Transparency News 8/6/14
State and Local Stories
On this date (Aug. 6, 1991) Tim Berners-Lee publicly introduces the project that creates the World Wide Web. He first proposed the Web in a memo to his colleagues at CERN on March 12, 1989. Here is an excerpt from his 1991 note to the alt.hypertext newsgroup: The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere….The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!
Poynter
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The city of Richmond plans to hire outside legal counsel in the defamation lawsuit filed against City Auditor Umesh Dalal, according to City Attorney Allen L. Jackson. The $10.7 million civil suit, filed by former city administrator Sharon Judkins, names Dalal as a defendant, but not the city. Even though the government is not named in the suit, the city will pay to defend Dalal because the allegations involve his official duties.
Times-Dispatch
Speaking only as a tax-paying citizen, Jones Stanley made a passionate stand before the Amherst County Board of Supervisors before withdrawing his candidacy for the county school board. Despite not receiving confirmation from a majority of supervisors, Stanley continues to serve on the school board with the backing of the school board attorney, A. David Hawkins. During the meeting, Stanley referenced what he called disparaging remarks made about him by certain members of the Board of Supervisors. He also questioned the board on its recent appointments. If a member of the Board of Supervisors needed a heart transplant, they’d seek the most qualified surgeon, Stanley added.
New Era-Progress
A former government contractor was sentenced in Norfolk on Tuesday to three years in prison forconspiracy to bribe public officials at the United States Navy Military Sealift Command. Michael McPhail, a former employee at an unnamed contractor, admitted he had contributed about $45,000 of his salary over nearly two years toward bribes to two officials in order to secure work for his company.
New York Times
Just six minutes after then-Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell e-mailed a wealthy businessman about a $50,000 loan, he sent a note to a staffer asking to discuss state university studies of the man’s new dietary supplement. The staffer, former chief policy adviser Jasen Eige, testified Tuesday that he didn’t know about the loan negotiations between his boss and Jonnie R. Williams Sr., then the chief executive of the supplement company. But he said that he was concerned about acting on the governor’s February 2012 e-mail.
Washington Post
National Stories
About 20,800 United States citizens and permanent residents are included in a federal government database of people suspected of having links to terrorism, of whom about 5,000 have been placed on one or more watch lists, newly disclosed documents show. The documents are briefing materials about accomplishments in 2013 by the Directorate of Terrorist Identities, a component of the National Counterterrorism Center, an interagency clearinghouse of information about people known to be or suspected of being terrorists. The documents were classified Secret and were published Tuesday by The Intercept, an online magazine. The disclosure provided new details about the numbers of people within the broad database and on terrorist watch lists derived from it — a system that has grown rapidly over the last four years, according to government officials.New York Times
Philadelphia has long had a crime problem. This year the city of Brotherly Love was ranked the 5th most dangerous big city in the country. Unfortunately, that wasn't an aberration -- Philadelphia has hovered between 4th and 7th most dangerous throughout the last decade. This year Mayor Michael Nutter decided to try a different approach to cutting crime: launching a competition. The city crafted a $100,000 challenge called FastFWD and invited entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions to crime. "We wanted to open up the solution space," explains Story Bellows, who led the initiative for the city. "We were looking for solutions we didn't expect and didn't even know existed."
Governing
Editorials/Columns
The current push for a conduct policy at U.Va. follows dissension within the governing board, which forced President Teresa Sullivan to resign in 2012, then reversed itself amid public outcry. Helen Dragas, a Virginia Beach businesswoman and then-rector of the board, led that coup. After being reappointed to the board, she has correctly - and quite publicly - opposed changes to the school's financial aid program, among other policy decisions. Rather than fight speech with more speech, some board members appear intent on quashing dissent. That would transform the governing board into a monolith rather than highlight the diversity of leaders, each of whom carries unique expertise, perspective and life experiences. While that may burnish U.Va.'s image in the short-term, it would come at the expense of its far more important traditions and principles.Virginian-Pilot
It appears that some people at the University of Virginia are in dire need of an education. That would start with the board of visitors. Today, we’ll take out our own metaphorical board of education – what used to be called the whipping stick — and try to beat some common sense into the visitors. Here goes: This isn’t the board of a private corporation, where any dissent might hurt stock values, or even a private college, which can pretty well do as it pleases up to a certain point. This is a public institution, and therefore what the board does is the public’s business. Put another way, the board is visitors of a state university isn’t like the board of directors of a business. It’s really a mini-legislature, and anyone accepting an appointment to the board should understand that. The draft “statement of expectations” is rooted in this faulty concept: “The Board of Visitors strives to function as a cohesive corporate entity ... . No Visitor is or should be a free agent.” Yet that is exactly what each visitor should be, within the usual bounds of propriety (meaning, OK, one or two board members can’t fire the president on their own.)
Roanoke Times
Text messages sent on a private telephone between Maureen McDonnell, wife of Bob McDonnell, and businessman Johnnie Williams are key evidence in the corruption trial of the former Virginia governor, according to the Washington Post. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s aides also produced text messages in the “Bridgegate” investigation, again using private telephones. Just like email, text messages can be preserved and produced. Federal employees are required to preserve text messages concerning official business. It was in this context that I recently received a Friday afternoon document production under a FOIA lawsuit I and colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed seeking nothing but text messages. After EPA claimed none existed, McCarthy admitted through the Department of Justice that she had in fact deleted each and every one of her many thousands of texts on her EPA-provided phone. The texts EPA produced on Friday prove that EPA's IT system does not automatically delete text messages; that is, for messages not to be there now, they had to be deleted from the system.
Christopher Horner, Washington Examiner
