Group Files ‘Largest FOIA of All Time’

Reclaim the Records — a group of activist genealogists, historians, journalists, teachers — has filed what may be the largest Freedom Of Information Act Request of all time. The group wants the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to release billions of digital images and their associated metadata to the public. From a report: NARA is a government agency that preserves…

Ancestry Taps AI To Sift Through Millions of Obituaries

Algorithms identified death notices in old newspaper pages, then another set of algorithms pulled names and other key details into a searchable database. From a report: Ancestry used artificial intelligence to extract obituary details hidden in a half-billion digitized newspaper pages dating back to 1690, data invaluable for customers building their family trees. The family history and consumer-genomics company, based in…

‘Game-Changer’ Warrant Let Detective Search Genetic Database

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last week, a Florida detective announced at a police convention that he had obtained a warrant to penetrate GEDmatch and search its full database of nearly one million users. Legal experts said that this appeared to be the first time a judge had approved such a warrant, and that the…