Transparency News 3/16/15
Monday, March 16, 2015
We know you like transparency, and we know you probably like free food, so come enjoy BOTH at Captial Ale House in downtown Richmond TONIGHT, from 5-7, for a Sunshine Week Happy Hour. Sponsored by Transparency Virginia.
State and Local Stories
Dave Ress' eight-part series on "The Virginia Way" still has politicians around the state a little nervous, and a little upset. Guided by two decades of experience covering Virginia politics, Ress distilled months of research and boxes of public records into a portrait of our political system's loopholes and long tradition of accepted back-scratching. It was not easy. Virginia's tradition of loose campaign and ethics laws has long been buoyed by arguments of transparency: Who cares how generous a lobbyist is, so long as everyone knows about it, and voters can judge you on it? But Ress showed how tangled transparency can be, how much hunting it takes to piece together a full picture. He traveled to local courthouses for property records. He pulled records on some 200 current and former elected officials.
Daily Press
Reporter Ryan Murphy began 2014 with a tip that Isle of Wight County Schools may have skirted federal regulations in the construction of the new Georgie D. Tyler Middle School. Using the state Freedom of Information Act to access copies of contracts, emails and bid documents, the Daily Press Isle of Wight County beat reporter found that the schools division had omitted from the construction contract wage standards required under the federal Davis-Bacon Act. The effect was to lower the cost of construction by underpaying local workers hundreds of thousands of dollars. "I spent a couple of months digging into the documents and digging into legislation to figure out exactly what had happened," Murphy said. Murphy worked with school administrators to get the documents he needed. When he realized that he would have to search through administrators' emails — communications between government officials are public records under state law — he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in 430 pages of emails. An additional 110 pages were withheld because they were protected by attorney-client privilege.
Daily Press
Laten Bechtel surrounds herself with the history of other people on a daily basis. As a part of the Augusta County Genealogical Society, she puts together the past from old documents that have been in the basement of the courthouse for centuries. Her specialty is African-American slave history in the area and she has written several publications for the society, even books. It hit home during one of her research endeavors when a women from across the country asked her to research her family lineage, which turned out to be that of slaves in the area. Digging further, Bechtel discovered her family were the owners of that other woman's family. "I thought, this is amazing," she said. "That doesn't happen often, to research someone's family and it turns out your own used to own them." That's just a piece of what the genealogical society does.
News Leader
A Loudoun County parent has sued state officials to force the release of evaluation data for thousands of teachers across Virginia, making it the latest in a series of states to grapple with whether such information should be made public. Brian Davison has pressed for the data’s release because he thinks parents have a right to know how their children’s teachers are performing, information about public employees that exists but has so far been hidden. He also wants to expose what he says is Virginia’s broken promise to begin using the data to evaluate how effective the state’s teachers are. “I do think the teacher data should be out there,” Davison said. “If you know that you have a teacher that’s not effective . . . is it fair to ask a parent to put their student in that teacher’s classroom?” Davison’s crusade for the teacher data offers a window into a national debate about what parents and taxpayers have a right to know about teachers and how to balance transparency with privacy. A Richmond judge ruled in his favor in January, but that ruling has been challenged by state officials and the Virginia Education Association, which represents teachers across the state. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for today.
Washington Post
Soon enough, Hanover residents won’t only be able to catch up on local government at home, but they will also be able to stay tuned on education news. March 5, the School Board unanimously approved a motion to record audio from their meetings after division staff looked into how much it would cost and how it could be done. “We can do it,” said David Myers, assistant superintendent of business and operations, at the board’s March 3 meeting. “The cost is nominal,” Myers added, noting it is priced at just under $2,000. In a few months, citizens will be able to listen to School Board meetings on their computers at their leisure. Myers said they’ll have to get the equipment installed in the board room, which shouldn’t take too long.
Herald-Progress
National Stories
A top freedom-of-information expert isn’t buying Hillary Clinton’s explanation of why she set up her own email system to conduct official State Department business, calling it “laughable.” Daniel Metcalfe, who advised White House administrations on interpreting the Freedom of Information Act from 1981 to 2007, told The Canadian Press that the former secretary of state acted “contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law.” “There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act,” he said, reviewing a transcript of Clinton’s remarks during her Tuesday news conference. Clinton told reporters she deleted approximately 30,000 personal emails from her private account that she also used as secretary of state.
Politico
Hillary Clinton’s camp late Sunday issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read “every email” before discarding those deemed private. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted. This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read. “We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said.
Fox News
The public’s right to see government records is coming at an ever-increasing price, as authorities set fees and hourly charges that often prevent information from flowing. Whether roadblocks are created by authorities to discourage those seeking information, or simply a byproduct of bureaucracy and tighter budgets, greater costs to fulfill freedom of information requests ultimately can interfere with the public’s right to know. Such costs are a growing threat to expanding openness at all levels of government, a cornerstone of Sunshine Week. The weeklong open government initiative is celebrating its 10th anniversary beginning March 15. “It’s incredibly easy for an agency that doesn’t want certain records to be exposed to impose fees in the hopes that the requester is dissuaded,” said Adam Marshall, a fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which sponsors Sunshine Week with the American Society of News Editors. “If the people don’t know what’s going on, either because they don’t have direct access to information or because the media isn’t able to provide them with access to information about what their government is doing, it’s impossible for the people to exercise any sense of informed self-governance.”
McClatchyDC
An Arkansas Senate committee on Thursday discussed but took no action on a bill that would largely exempt former state employees’ records from the state Freedom of Information Act. Senate Bill 892 by Rep. John Cooper, R-Jonesboro, would make all information about a state employee exempt from the FOI law 60 days after the person leaves office, except for the employee’s name; agency or department of employment; position or rank; dates of service; awards, decorations or commendations; and the city or town of his or her last known address. Cooper said the bill would protect former state employees’ privacy. Some committee members expressed reservations about the measure. Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, said former state employees’ records sometimes yield evidence of “egregious acts.” “What you’re saying, in essence, is after 60 days it doesn’t matter what you did. The only thing they need to know is your name, rank and serial number,” she said. Cooper responded that the bill would not hinder law enforcement investigations. Chesterfield pointed out that some investigations begin with “our newspaper folks.”
Times Record
A powerful new surveillance tool being adopted by police departments across the country comes with an unusual requirement: To buy it, law enforcement officials must sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from saying almost anything about the technology. Any disclosure about the technology, which tracks cellphones and is often called StingRay, could allow criminals and terrorists to circumvent it, the F.B.I. has said in an affidavit. But the tool is adopted in such secrecy that communities are not always sure what they are buying or whether the technology could raise serious privacy concerns.
New York Times
Some state agencies in Delaware fail to comply with requirements for identifying their Freedom of Information Act coordinators and tracking FOIA requests. red to maintain showed significant differences in the details they include, and several agencies failed to meet a statutory deadline of 15 business days to respond to or at least acknowledge recent requests for the logs. The response deadline and requirement to keep such logs are outlined in a 2012 law that codified an executive order by Democratic Gov. Jack Markell. The law also requires each agency to identify a FOIA coordinator on its website, a requirement with which some agencies have yet to comply.
Washington Times
After the scandal that sent former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to prison, lawmakers adopted a raft of reforms that included creating a referee to intervene when bureaucrats reject citizens' requests for government records. Five years later, the "public access counselor" in the attorney general's office has yet to respond to more than 2,800 appeals of Freedom of Information Act requests for information that a government agency deemed secret, according to an analysis of records obtained by The Associated Press. That's about one in five of all FOIA appeals submitted to the office since the law took effect in 2010.
Belleville News Democrat
Editorials/Columns
Our long winter is finally ending. We would be further grateful if the sunshine applied to Virginia’s laws on government transparency. In that respect, we remain a cloudy, dreary commonwealth, no matter the weather. If Hillary Clinton had been a Virginia appointee, rather than a federal one, her emails could all be kept secret. Yes, the commonwealth operates under the Freedom of Information Act, which ensures citizen access to records and meetings of state and local governments. But the General Assembly has granted many generous “working papers” exemptions to FOIA. “Working papers,” as in all correspondence. Sadly, government secrecy at the state and local level matters little to some citizens. As journalists, we are passionate about the topic, not because we expect wrongdoing at every turn, but because we believe open government is good government. Good government attracts leaders with clear consciences, strong backbones and sharp minds. Can we say we have that in Richmond? Does secrecy nurture trust? We think not.
News Leader
It’s getting harder and more expensive to use public records to hold government officials accountable. Authorities are undermining the laws that are supposed to guarantee citizens’ right to information, turning the right to know into just plain “no.” Associated Press journalists filed hundreds of requests for government files last year, simply trying to use the rights granted under state open records laws and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years: The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.
Gary Pruitt, McClatchyDC
Data is nothing and everything at once. Any data point a person can think of is either an arbitrary label fabricated to make a complex world more intelligible, or an imperfect measurement or characterization of some physical world phenomena. But people cling to information as if it were the only thing keeping them from being sucked into outer space, because there really is nothing else to rely on. Every decision every person has ever made has been based on some kind of data, whether something as nebulous as one’s feelings at a given moment or as concrete as cell D18 in a spreadsheet. People will never stop searching for more information, more things to measure and catalog, and when they run out of things in the external world, nervous systems will be monitored and analyzed live, cross-indexed with environmental data to map the probability of future events, showing that brain-states and biochemistry aren’t actually as nebulous as they once seemed. A steady flow of reliable and easily accessible data will radically transform how people behave and what civilizations look like.
Governing
The silver lining of the Hillary Clinton email debacle is that the Department of State is well positioned to post all of Clinton’s emails online for the public to view after it reviews them for release. Unfortunately, according to a government-wide FOIA audit conducted by the National Security Archive to celebrate Sunshine Week, the majority of federal agencies are not so well situated. Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments, only 40 percent of agencies follow the law’s instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms. The remainders seem willing to keep the public ignorant of their records, because in the digital age if it’s not online, it might as well not exist.
Lauren Harper, The Sentinel
We know you like transparency, and we know you probably like free food, so come enjoy BOTH at Captial Ale House in downtown Richmond TONIGHT, from 5-7, for a Sunshine Week Happy Hour. Sponsored by Transparency Virginia.
State and Local Stories
Dave Ress' eight-part series on "The Virginia Way" still has politicians around the state a little nervous, and a little upset. Guided by two decades of experience covering Virginia politics, Ress distilled months of research and boxes of public records into a portrait of our political system's loopholes and long tradition of accepted back-scratching. It was not easy. Virginia's tradition of loose campaign and ethics laws has long been buoyed by arguments of transparency: Who cares how generous a lobbyist is, so long as everyone knows about it, and voters can judge you on it? But Ress showed how tangled transparency can be, how much hunting it takes to piece together a full picture. He traveled to local courthouses for property records. He pulled records on some 200 current and former elected officials.
Daily Press
Reporter Ryan Murphy began 2014 with a tip that Isle of Wight County Schools may have skirted federal regulations in the construction of the new Georgie D. Tyler Middle School. Using the state Freedom of Information Act to access copies of contracts, emails and bid documents, the Daily Press Isle of Wight County beat reporter found that the schools division had omitted from the construction contract wage standards required under the federal Davis-Bacon Act. The effect was to lower the cost of construction by underpaying local workers hundreds of thousands of dollars. "I spent a couple of months digging into the documents and digging into legislation to figure out exactly what had happened," Murphy said. Murphy worked with school administrators to get the documents he needed. When he realized that he would have to search through administrators' emails — communications between government officials are public records under state law — he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in 430 pages of emails. An additional 110 pages were withheld because they were protected by attorney-client privilege.
Daily Press
Laten Bechtel surrounds herself with the history of other people on a daily basis. As a part of the Augusta County Genealogical Society, she puts together the past from old documents that have been in the basement of the courthouse for centuries. Her specialty is African-American slave history in the area and she has written several publications for the society, even books. It hit home during one of her research endeavors when a women from across the country asked her to research her family lineage, which turned out to be that of slaves in the area. Digging further, Bechtel discovered her family were the owners of that other woman's family. "I thought, this is amazing," she said. "That doesn't happen often, to research someone's family and it turns out your own used to own them." That's just a piece of what the genealogical society does.
