Re: Director Database Marketing (Herndon VA US) (http://www.saic.com/career/jobs/c5

[Paul Zawada <zawada () ncsa uiuc edu>]

Would it have been the NSF that originally paid SRI to create the whois
database or would it have been ARPA?  My memory is fading on the timeline
of that stuff... 

--zawada

On Thu, 3 Sep 1998, Dean Anderson wrote:
> Tim Salo just pointed out to me some flaws in my reading of Karls NSF
> letter, and some history I was unaware of or at least forgotten:
>
> The key being that it was SRI who actually created the database under
> contract from NSF.  Meaning the database might not be subject to the FOIA
> or Privacy acts, and in fact might be property of SRI/NSI.
>
> He points out that NSF *probably* directed the SRI to give the database to
> NSI, and so the NSF in fact may never have actually handled the database at
> all.
>
> Of course, the NSF letter to Karl still claims that the DB was created by
> NSI, which still isn't correct.
>
> In light of that, I suppose one can still argue that if the NSF directed
> the SRI to give the database to NSI, then the database wasn't property of
> the SRI, and that its creation was part of the contract. So it would still
> be property of the NSF. On the otherhand, I suppose that SRI could state it
> originally owned the DB, and gave it to NSI under private arrangements not
> related to NSF.... So perhaps one should look for such a directive from the
> NSF to the SRI, and whether SRI thought the database belonged to it or to
> the NSF.
>
> It seems to me that given these rules, a federal agency could trivially
> avoid both the FOIA and Privacy Act merely by outsourcing the creation and
> administration of its records.  I don't think that it was the intention for
> either of these acts to allow that, so perhaps that might be an argument, too.
>
>               --Dean

Paul J. Zawada, RCDD     | Senior Network Engineer
zawada () ncsa uiuc edu     | National Center for Supercomputing Applications
+1 630 686 7825          | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada