Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
My lead story today on the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center follows Minnesota Independent’s investigation of their fusion center, the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center, published yesterday.
In “You don’t know MN-JAC,†reporter Dan Haugen found that the agency, created in the wake of 9/11 to collect and analyze suspicious activity reports from across Minnesota, is operating without an important and widely used safeguard meant to check against inappropriate use of data.
Most law-enforcement databases are protected with software that automatically keeps a record of every search that’s performed. That way supervisors can easily monitor who is accessing what information.
A records-management system at the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC), however, relies on employees to manually record searches. Data-policy consultant Robert Sykora calls it “an anxiety-provoking flaw” that leaves part of the system open to abuse.
Because the fusion center phenomenon has been neglected by the mainstream media, our sister sites in Colorado, Michigan and New Mexico will also report on fusion centers later this week.
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