News Leader
A Loudoun County parent has sued state officials to force the release of evaluation data for thousands of teachers across Virginia, making it the latest in a series of states to grapple with whether such information should be made public. Brian Davison has pressed for the data’s release because he thinks parents have a right to know how their children’s teachers are performing, information about public employees that exists but has so far been hidden. He also wants to expose what he says is Virginia’s broken promise to begin using the data to evaluate how effective the state’s teachers are. “I do think the teacher data should be out there,” Davison said. “If you know that you have a teacher that’s not effective . . . is it fair to ask a parent to put their student in that teacher’s classroom?” Davison’s crusade for the teacher data offers a window into a national debate about what parents and taxpayers have a right to know about teachers and how to balance transparency with privacy. A Richmond judge ruled in his favor in January, but that ruling has been challenged by state officials and the Virginia Education Association, which represents teachers across the state. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for today.
Washington Post
Soon enough, Hanover residents won’t only be able to catch up on local government at home, but they will also be able to stay tuned on education news. March 5, the School Board unanimously approved a motion to record audio from their meetings after division staff looked into how much it would cost and how it could be done. “We can do it,” said David Myers, assistant superintendent of business and operations, at the board’s March 3 meeting. “The cost is nominal,” Myers added, noting it is priced at just under $2,000. In a few months, citizens will be able to listen to School Board meetings on their computers at their leisure. Myers said they’ll have to get the equipment installed in the board room, which shouldn’t take too long.
Herald-Progress
National Stories
A top freedom-of-information expert isn’t buying Hillary Clinton’s explanation of why she set up her own email system to conduct official State Department business, calling it “laughable.” Daniel Metcalfe, who advised White House administrations on interpreting the Freedom of Information Act from 1981 to 2007, told The Canadian Press that the former secretary of state acted “contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law.” “There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act,” he said, reviewing a transcript of Clinton’s remarks during her Tuesday news conference. Clinton told reporters she deleted approximately 30,000 personal emails from her private account that she also used as secretary of state.
Politico
Hillary Clinton’s camp late Sunday issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read “every email” before discarding those deemed private. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted. This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read. “We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said.
Fox News
The public’s right to see government records is coming at an ever-increasing price, as authorities set fees and hourly charges that often prevent information from flowing. Whether roadblocks are created by authorities to discourage those seeking information, or simply a byproduct of bureaucracy and tighter budgets, greater costs to fulfill freedom of information requests ultimately can interfere with the public’s right to know. Such costs are a growing threat to expanding openness at all levels of government, a cornerstone of Sunshine Week. The weeklong open government initiative is celebrating its 10th anniversary beginning March 15. “It’s incredibly easy for an agency that doesn’t want certain records to be exposed to impose fees in the hopes that the requester is dissuaded,” said Adam Marshall, a fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which sponsors Sunshine Week with the American Society of News Editors. “If the people don’t know what’s going on, either because they don’t have direct access to information or because the media isn’t able to provide them with access to information about what their government is doing, it’s impossible for the people to exercise any sense of informed self-governance.”
McClatchyDC
An Arkansas Senate committee on Thursday discussed but took no action on a bill that would largely exempt former state employees’ records from the state Freedom of Information Act. Senate Bill 892 by Rep. John Cooper, R-Jonesboro, would make all information about a state employee exempt from the FOI law 60 days after the person leaves office, except for the employee’s name; agency or department of employment; position or rank; dates of service; awards, decorations or commendations; and the city or town of his or her last known address. Cooper said the bill would protect former state employees’ privacy. Some committee members expressed reservations about the measure. Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, said former state employees’ records sometimes yield evidence of “egregious acts.” “What you’re saying, in essence, is after 60 days it doesn’t matter what you did. The only thing they need to know is your name, rank and serial number,” she said. Cooper responded that the bill would not hinder law enforcement investigations. Chesterfield pointed out that some investigations begin with “our newspaper folks.”
