Current Headlines

  A Radford Circuit Court judge has ruled that the city violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act when it redacted portions of two documents supplied to The Roanoke Times.  

A sharply divided Lynchburg City Council decided last week that all parts of the selection process to fill a council vacancy — from vetting candidates to debating over the final pick — will be carried out behind closed doors. “Public scrutiny doesn’t equal bad,” said VCOG executive director Megan Rhyne. “The argument for not doing…

  Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina plans to release records to state legislators about previously undisclosed flights that he took on planes owned by friends and campaign donors, his lawyer, Butch Bowers, said. That announcement came a day after the State Ethics Commission charged Mr. Sanford, a Republican, with unspecified ethics violations — a…

    Lansing, Mich., City Council member Carol Wood Monday released a draft of a proposed ordinance which will serve as a guide to city employees in the release of public information under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act. Under the proposed ordinance, city officials charged with responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and release…

Five thousand previously unpublished documents from our nation’s founders, including James Madison, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, are now online through Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press. The project was spearheaded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grant-making arm of the National Archives, in partnership with the “Documents…

Should metadata be considered a public record like most other government documents? Yes, said the Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday, overturning a lower court decision that denied a police officer access to performance reviews, written by his superiors, to find out who accessed the documents when.http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202435052835

New addition to our brief bank on the federal appeal of a case challenging Virginia’s FOIA residency requirement: Appellants brief.

State Sen. William Wampler is one of eight among the Assembly’s 140 members who earn income from state colleges and universities, according to documents produced by Virginia’s 39 public two- and four-year schools in response to a FOIA request by the Virginian-Pilot. Read the story here.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center will file a friend of the court brief in support of BJ Ostergren, also known as The Virginia Watchdog. Ostergren obtains the Social Security numbers from public records and publishes them on her Web site to protest government posting personal information online. A lower federal court ruled in Ostergren’s favor…

Thanks to Peter Vieth of Virginia Lawyers Weekly and Valerie Garner of Roanoke Free Press for sharing their photos of Access 2009. Right now, the photos are on VCOG’s Facebook page, but we’ll post them to our Web site soon.

Christiansburg resident Carol Lindstrom is the winner of VCOG’s 2009 citizen FOI award. Mike Owens of the Bristol Herald Courier is the winner in the media category, while the City of Alexandria and Fairfax County will share the award in the government category. To learn more, check out the full story in our blog.

Citizens who violate a conduct policy could be barred from attending future Appomattox Town Council meetings. At least that is what Council member Karl Carter would like to see happen. The concerns stem over alleged conduct problems during and after Council’s Sept. 14 meeting. Read the article here, and a related column (criticizing Carter’s criticism)…

We’re posting great stories, articles and editorials about access, FOIA and the First Amendment every day on Twitter. You can also check our feed for recent news of VCOG’s work, including our upcoming conference. Click here for the opengovva Twitter feed.

Law.com: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to release records of interviews with former Vice President Dick Cheney conducted during its investigation into the Valerie Plame leak. Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected the DOJ’s argument that releasing the interviews would have a chilling effect on future investigations involving White House…

Virginian-Pilot editorial: If you are buying or selling property, starting a business, getting married or divorced, filing a will, fighting a felony, leaving the military, involved in a lawsuit or simply need a fishing or hunting license, the latest budget cuts affect you.

The FBI has released long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. The soundless recordings show people rushing from nearby buildings after the fertilizer bomb went off. They don’t show the actual explosion outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The tapes were obtained by an…

Law.com article: An attorney does not have a constitutional right to wear jeans and a hat — specifically, an Operation Desert Storm baseball cap — while appearing in state court, a New York federal judge has ruled. Eastern District of New York Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the court’s dress code merely enforced “commonly…

The agenda for the FOI Advisory Council’s full meeting at 11 a.m. on Sept. 21 is online here. Also included is the agenda for the Council’s subcommittee on Personal Identifying Information, which meets the same day at 9:30.

In the challenge to citizenship limitation in Virginia’s FOIA, the opening brief is due to the 4th Circuit on 9/21. Response brief is due 10/21. And a reply brief is due within 14 days of the response brief.

The Reporters Committee reports that the Texas Open Meetings Act remains good law after withstanding a constitutional challenge by former city council members who asserted the law violated their rights to exchange e-mail messages discussing city business in secret. After four years of litigation, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Dallas (5th Cir.) dismissed the…

A long-debated federal “shield” law to protect journalists who refuse to reveal their confidential sources is poised to move a little closer to passage Thursday. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a mark-up session with the shield law at the top of the agenda, a committee source told The Washington Times.

On Tuesday, September 9, OpenTheGovernment.org released the  2009 Secrecy Report Card. This years report chronicles slight decreases in secrecy across a wide spectrum of indicators in the last year of the Bush-Cheney Administration, after five years of continued expansion. For this year only, the report includes two special sections: one on fiscal transparency and one providing…

The Obama administration plans to change White House policy by releasing the names of thousands of visitors whose comings and goings traditionally are kept secret by presidents. President Obama’s announcement scheduled for today follows a lengthy legal review. The policy change would resolve four lawsuits filed by a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics…

Adam Liptak of the New York Times talks about how open government fights, once left to media to fight, are often left dying on the vine, or left to public interest groups.

Reporters Committee reports: The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s controversial practice of randomly searching laptops upon U.S. entry quietly began last year but has quickly drawn attention, including a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union for records related to the practice.