October 1996
EXECUTIVE MEMO
A Tale of Two Web Sites
here's no question that the Internet is enhancing the ability of the U.S. Information Agency to carry out its mission-to inform the world about the official policies of the United States and the people, values and institutions that shape those policies. But it may also be making it impossible for USIA to comply with the law.
The Smith-Mundt provision of the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 prohibits USIA from directing its informational programs to its own citizens. Therefore, when the agency established a presence on the Internet about a year ago, it actually established two presences: A web site for a domestic audience (http://www.usia.gov) and one directed at other countries. USIA will not give American citizens the address for the international site, nor is the URL directly available from Internet search engines.
However, starting with one of these search engines, it took us at Government Executive less than five minutes to hop across a chain of links to the international site. It is located at http://www. usia.gov/usis.html.
For end-users, USIA's parallel Internet universes just make it that much easier to get lost. For example, clicking on a section on the domestic home page entitled "Civic Education" leads the user to a cluster of other pages, including "Election 96," a site that explains the American electoral process to foreign audiences. If users click on "home" or "U.S. Information Agency" on this page, they return to the international USIA home page, not the domestic site.
USIA's international site provides more information than does its domestic site. It is divided into five sections-Products/Services, Topics/Issues, International Exchanges/Training, Regional Issues/Initiatives, and the United States.
One particularly innovative section of the site is "The Washington File," a collection of time-sensitive policy statements and transcripts compiled by the Bureau of Information five days a week and available in English, French and Spanish. The site also features electronic journals on economics, political security, U.S. society and values, democracy and human rights, and global issues that are transmitted worldwide every two weeks. The international site also offers links to individual sites maintained by USIA offices abroad.
USIA's domestic site is nothing to sneeze at either. Its "Daily Digest" provides a unique service for federal executives: Five days a week, American embassy press staffs excerpt and translate articles from major foreign newspapers and magazines and submit them to staffers at USIA headquarters, who then post the items on the domestic site.
The USIA site for Americans:
What the rest of the world sees:
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