Times Record
A powerful new surveillance tool being adopted by police departments across the country comes with an unusual requirement: To buy it, law enforcement officials must sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from saying almost anything about the technology. Any disclosure about the technology, which tracks cellphones and is often called StingRay, could allow criminals and terrorists to circumvent it, the F.B.I. has said in an affidavit. But the tool is adopted in such secrecy that communities are not always sure what they are buying or whether the technology could raise serious privacy concerns.
New York Times
Some state agencies in Delaware fail to comply with requirements for identifying their Freedom of Information Act coordinators and tracking FOIA requests. red to maintain showed significant differences in the details they include, and several agencies failed to meet a statutory deadline of 15 business days to respond to or at least acknowledge recent requests for the logs. The response deadline and requirement to keep such logs are outlined in a 2012 law that codified an executive order by Democratic Gov. Jack Markell. The law also requires each agency to identify a FOIA coordinator on its website, a requirement with which some agencies have yet to comply.
Washington Times
After the scandal that sent former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to prison, lawmakers adopted a raft of reforms that included creating a referee to intervene when bureaucrats reject citizens' requests for government records. Five years later, the "public access counselor" in the attorney general's office has yet to respond to more than 2,800 appeals of Freedom of Information Act requests for information that a government agency deemed secret, according to an analysis of records obtained by The Associated Press. That's about one in five of all FOIA appeals submitted to the office since the law took effect in 2010.
Belleville News Democrat
Editorials/Columns
Our long winter is finally ending. We would be further grateful if the sunshine applied to Virginia’s laws on government transparency. In that respect, we remain a cloudy, dreary commonwealth, no matter the weather. If Hillary Clinton had been a Virginia appointee, rather than a federal one, her emails could all be kept secret. Yes, the commonwealth operates under the Freedom of Information Act, which ensures citizen access to records and meetings of state and local governments. But the General Assembly has granted many generous “working papers” exemptions to FOIA. “Working papers,” as in all correspondence. Sadly, government secrecy at the state and local level matters little to some citizens. As journalists, we are passionate about the topic, not because we expect wrongdoing at every turn, but because we believe open government is good government. Good government attracts leaders with clear consciences, strong backbones and sharp minds. Can we say we have that in Richmond? Does secrecy nurture trust? We think not.
News Leader
It’s getting harder and more expensive to use public records to hold government officials accountable. Authorities are undermining the laws that are supposed to guarantee citizens’ right to information, turning the right to know into just plain “no.” Associated Press journalists filed hundreds of requests for government files last year, simply trying to use the rights granted under state open records laws and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years: The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.
Gary Pruitt, McClatchyDC
Data is nothing and everything at once. Any data point a person can think of is either an arbitrary label fabricated to make a complex world more intelligible, or an imperfect measurement or characterization of some physical world phenomena. But people cling to information as if it were the only thing keeping them from being sucked into outer space, because there really is nothing else to rely on. Every decision every person has ever made has been based on some kind of data, whether something as nebulous as one’s feelings at a given moment or as concrete as cell D18 in a spreadsheet. People will never stop searching for more information, more things to measure and catalog, and when they run out of things in the external world, nervous systems will be monitored and analyzed live, cross-indexed with environmental data to map the probability of future events, showing that brain-states and biochemistry aren’t actually as nebulous as they once seemed. A steady flow of reliable and easily accessible data will radically transform how people behave and what civilizations look like.
Governing
The silver lining of the Hillary Clinton email debacle is that the Department of State is well positioned to post all of Clinton’s emails online for the public to view after it reviews them for release. Unfortunately, according to a government-wide FOIA audit conducted by the National Security Archive to celebrate Sunshine Week, the majority of federal agencies are not so well situated. Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments, only 40 percent of agencies follow the law’s instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms. The remainders seem willing to keep the public ignorant of their records, because in the digital age if it’s not online, it might as well not exist.
Lauren Harper, The Sentinel
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