In February, I sent out numerous Freedom of Information Act requests to different government agencies to see if they had any information on me in their files.  I received my response letters from most of the agencies, and they're on the one hand fairly anticlimactic, and on the other hand illuminating of how potentially weak FOIA can be.

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) held their annual awards ceremony last Thursday in New York City, and among the usual winners – Time, The New Yorker, etc. – was Tim Rogers, writer for D Magazine, a small monthly magazine in Dallas. Rogers won “best profile writing” for his piece about one of the public faces of the famous internet hacker group, Barrett Brown. Rogers's profile is called “Barrett Brown is Anonymous.” 

The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

On this week’s episode, we’re talking about the one year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Today, the government released a trove of declassified materials from the raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. If your Arabic is up to snuff, you can see the original documents here. If not, helpful English summaries are this-a-way. 

This week, a British high court declared the self-described "most resilient BitTorrent site" guilty of "massively infringing on copyright", and ruled that British ISPs must block access to the site. Since The Pirate Bay is infamous for telling legal interlopers to sodomize themselves with retractable batons, the team at The Pirate Bay doesn't seem too concerned.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post Books Blog.

The most effective campaign posters of every era leave as much as possible to the voter's imagination. They are like Japanese manga: the less detailed the image, the more easily we can identify with the candidate, the more space for projecting our dreams. The more specific the image, the greater the risk of creating a feeling of "otherness" which translates into death at the polls.

"This Report examines whether or not there is good evidence to suggest that the Committee and its predecessor Committees have been misled by any witnesses during thecourse of their work on the phone-hacking scandal, which continues to reverberate around News International and to have major repercussions for the British newspaper industry as a whole."

Today the British Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee released their report on the Murdoch’s News International phone-hacking scandal.

About a year ago, OTM talked with Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson about the wifi-snooping tendencies of Google’s Street View. The project was not only taking panoramic pictures for the Google Maps application, but also picking up data from the unsecured wifi signals it came across. 

The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

Earlier this month, the California 9th Circuit court of appeals decided a case called Minority Television Project v. FCC. The case concerned San Francisco station KTMP, a public television station that had been fined for carrying paid corporate advertisements. The 9th circuit upheld the ruling, and in the process, struck down a more than half-century old ban on political and issue advertisements airing on public airwaves.

In February, we aired a piece by Rick Karr about a boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, for practices that academics and academic librarians said were prohibitively expensive. Of particular concern is a practice called "bundling," which requires libraries to subscribe to numerous periodicals they had no interest in so they might get a few that they wanted. A new memorandum by Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council makes their concerns about academic periodicals explicit, by saying the existing pricing model is untenable:

The staff of OTM again pick a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

A notorious website closes and OTM producer PJ Vogt reflects on our infamous interview with its founder, Hunter Moore.

The staff of OTM again pick a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

This week on the show, we're talking with Carl Malamud, open government advocate and director of public.resource.org. Malamud's interested in what are called "incorporation by reference." The phrase describes laws that have references to safety standards embedded in them. For instance, a law that says your car has to have turning signals will also include standards about how bright or how large the turn signals have to be. Malamud's gripe is that frequently, those standards are written by private companies, and those companies hold the copyright to the standards. That means that even though the standards are part of a law everyone has to follow, citizens have to pay -- sometimes several hundreds of dollars -- for the privilege of looking at them.

Yesterday, OTM producer Chris Neary read this Wired.com article about a bill called The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that leaker Bradley Manning is charged with having violated numerous times. Since Chris had some questions about the story and I'm kind of a nerd about hacking stuff, we thought it might be useful to have our conversation about the CFAA on the blog. Please feel free to contribute in the comments below.

The staff of OTM again choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

The staff of OTM again choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.