Transparency News 10/14/14 – Virginia Coalition for Open Government

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

National Stories

The First Amendment is strong medicine, the Supreme Court keeps telling us, and it even requires vulnerable people to listen to things they do not want to hear. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. explained this in 2011 to the father of a fallen soldier who had to endure a hateful protest while he tried to lay his son to rest. The First Amendment, the chief justice said, protects “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.” In June, Chief Justice Roberts told women seeking abortions essentially the same thing in a decision striking down buffer zones around clinics in Massachusetts. “Vital First Amendment interests,” he said, required women to hear from opponents of abortion in the fraught moments before they entered those clinics. But the Supreme Court’s devotion to the First Amendment has its limits. It stops at the edge of the grand marble plaza outside its own courthouse. That vast and inviting space, with its benches and fountains, seems better suited to public debate than a military funeral or the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic. But the court insists on banning free speech on the plaza. Court police officers have been known to instruct visitors to remove small buttons bearing political messages.
New York Times

Nobody said it was going to be easy. After Sept. 11 exposed huge holes in the country’s public safety communications capabilities, Congress passed a law on Feb. 22, 2012, creating the First Responder Network Authority (better known as FirstNet) to build a nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety and emergency response. The nation’s 5.4 million first responders would no longer have to rely on commercial carriers to communicate and transmit critical information during major emergencies.
Governing

Six months before the world knew the National Security Agency’s most prolific leaker of secrets as Edward Joseph Snowden, Laura Poitras knew him as Citizenfour. For months, Poitras communicated with an unknown “senior government employee” under that pseudonym via encrypted emails, as he prepared her to receive an unprecedented leak of classified documents that he would ask her to expose to the world. Poitras’ remarkable new film, Citizenfour, premiered Friday at the New York Film Festival, and opens in theaters on October 24. It is a haunting, historic document of Snowden’s motivations and personality, the sort of revelatory filmmaking that could only have been achieved by a director who was herself at the center of the story; Poitras lived out the NSA drama almost as completely as Snowden.
Wired

Editorials/Columns

Jesse L. Matthew, the man charged in the disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham, briefly attended Christopher Newport University in 2003. Enrolled from January to Oct. 15 of that year, Mr. Matthew faced a sexual assault complaint filed by a CNU student during that time. Media inquiries led school officials to release basic details of the case, ending the summary with the following: "Federal law prohibits us from reporting on university disciplinary actions." The law in question, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, is an oft misused statute intended only to protect students' report cards and transcripts from public scrutiny without consent. The bill's author, former U.S. Sen. James L. Buckley, never intended it to be applied so broadly.
Daily Press

The Puckett scandal just keeps growing. What started as a story about one retiring member of the Virginia Senate now reaches all the way to the United States Senate. A lot was moving around in the dark at that time. Now comes word (again from The Post) that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner also got involved. Warner called Puckett’s son, Joseph, and over the course of an hour discussed several job possibilities for Puckett’s daughter — including even a federal judgeship, a post for which she would seem underqualified. A spokesman for Warner says the senator simply “brainstormed” with Joseph Puckett. Really? Is that what they’re calling it these days?
Times-Dispatch

While this particular lawsuit against gerrymandered districts was brought by Democrats—and the districts in question were drawn by Republicans—no one should get the idea that either political party is innocent. Drawing district lines to protect parties and incumbents is as old as districts themselves. Both parties are guilty of doing it, and both parties should be held responsible for changing it. Gerrymandering serves only elected officials; it does nothing to help voters. State lawmakers are expected to review the ethics laws that apply to elected officials in the 2015 General Assembly session that starts in January. Now they’ll be redrawing congressional district lines as well. Maybe this time they’ll shake free of self-interest and incumbency protections and get it right.
Free Lance-Star

It's time for an independent commission to select the boundaries for legislative and congressional districts in Virginia. That's a key takeaway from this week's judicial ruling that ordered the General Assembly to redraw the lines of the state's 3rd Congressional District.
Roger Chesley, Virginian-Pilot

Whatever might be said about the tenure of Mayor Dwight C. Jones, it has not be uneventful. With a little more than two years remaining in his second term, Jones could make a case for himself as one of Richmond’s most consequential mayors. But whether he will be judged as a success or a failure remains an open question. Another self-inflicted wound, the mayor has clung to secrecy. Shortly after taking office in 2009, Jones indicated in his inaugural speech that he would loosen the grip on department directors and other employees rendered mute by then-Mayor L. Douglas Wilder. “I’m going to take the muzzle off,” he said then. But the mayor himself has come to embody information constraint, particularly regarding the abrupt departure last month of Chief Administrative Officer Byron Marshall.
Times-Dispatch