Log in
  • Monday, September 10, 2018 4:34 PM | Anonymous

    ART has joined 24 other organizations in opposing the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) proposal to collect citizenship and country of birth information about state and local prisoners, a data collection project of dubious efficacy and accuracy. 

    Read the full letter here.

  • Thursday, July 05, 2018 11:57 AM | Anonymous

    Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, provided an update on the AOTUS Blog about the the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) work to review and revise Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records retention schedules relating to deaths and sexual assaults of detainees in government custody. 

    Ferriero states that, "As part of the regular process of reviewing the submission from ICE, NARA received an unprecedented number of comments. Comments under review by NARA include three congressional letters with a total of 36 signatures (29 house members, 7 senators); a petition from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with 23,758 comments, a petition from UltraViolet with 1,475 signatures; written comments from 187 individuals and six organizations; and phone calls from seven individuals."

    ICE previously requested imminent destruction of records of deaths and sexual assaults of detainees, which the Roundtable publicly opposed in its ART Statement on ICE Retention Schedules.



  • Monday, June 25, 2018 3:58 PM | Anonymous

    On June 22, 2018, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Daniel Coats, responded to the coalition letter ART signed on May 31, 2018, regarding ODNI failure to report information as required by the USA FREEDOM Act for it's call records program that replaced the bulk collection program outlawed by the same legislation. Read the response here

  • Thursday, May 31, 2018 1:07 PM | Anonymous

    ART has signed pair of letters spearheaded by the ACLU regarding ODNI failure to report information as required by the USA FREEDOM Act for it's call records program that replaced the bulk collection program outlawed by the same legislation (a bulk collection program developed to target immigrants). This letter highlights potential unlawful surveillance and collection of data of persons in the U.S., as well as failures of transparency on the part of the government in disclosing the extent of surveillance and data gathering mechanisms. Read the letter to the Director of the ODNI here, and the letter to the House Judiciary Committee here

    ART has also signed a letter issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), highlighting the Department of State proposal to ask visa applicants to provide social media identifiers, telephone numbers, and email addresses used in the past five years, among other information. This is yet another form of data gathering by the US Government that will undermine civil liberties and free speech, and an issue which we've pushed back on previously, in our official statement on the DHS/ICE Visa Lifecycle Vetting initiativeRead the full letter here.


  • Thursday, May 17, 2018 3:14 PM | Anonymous

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has abandoned the software component of its “Extreme Vetting Initiative,” also named the "Visa Lifecycle Vetting" initiative, which aimed to automatically mine Facebook, Twitter, and the broader Internet to determine whether visitors to the U.S. would "contribute to American society", further national interests, or intend to commit crimes or terrorist acts, language lifted directly from President Trump’s Muslim Ban of January 2017.

    ICE has eliminated the machine-learning requirement from its vetting initiative, opting to hire a contractor that can provide human personnel to execute the job. While this represents a victory for government transparency and accountability activism, a vetting plan (with human personnel) is still moving froward, with a contract expected to cost more than $100 million, to be awarded by the end of the year.

    Read the Washington Post article breaking the news, as well as the ART Advocacy Committee’s initial coalition letter with the Concerned Archivists Alliance (CAA) opposing the Extreme Vetting Initiative.


  • Friday, May 04, 2018 4:46 PM | Anonymous

    This past February, the ART Advocacy Committee organized Investing in Archivists: Advocating as a Lone Arranger, hosted by the New York Municipal Archives. The Advocacy Committee is pleased to finally publish the video recording of the event.





    Investing In Archivists: Advocating as a Lone Arranger


    Panelists:


    Yue Ma, Director for Collections and Research, Museum of Chinese in America


    Yue Ma, Director for Collections and Research at MOCA, manages the museum collections, library, and archives at 70 Mulberry Street. Yue oversees daily acquisition, preservation, digitization, research, and online projects. In addition, she assisted with the permanent exhibition “With a Single Step,” and co-curated the exhibition “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving.” Prior to MOCA, Yue worked at the Shenzhen City Archives in China. Educated globally, she received a B.Sc. and a MBA in China, and then received a MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from a joint program at Ryerson University in Canada and George Eastman House in America.


