Transparency News 7/9/13

 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013
 
State and Local Stories

 

A hearing to determine whether a judge will remove embattled Isle of Wight School Board member Herb DeGroft from office has been delayed nearly two months to allow both sides time to prepare. In the meantime, petitioners may have to gather more signatures after the county registrar verified only about 200 of the signatures on the initial petition targeting DeGroft. The petition targeting DeGroft was filed on July 2 with 238 signatures. After reviewing the petition, a staff member at the registrar's office said only about 200 signatures were verified against county voting records. The petition must bear 205 signatures — a number equivalent to 10 percent of the total number of votes cast in the previous election for the office — belonging to qualified voters registered in the Hardy District. There was some confusion in the courtroom Tuesday over whose responsibility it was to verify the signatures.
Daily Press

As legal and public pressure mounts over the use of Executive Mansion resources by Virginia’s first family, Gov. Bob McDonnell late last week reimbursed the state for nearly $2,400 in food and household supplies used by his children. The governor’s office disclosed the reimbursement Monday, the same day that a Richmond Circuit Court judge deferred until later this week a decision on whether to dismiss the four-count embezzlement indictment against former mansion chef Todd Schneider.
Times-Dispatch

Phil Jenkins has been named editor of The Free Lance–Star. Jenkins had served as the interim editor since Ed Jones’ retirement in March, and he had been managing editor since 2009. He joined the FLS in 1998 as a local news editor.
Free Lance-Star

Reviewing a short list of potential candidates for a new county administrator is on the agenda for tonight’s meeting of the Washington County Board of Supervisors. The supervisors met two weeks ago in closed session with a representative from executive search firm Springsted Inc., who presented a list of potential candidates, said current County Administrator Nadine Culberson. “He gave the board a lot of information and a booklet of the profiles of the candidates,” Culberson said. “And they’ve studied it for over a week. Hopefully, [tonight] they will set the dates for interviews and narrow the list.” She said she couldn’t say how many names were on the list.
Herald Courier

No criminal charges will be brought against past or present Nelson County building officials, a judge concluded last week after a commonwealth’s attorney completed investigations into the Nelson County Building Inspections Office. Specifically, the investigation was into the actions of Peter Brechlin, a building inspector with the Nelson County Building Inspections Office from 2006 until May 2011, and David Thompson, the Nelson County building code official, Doucette wrote in his report. The investigation stemmed from an alleged conflict of interest as Brechlin undertook work at the former Gladstone Rescue Squad.
Nelson County Times

A Manassas City Council member who is the executive director of the Manassas Ballet Theatre voted again Monday to fund the non-profit with $23,000 of city money. Mark D. Wolfe (R) is the unpaid executive director of the ballet, and his wife, Amy, is paid $50,000 per year, Wolfe said. Last month,Wolfe did not disclose his position in the ballet — although he is well-known locally for that role — before a vote that gave a total of $142,500 to arts and human-services groups, including the ballet.
Washington Post

Can’t make it to The Homestead later this month for the Virginia Bar Association’s gubernatorial debate but you still want to watch the fireworks? PBS has you covered. VBA Executive Director Yvonne McGhee reports that for the first time ever, one of the VBA’s debates will be live-streamed, atpbs.org. The group got confirmation of the web broadcast today, she said.
VLW Blog

National Stories

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Friday ordered the government to promptly start releasing thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz, following months of roadblocks and delays. “Defendant shall promptly release to Plaintiff all responsive documents that it has gathered thus far and shall continue to produce additional responsive documents that it locates on a rolling basis,” wrote U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Wired

The top U.S. special operations commander, Adm. William McRaven, ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public. The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Politico

Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, Abdiwali Warsame embraced the First Amendment by creating a raucous Web site about his native Somalia. Packed with news and controversial opinions, it rapidly became a magnet for Somalis dispersed around the world, including tens of thousands in Minnesota. The popularity of the site, Somalimidnimo.com, or United Somalia, also attracted the attention of the Defense Department. A military contractor, working for U.S. Special Operations forces to “counter nefarious influences” in Africa, began monitoring the Web site and compiled a confidential research dossier about its founder and its content.
Washington Post

The snapshots are old and discolored, capturing the faces of men behind bars in California’s vast penal system and those destined to enter it. Some are wide-eyed. Others cast hard stares. One inmate, a bony heroin addict dressed in baggy prison denim, stares submissively into the camera. Dating back as far as the 1980s, the photographs would be unremarkable except for this detail: They were the last pictures of the men seen by their families and even by the prisoners themselves. For a quarter-century, California outlawed personal photographs for inmates held in isolation in special security housing units. Over the years, the restrictions affected thousands of inmates in four prisons: California State Prison, Corcoran; California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi; California State Prison, Sacramento; and Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City.
Center for Investigative Reporting

Orange County’s (Calif.) attempt to get more money from people trying to access its database of information about land parcels is contrary to the law, the California Supreme Court says. Using the proper software, a person could access what the county calls its “OC Landbase,” and create a layered digital map containing information for over 640,000 specific parcels of land in Orange County, including geographic boundaries, assessor parcel numbers, street addresses, and links to additional information on the parcel owners. When the county tried to charge it a fee higher than what would normally be permitted under the state’s public records law, the Sierra Club sued and Monday the state’s highest court agreed with the environmental group.
Central Valley Business

The IRS mistakenly posted the Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of Americans on a government website, the agency confirmed Monday night. One estimate put the figure as high as 100,000 names. The numbers were posted to an IRS database for tax-exempt political groups known as 527s and first discovered by the group Public.Resource.org.
Fox News

More details could be released soon about the murder investigation involving former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez as search warrants in the case may be unsealed. A judge has granted a motion by news organizations to lift an impoundment of the material, saying he would do so by 2 p.m. Tuesday if there is no challenge by prosecutors and defense attorneys who had argued to keep it sealed.
Boston Globe

A privacy-rights organization faces an uphill battle to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the National Security Agency’s surveillance of domestic telephone records. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington-based nonprofit public-research center, on Monday filed a petition for a writ of mandamus, or, in the alternative, a petition for review, with the justices. It charged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) exceeded its statutory authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when it ordered “production of millions of domestic telephone records that cannot plausibly be relevant to an authorized investigation.”
National Law Journal

A federal judge Monday rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between. The EFF’s lawsuit accuses the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — a surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the President George W. Bush administration following 9/11. The allegations were based on a former AT&T technician’s documents that outline a secret room in an AT&T San Francisco office that routes internet traffic to the NSA.
Wired

Editorials/Columns

Roanoke Times: Only four states pay their governors more generously than Virginia, according to a report released last month by The Council of State Governments. But if you think Gov. Bob McDonnell’s $175,000 salary is excessive, consider that more than 1,000 state employees make more money than Virginia’s chief executive. Our governor is not overpaid.

Matthew Davis, MLive.com: That the City of Lansing would get its government-made underwear knotted over how it spent $127,000 on the Common Ground Festival last year illustrates just how much the Michigan Freedom of Information Act has fallen from its once-vaunted status. What has happened, though, is that governments -- state and local -- have routinely asserted the exemptions and forced the person requesting information to sue for it. Or, alternatively, the government agency will respond to the request by saying the documents are available for some astronomically high cost -- a de facto denial of the request. Such cynical, intransigent behavior is likely coming to an end.State Reps. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, and Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, have penned legislation that attempts to force government to hew toward transparency. Shirkey's HB 4001  would limit copying costs to $.10 per page, impose a cost reduction (all the way down to $0) for each day the requested documents are not available by the statutory deadline, and allow a person making a request to appeal the costs.