. KVM-based capture makes our system both application and operating-system independent because it eliminates software-interface dependencies on capture targets. Thus, our work can be used to instrument closed or certified systems where capture software cannot be installed or documentation and support lack. It can instrument widely-varying platforms that lack standards-compliance and interoperability or redact special document formats while displayed onscreen. We present three techniques for redacting text from screenshots and two redaction applications. One application can capture, text redact, and edit screen video and the other can text redact and edit static screenshots. We also present empirical measurements of redaction effectiveness and processing latency to demonstrate system performance. When applied to our principal dataset, redaction removes text with over 93\% accuracy and simultaneously preserves more than 76\% of image pixels on average. Thus by default, it retains more visual context than a technique such as blindly redacting entire screenshots. Finally, our system redacts each screenshot in 0.1 to 21 seconds depending on which technique it applies

Towards Redaction of Digital Information from Electronic Devices

In the discovery portion of court proceedings, it is necessary to produce information to opposing counsel. Traditionally, this information is in paper form with all privileged information removed. Increasingly, the information requested during discovery exists in digital form and savvy counsel is requesting direct access to the original digital source: a broad spectrum of additional digital information can be often be extracted using digital forensics. This paper describes the major problems which must be solved to redact digital information from electronic devices. The primary hurdle facing digital redaction is the lack of a rational process for systematically handling encoded, encrypted, or otherwise complex data objects. Any such process would need to incorporate a method for validating the integrity of electronic or digital redaction processes. Keywords: digital forensics, redaction, electronic discovery, legal production, privileg

SafeguaRDP: an Architecture for Mediated Control of Desktop Applications by Untrusted Crowd Workers

The future of crowdsourcing depends on improving usability for the requesters who post jobs. Allowing workers to perform tasks directly on a requester’s computer could help, by obviating the need to adapt data into formats that a crowdsourcing platform can handle. However, granting remote access to a requester’s desktop would also pose the risk the workers might steal information or take malicious actions. This thesis presents SafeguaRDP, an architecture designed to enable future services in which a mediated and redacted desktop is shown to a remote worker. The redaction of the desktop does not modify any files on the desktop; it only changes what is shown to the worker. This thesis contributes the rationale behind the architecture as well as a threat analysis based on accepted software security principles. To place the SafeguaRDP architecture in context, a set of eight vignettes illustrate potential applications that would be possible with future services based on the SafeguaRDP architecture. With these applications, the transfer of digital labor may someday become as simple as the transfer of data today, all while preserving the privacy of the hiring party

Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data

This paper explores the costs and benefits of four avenues for achieving open Form 990 data: a mandate for e-filing, an IRS initiative to turn Form 990 data into open data, a third-party platform that would create an open database for Form 990 data, and a priori electronic filing. Sections also discuss the life and usage of 990 data. With bibliographical references