#recordkeeping — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #recordkeeping, aggregated by home.social.
-
No Company Has Admitted to Replacing Workers With AI in New York
-
Comment on DHS Records Modification
We received notice from Restore the Fourth about a comment period on a DHS change to the agency’s record system. Disturbingly, they have already made the change, but now are asking for retroactive approval. Sorry, no approval from us!
There are just 3 days left to comment, so have your say at this link.
Here is the text of Restore the Fourth’s e-mail announcing the comment period, which I sadly did not notice days ago when it was sent:
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), for the first time, has begun pooling data from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the IRS and state voter rolls, to generate a list of US citizens in its “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)” database.
They have begun doing this without notifying the American public of this change in practice, and without offering an opportunity before they began for people to comment, violating the National Privacy Act of 1974. That Act, responding to Watergate, intentionally siloed federal datasets, preventing different federal agencies from sharing data except in very specific cases where justification and notification of the subject of the “investigation” is required.
Without that siloing, the government can go fishing across all of government to find anything that a pre-selected person has done wrong; and doing that violates the Fourth Amendment.
What USCIS is doing now is asking for public comment on these changes that have already happened, in order to get some sort of retrospective blessing and insulate themselves from legal challenges. We don’t bless it. We urge you to write comments objecting to it.
Below is the Restore the Fourth suggested e-mail with a list of talking points; use one or more, paraphrase, or write your own comment:- I oppose the change that DHS/USCIS has implemented to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service’s (USCIS’) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Pooling data from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and state voter data and other sources violates the National Data Privacy Act of 1974. The fact that DHS/USCIS is belatedly asking for comment about the changes that it has already implemented by accessing data from other federal agency databases in order to gather additional information on immigrants in violation of the National Data Privacy Act is deeply troubling because many Americans would have opposed this change had they been consulted ahead of the change, as the Act requires.
- The National Privacy Act of 1974 created silos in order to prevent different federal agencies from sharing data except in very specific cases, and in those cases justification and notification of the subject of the “investigation” is required. Enacted in the aftermath of Watergate, the National Privacy Act was designed to protect Americans from investigations where the government is fishing for evidence that someone has committed a crime with no predicate based on probable cause that they have done anything criminal. Access by any agency to another agency’s data without probable cause to see specific data on a suspect is illegal in order to protect all of us, regardless of our political party or our immigration status. Every resident of the U.S. is entitled to the protections enshrined by the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution.
- The legal justification provided by DHS in its SORN for its merger of federal databases is a 1999 opinion in which the Department of Justice limited the kinds of restrictions agencies could put on sharing data with law enforcement. It provides for the lawful disclosure of citizenship- or immigration-related information, but it does not grant the Social Security Administration the authority to disclose information without adhering to the requirements of the Privacy Act.
- The repurposing of data from different agencies is also dangerous because different people’s records may be incorrectly linked together because of a name misspelling or even a failure to update a name change.
- DHS/ICIS has implemented additional changes to normal practices as part of its consolidation. Until recently there was no way to deactivate a person’s Social Security number and prevent them from receiving benefits unless there was documentation of their death. Under SAVE, DHS now uses a special indicator code to flag what it considers questionable data or special circumstances concerning an application for an SSN. This allows DHS, without any form of review, to terminate someone’s Social Security benefit. In one case earlier this year when the Social Security Administration under DOGE accidentally declared an 82-year-old man dead (see https://www.livenowfox.com/news/seattle-man-social-security-error), he lost his Social Security benefits, Medicare coverage, and even access to his bank fund. Since in the system being implemented by DHS there will be challenges in matching up names across various databases, the risk of accidental terminations of benefits is heightened.
- In 2023, a lawyer from the Social Security Administration wrote to the Fair Elections Center that “while SSA records provide an indication of citizenship, they do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship,” so it is very concerning that SSA data can now be used to eliminate Americans from voter rolls without further verification.