    Elena Rossi-Snook, New York Public Library Reserve Film and Video Collection


    Elena Rossi-Snook is the Collection Manager for the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library. She has an M.A. in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia and was the 2002 recipient of the Kodak Fellowship in Film Preservation. She has served as a curriculum consultant for the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program, on the Board of Directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is the chair of the AMIA Film Advocacy Task Force. Elena’s documentary film WE GOT THE PICTURE was made an official selection of the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival. Rossi-Snook teaches film history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.


    Julianna Monjeau, Archivist, Public Design Commission of the City of New York


    Julianna Monjeau is the Archivist and Records Manager of the Public Design Commission. She holds a Master’s Degree in Archives & Public History from New York University. She manages the accession and preservation of all public records reviewed by the Public Design Commission, prepares and manages archival grants, provides research services, manages the digitization of Design Commission records, provides public tours of the archive, and promotes the collection on the agency's social media platforms.


    Moderated By:


    Michael Andrec, PhD CA, Archivist, Ukrainian History and Education Center


    Michael Andrec has been the archivist at the Ukrainian History and Education Center since 2010. Michael has been tasked with single-handedly bringing the nearly 200 collections containing documents, photographs, ephemera, and recorded sound that the Center had accumulated since the 1960s up to professional standards of arrangement, description, preservation, and accessibility, while at the same time providing reference services, outreach, and web site/social media content. Outside of the archives, Michael is a consultant in statistics and data analytics, programming, and web design and development. He is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and other national, regional, and local archival associations, and has served on the board of A.R.T.


    New York City Municipal Archives, Room 111 (Municipal Archives and Municipal Library Reading Room), 31 Chambers St, New York, NY 10007


    Date of video: 2-22-2018

    Format of original video: Digitally captured on an iPhone 8


  • Friday, April 13, 2018 2:04 PM | Anonymous

    ART has joined over 300 organizations in singing Census Stakeholder letters to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) & Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), calling upon them to promptly hold oversight hearings with regards to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census. 


    Read the House OGR letter here

    Read the Senate HSGAC letter here

  • Thursday, March 22, 2018 5:20 PM | Anonymous

    The Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York (ART) and the Concerned Archivists Alliance (CAA) issued a letter to over 150 congressional staffers opposing the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) proposed Visa Lifecycle Vetting program, under the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Visa Lifecycle Vetting Program aims to use social media monitoring to automatically flag 10,000 people annually—inside the country and abroad—for deportation investigations and visa denial. Formerly known as the “Extreme Vetting Initiative,” the Visa Lifecycle Vetting plan represents ICE efforts to monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest of internet to automatically identify people for deportation or visa denial based on the exact criteria from the Executive Order 13769 (widely known as the “Muslim ban”). 

    This plan demonstrates, at best, an incredibly flawed data mining initiative, and at worst, a repressive mode of government surveillance under the guise of efficiency and objectivity. The Visa Lifecycle Vetting initiative will undermine civil liberties and free speech, the cornerstones of our democracy.


    Read the full letter here

  • Friday, October 27, 2017 11:05 AM | Anonymous

    ART has signed on to a letter, written by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), to Acting Privacy Chief Officer Jonathan Cantor expressing “concerns with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) System of Records Notice…stating that DHS will now store social media information in ‘Alien Files’ (A-Files), which include the official record of an individual’s visa and immigration history.” This "raises concerns that the collection, retention, use, and sharing of social media information will (1) invade the privacy of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike; (2) chill freedom of speech and association; (3) invite abuse in exchange for little security benefit; and (4) establish a system that treats naturalized citizens as second-class citizens."

    Read the letter in full here


  • Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:09 AM | Anonymous

    The Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York (ART) urges the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to reconsider the records retention schedule preliminarily approved on June 20, 2017 (Appendix 1), relating to the disposition of detainee records generated by the officials of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Office of Professional Responsibility. ART has represented a diverse group of more than 400 archivists, librarians, and records managers in the New York metropolitan area since its inception in 1979, and is collectively alarmed by the implications of this ICE records appraisal.

    ICE is seeking approval from NARA to routinely destroy 11 types of records relating to abuses of detained individuals in ICE custody, including documentation of deaths and sexual assaults in ICE custody, uses of solitary confinement, alternatives to detention programs, communications from the public reporting detention abuses, and logs about detainees, among other records. The various timelines for the destruction of these records—from 20 years for sexual assault and death records, to 3 years for reports of use of solitary confinement—fail to adhere to archival and records management best practices, and present ethical red flags for information professionals and the general public. Our concerns derive from professional and ethical standpoints:

    Archives and Records Management Perspective: What Value Do The Records Possess?

