Cook v. NARA Versus the Public’s Right to Know

In Cook v. National Archives and Records Administration , the court misapplied the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) privacy exemption to hide presidential records, favoring secrecy over the public interest. The court set up a double standard by protecting George W. Bush and Richard Cheney’s library reference requests—even though, under laws created during the Bush administration, librarians would face possible prison sentences for refusing to turn over similar requests. In 2013, a Gawker reporter named John Cook made a FOIA request to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to get more information on “who’s digging through what in former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s libraries.” Cook hoped to get a glimpse of NARA’s special access request policies and procedures because Bush, Cheney, and their representatives made thousands of secret requests to sift through presidential records before the public could see the papers. The requests were secret because NARA maintains presidential records pursuant to the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which limits public access to presidential archives through several statutory embargoes. During the embargo periods, former presidents and vice presidents, and their designated representatives, are the only people who can look through the collection. This special privilege is provided by the PRA and carried out by NARA archivists through the “special access request” process. The Cook v. NARA court relies on Exemption, the FOIA exemption that protects records containing personal information, to make Bush and Cheney’s special access requests off limits to the public. The court determines that the former officials’ interest in privately researching for their memoirs outweighs the public’s interest in seeing NARA’s operations during secretive record embargo periods (which have historically been opportunities for special access recipients to destroy and exploit presidential records), denying FOIA’s transparency directives. This case note suggests that the Second Circuit tipped the balance too far in favor of privacy in Cook v. NARA by mistakenly (1) treating Bush and Cheney like ordinary academic scholars, (2) ignoring the open-government, transparency purposes of both the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and (3) determining that PRA embargo periods are to provide former officials with unfettered access to their records

Cook v. NARA Versus the Public’s Right to Know

In Cook v. National Archives and Records Administration , the court misapplied the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) privacy exemption to hide presidential records, favoring secrecy over the public interest. The court set up a double standard by protecting George W. Bush and Richard Cheney’s library reference requests—even though, under laws created during the Bush administration, librarians would face possible prison sentences for refusing to turn over similar requests. In 2013, a Gawker reporter named John Cook made a FOIA request to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to get more information on “who’s digging through what in former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s libraries.” Cook hoped to get a glimpse of NARA’s special access request policies and procedures because Bush, Cheney, and their representatives made thousands of secret requests to sift through presidential records before the public could see the papers. The requests were secret because NARA maintains presidential records pursuant to the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which limits public access to presidential archives through several statutory embargoes. During the embargo periods, former presidents and vice presidents, and their designated representatives, are the only people who can look through the collection. This special privilege is provided by the PRA and carried out by NARA archivists through the “special access request” process. The Cook v. NARA court relies on Exemption, the FOIA exemption that protects records containing personal information, to make Bush and Cheney’s special access requests off limits to the public. The court determines that the former officials’ interest in privately researching for their memoirs outweighs the public’s interest in seeing NARA’s operations during secretive record embargo periods (which have historically been opportunities for special access recipients to destroy and exploit presidential records), denying FOIA’s transparency directives. This case note suggests that the Second Circuit tipped the balance too far in favor of privacy in Cook v. NARA by mistakenly (1) treating Bush and Cheney like ordinary academic scholars, (2) ignoring the open-government, transparency purposes of both the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and (3) determining that PRA embargo periods are to provide former officials with unfettered access to their records

Librarians as Feisty Advocates for Privacy

Librarians are the ideal professional group to advocate for privacy and intellectual freedom during online social media product use. Under the central leadership of the American Library Association (ALA), librarians should lead a campaign to urge Internet social media companies to include Privacy by Design principles in their user agreements. This social media privacy campaign would follow librarians’ historical privacy advocacy efforts, and promoting ethical user agreements presents a new venue for librarians’ advocacy in the era of online information access

Shape Matching and Object Recognition

We approach recognition in the framework of deformable shape matching, relying on a new algorithm for finding correspondences between feature points. This algorithm sets up correspondence as an integer quadratic programming problem, where the cost function has terms based on similarity of corresponding geometric blur point descriptors as well as the geometric distortion between pairs of corresponding feature points. The algorithm handles outliers, and thus enables matching of exemplars to query images in the presence of occlusion and clutter. Given the correspondences, we estimate an aligning transform, typically a regularized thin plate spline, resulting in a dense correspondence between the two shapes. Object recognition is handled in a nearest neighbor framework where the distance between exemplar and query is the matching cost between corresponding points. We show results on two datasets. One is the Caltech 101 dataset (Li, Fergus and Perona), a challenging dataset with large intraclass variation. Our approach yields a 45 % correct classification rate in addition to localization. We also show results for localizing frontal and profile faces that are comparable to special purpose approaches tuned to faces