- Until now, undocumented Immigrants who lawfully paid federal taxes on their earnings using an Individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) were promised that their personal information would remain confidential. DHS access to the IRS database completely undermines this protection, making it much less likely that they will file. This reduces government revenue and will result in increased taxes for the rest of us.
- We are seeing more frequent and broader hacking operations affecting federal agencies by foreign states and other actors (see https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-charges-12-chinese-contract-hackers-and-law-enforcement-officers-global and https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/us-treasurys-workstations-hacked-cyberattack-by-china-afp-reports-2024-12-30/ and https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-OPM-Data-Breach-How-the-Government-Jeopardized-Our-National-Security-for-More-than-a-Generation.pdf). By combining databases as DHS/USCIS is doing, hundreds of millions of Americans’ data may be compromised by hackers.
- For all of these reasons, I ask DHS/USCIS to terminate the changes to the SAVE program.
#confidentiality #data #dataSilos #dhs #hacking #immigration #irs #nationalDataPrivacyActOf1974 #privacy #recordKeeping #repurposingData #save #socialSecurity #ssa #systemicAlienVerificationForEntitlements #uscis
-
SEC Faces Heat Over Missing Gensler Texts as Lawmakers Demand Accountability - TLDR:
Lawmakers press SEC over lost Gary Gensler texts, citing failures in oversight and... - https://blockonomi.com/sec-faces-heat-over-missing-gensler-texts-as-lawmakers-demand-accountability/ #financialservices #cryptoregulation #recordkeeping #u.s.congress #garygensler #regulation #compliance #oversight #sec
-
Michael Nedd’s BLM Calendar, From Election Day 2016 through the Inaugural Period
Back in 2019, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the work calendar of Michael Nedd, a longtime Bureau of Land Management official, for the months following the 2016 election through the inaugural period. The documents were released just the other day, six years and four months after I submitted the FOIA request.
Nedd had been promoted from Executive Director, Energy Minerals and Management to Deputy Director at the Bureau of Land Management in March of 2017, just a couple of months after Trump took office. He would have been privy, I imagined, to any discussions of Twin Metals’ canceled mineral leases and the full-court-press flurry to renew them. I thought his work calendar might help me fill out the Timeline I made of that coordinated effort or help me reconstruct what was happening behind closed doors at BLM.
Upon review, these documents do not seem all that helpful in that regard. For example, the Timeline indicates that on February 7, 2017, Nedd forwards a briefing paper on land withdrawals to his colleagues; no surprise, his calendar for that day shows a “Land Withdrawal Proposal Discussion.” In my view, all this does is drive home a point I’ve made many times, that reversing land withdrawals was a priority for the incoming administration. And we already have Nedd’s calendar for April of 2017, when he met with then-solicitor Daniel Jorjani and other officials to discuss “Mining in Minnesota.” Or at least we had that calendar, but the link (to a domain called altgov2) has now gone dead. Well, not exactly dead: it’s a tarted-up 404 Page, occupied by “affiliate marketers.” I’m not going to bother linking to it, but if you want to see what I’m talking about, just go to the entry for April 10th on the Twin Metals Timeline and click the link to Nedd’s calendar.) It’s been a while, and, contrary to popular wisdom, the Internet is not forever.
So why put these documents up now? Circumstances have changed. The threat to the Boundary Waters looks even more menacing than it did during Trump’s first term, and we should be paying attention to what’s going on now, not what happened eight or more years ago, right?
What’s more, Michael Nedd was frog marched out of BLM’s office back in May, 2025, for telling employees to ignore a DOGE directive. (Politico has the details here; the Washington Post also has a story; I’ll note in passing that it’s classic Politico to report Nedd’s ouster, which is part of the clumsily executed destruction of modern American government that we’re witnessing, as a threat to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda.) Though Nedd is still listed on the BLM website as Deputy Director, Greenwire reports that Joe Stout has now replaced him as Acting Deputy Director. Things are unclear: there may be litigation underway or some reinstatement in the works. (After all, the DC kleptocrats wouldn’t want to do anything to threaten that fossil fuel agenda).