    Historical Value

    ICE is a relatively new federal agency with significant activities under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security data recently collected by New York University researchers reported that between ICE’s inception in 2003, and 2015, 150 individuals died in the agency’s custody. Furthermore, the immigration detainee watchdog group, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), highlighted 14,693 reported incidents of sexual and physical abuse in ICE detention centers from 2010 to 2016, with just about 1 percent of these reports actually resulting in investigations. Deciding wholesale that 0% of records of abuses of ICE detainees deem worthy of permanent retention leaves no room for reassessment in the historical narrative, hamstringing future research with a glaring gap in the documentary record.

    Further, the “annual reports” mentioned in NARA’s “Appraisal Justification,” which amount to yearly summaries of abuse incidents or allegations, privilege top-down documentation of serious abuses of power by the government, and shroud the activities of ICE in secrecy, notably at a time when ICE is increasing its presence and authority. These executive reports are no replacement for the complete documentation generated by ICE officials, especially at a time of unprecedented immigration enforcement.

    This prioritization of top-down documentation also begs the question: Whose history is worth preserving? The executive summaries from ICE managers relating to (generalizing about) abuses in ICE custody will function as the “official” account—the public will thus rely on these synopses, as opposed to more nuanced documentary evidence from the ground (i.e. internal investigation documents scheduled for imminent destruction).

    Finally, a pillar of records management, that, “not everything can be saved,” fails to hold up. If the “Death and Sexual Abuse and Assault Files” are growing so exponentially, one might conclude that abuses of ICE detainees is a serious problem requiring administrative remedy and retrospective deliberation. This would be a strong argument against destroying such records—there are potentially many lessons to be learned from the documents, and the agency should invite scrutiny. If the file is not actually growing so much (i.e. if deaths and sexual assaults in ICE custody just aren’t commonplace), then, again, the “can’t keep everything” argument is fraudulent.

    Administrative Value

    Why does ICE maintain records of abuse in the first place? Presumably, ICE keeps these records to document the circumstances surrounding deaths or sexual assaults in its custody, and to use this information to improve their practices. These are the records’ primary use. The records also function to hold the agency accountable for the documented abuses. Theoretically, this allows the public to access documentation of agency activities, and take action to advocate for change. These are the records’ secondary use. While ART hopes ICE is taking the necessary steps to fix detention practices, the proposed retention schedule diminishes the ability of the public to assess information about ICE practices, and thus hold its government accountable.

    Moreover, as records professionals, ART finds the appraisal language related to “Detainee Sexual Assault Abuse and Assault Files” particularly problematic. NARA’s “Appraisal Justification” claims these records do “not document significant actions of Federal officials.” To be clear, these records document the deaths and sexual assaults of detainees while in federal immigration custody. ART finds the assertion that federal agents have no significant actions in the fate of those in their custody at best a glaring oversight, and at worst, a severe obstruction to transparency and government accountability.

    Legal Value

    Preserving records of ICE abuses serves legal ends too. The documents could be used in lawsuits for or against ICE agents, and could either exonerate or incriminate the alleged offender(s). Destroying records relating to inmate abuse, whether after 3 years or 20, hampers the ability to legally defend or charge the accused, and shackles wrongly detained individuals seeking legal redress. For example, former detainees seeking to rectify unlawful use of solitary confinement while in ICE custody might find no record of such abuses (i.e. the records’ 3-year lifespan could very likely end before the statute of limitations for seeking legal redress). Beyond circumventing public accountability and government transparency, the destruction of this body of records flouts the constitutional rights of those in ICE custody, as well as those of ICE officials.

    Government Accountability and Citizen’s Rights Perspective

    Public records evidence the activities of our collective democracy, and provide documentary evidence of government, in service of its constituents. The decision to destroy ICE detention records will severely handicap access to this body of public records, thereby undermining government transparency and public accountability. This is especially alarming, considering that these records document the abuses of human subjects in the custody of a government agency (ICE). As concerned records professionals, we implore NARA to reconsider what could very well be a disastrous mistake for records management, for the historical record, and for government accountability and transparency.

    Read full letter with appendix

    Sincerely, 
    ART Board of Directors


Questions? communications@nycarchivists.org

Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Software