New Presidential Website

Barrack Obama became the nation's 44th. President of the United States at noon yesterday before the eyes of probably almost the entire world. In the Wall Street Journal he was courted as "calling for a new era of responsibility."

Today's his first day at THE OFFICE --- Now 26 hours old

…Nobody said this would be easy or all fun. Mr. Obama said in his inaugural address that, "Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests & putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed….. We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin the work of remaking America."

In keeping with that and his theme that "a time for change has happened," at almost the same instant the new president was being sworn in, a new administration re-launched the Presidential website. We call your attention to it this afternoon, if you haven’t already seen it. ( White House.gov )

It's not your typical law firm, government, or library-type site -- not that that's not good.

CNN relates "the new design includes more interactive features, a prominent photo gallery, access to e-mail alerts, and a blog. The site's 'briefing room' includes places for weekly video addresses, slide shows, presidential proclamations & executive orders, and news about nominations and appointments."

The site's "contact us page" sports the new administration's commitment to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history; News Media Director Macon Phillips, writing in their blog's initial entry, stated that the new President's online efforts will center on communication, transparency & participation.

Admittedly, there may still be a lot of "bugs" that still need to be worked out, but the site has lots of promise according to an article by Newseek’s Kurt Soller. One plan the White House has is posting non-emergency legislation for a couple days for public feedback before the President signs it. Another is letting online readers suggest their own priorities they think the Government should address, then allowing other readers to comment on them.

"To succeed," Soller writes, "the site will have to roll out features slowly, combining the best of social networking with the new administration's presumably limited manpower to moderate or read in-boxes bulging with e-mail. It will be interesting to see how many resources the President will put into the digital realm, but online media consultants agree the framework is there to accomplish it."

Wired.com on Monday explored a lot of other obstacles and nuances facing the new "wannabe tech-savy" administration, not the least of which, Soller adds, may come from the Presidential Records Act, which requires all written communications be preserved. Says Mr. Soller, "We won't even try to guess how many gigabytes of data Obama's site might add to that record… but at least there'll be some new jobs at the National Archives."

Social Security Administration's Online Retirement Application

The Social Security Administration – in part envisaging the prospect of having some 80 million baby boomers becoming eligible for retirement in the not-too-distant future at the rate of some 10,000 a day for the next 20 years -- yesterday introduced another new service that will allow applying for retirement benefits online.

An Associated Press article, this morning, relates that the SSA has had versions of some applications available online since 2000, but that they had still required applicants to mail or deliver documents with signatures, copies of birth certificates, or W-2 forms to regional offices. In the future most cases are expected to be completely paperless.

Now, one can determine, apply for, and get estimates of what benefits one might be eligible for, and get a wealth of other information from SSA’s recently re-designed web site @ http://www.socialsecurity.gov/ .

Disability benefits can also be applied for online.

Last Summer, its "Retirement Estimator," the highest rated online application in government, was introduced by the Social Security Administration.

Ohio Supreme Court Public Access Rules

The Ohio Supreme Court yesterday announced adoption of its rules regarding public access to court records— its first formal policy guiding what court records the public can and cannot see, according to the Toledo Blade—ending, or at least putting on hold for a time, a debate reaching back some six years or more that initial addressed privacy matters & identity theft concerns as more courts began making records available on the Internet. ( Court’s Announcement )

Cleveland lawyer David Marburger told the Blade that the rules were not as problematic as those proposed a year ago, but that they still set a bad precedent. “It opens the way for broad swaths of closed court records,” he said. “The court assumes it has the authority to adopt these rules and amend them later to identify a record solely based on its content that should automatically be kept out of the public domain even if no litigant in a case asks that the record be closed.” Marburger questions the Court’s authority, in the first place, to issue general rules he says go beyond administrative housekeeping to affect litigants’ substantive rights.

Amendments proposing the new rules were submitted after some two years of work and research by the Commission on the Rules of Superintendence, which makes recommendations to the Supreme Court regarding the rules that govern all Ohio courts.

Language for the rules, the Court said, was based in part on the report and recommendations of the Privacy and Public Access Subcommittee of the Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Technology and the Courts, a subcommittee that included members of the public and the media. Rules include:

• Definitions of court record, case document, administrative document, case file and other terms.


• A process for the sealing of court records. The court can consider whether to allow limited public access to a case document or information in a case document upon request by a party to the case or a person who is the subject of information in the case document only after finding by clear and convincing evidence that the presumption of public access is outweighed by a higher interest.


• A process by which any person may request access to a case document or information in a case document that has been granted limited public access. Currently when an entire record is sealed, no part of the record is accessible to the public, nor can it be petitioned to be accessible.


• A provision requiring the partial redaction or omission of personal identifiers, i.e. personal information that might contribute to identity theft, from a case document before the document is submitted to a court or filed with a clerk of court. The rules also state that a court or a clerk of court may provide a form for the recording of personal identifiers omitted from a case document. The court, clerk of court and parties would continue to have full access to this information.

The Court will instruct local court personnel next year in the intricacies familiarizing them with the public access rules.

Rules become effective May 1st. 2009