Anyway, I put these records up now because a) they arrived, so I might as well acknowledge the response; b) they help fill out the public record for a critical period; c) someone else might find these records useful; and d) I have a chance to test out Muckrock’s DocumentCloud plugin for WordPress — which I have not used until now.
In order to upload the 2000-plus-page calendar to documentcloud.org, I had to break it into two parts.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Postscript 30 August 2025: Results from the plugin experiment are mixed. Right now, it looks as if the documentcloud server is returning a 500 error. The docs, if you want them, are here.
Postcript 2, 9 Sept 2025. 1) It turns out the 500 error only shows up when I try to view the documents on Chrome, on my laptop. The plugin works just fine on Safari and Firefox. And when I emailed Sanjin Ibrahimovic at Muckrock to ask about all this, he said he could not replicate the 500 error, even when viewing the post in Chrome. So, who knows? I speculated that it might be an extension I’m running on Chrome. As long as people can access the documents, all is well, I guess. 2) On Chris D’Amico‘s suggestion, I tried looking at the post in an incognito window. And I can see the docs just fine.
Type your email…
Subscribe
#antiScience #bureaucracy #climateDenial #corruption #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #kleptocracy #Muckrock #publicRecord #recordKeeping #Water #Wordpress
-
Back to the Great Swamp
I last visited the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in February. The photographs I took on my walk that afternoon I edited in black and white, which seemed to suit and evoke the gloomy winter mood of the place.
This morning, the mood was very different. These are a few photos I took while kayaking through the Swamp today.
#35mm #GreatSwamp #kayak #photography #recordKeeping #SonyA7iii #Water
-
Your thoughts on the TEAM spirit matter—join the discussion and tell us what unity means to you! #SpeakUp #TEAM #Unity #Teamwork #Collaboration #Inspiration #Community #TogetherStrong #Inclusivity #SharedSuccess #RecordKeeping #UnlimitedPotential #TeamEffort #CollectiveVision #OpenDiscussion #CallToAction #ModernInspiration #TeamMindset #SpeakUp #CommunityImpact #NoLimits
https://medium.com/@sanjay.mohindroo66/team-together-everyone-can-achieve-more-embrace-unity-for-greater-achievements-4bddaa4e9abd -
How do we scrutinise whether disappeared messages comply with record-keeping requirements if the messages in question have been… disappeared?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/27/stephanie-foster-signal-australian-home-affairs-secretary-trump-scandal
#AusPol #AusGov #AusLaw #Accountability #Transparency #RecordKeeping -
Amateur archaeologist uncovers ice age ‘writing’ system
-
Levi-Strauss on the Functions of Writing
…The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical pattern of development observed from Egypt to China, at the time when first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of Architecture than the direct link referred to above. …
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/levi-strauss-on-the-functions-of-writing
I’m not sure I can agree with CLS’s assertion that writing enabled slavery (omitted in the above exerpt), but the notion that writing can communicate across time or across a complex organisation, enabling bureaucracy, is asn interesting onee. There’'s a pre-voicing of Arendt’s “banality” observation here as well.
Originally: https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/8e1fa4102f650139e9ed002590d8e506
#writing #ClaudLeviStrauss #Anthropology #recordkeeping #organisation
-
Levi-Strauss on the Functions of Writing
...The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical pattern of development observed from Egypt to China, at the time when first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of Architecture than the direct link referred to above. ....
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/levi-strauss-on-the-functions-of-writing
#writing #ClaudLeviStrauss #Anthropology #recordkeeping #organisation
I'm not sure I can agree with CLS's assertion that writing enabled slavery, but the notion that writing can communicate across time or across a complex organisation, enabling bureaucracy, is asn interesting onee. There''s a pre-voicing of Arendt's "banality" observation here as well.