Transparency News 9/2/15

Wednesday, September 2, 2015
 

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National Stories
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The U.S. government has not yet notified any of the 21.5 million federal employees and contractors whose security clearance data was hacked more than three months ago, officials acknowledged on Tuesday. The agency whose data was hacked, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), said the Defense Department will begin "later this month" to notify employees and contractors across the government that their personal information was accessed by hackers. OPM said notifications would continue over several weeks and "will be sent directly to impacted individuals."
Reuters

FBI agents and a local public corruption task force raided Palm Springs City Hall armed with search warrants on Tuesday, sending home employees and closing the offices for the day, an FBI spokeswoman said. Laura Eimiller of the FBI's Los Angeles office said she could not disclose the nature of the searches, which were conducted with members of the so-called Inland Empire Public Corruption Task Force, because the case was under seal. The raid comes some three months after the state's Fair Political Practices Commission opened an investigation into links between Mayor Steve Pougnet and a real estate developer.
Reuters

Hillary Clinton violated numerous State Department rules by using privately owned thumb drives to copy 30,000 of her official emails for her lawyer, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation. The former Secretary of State in December 2014 downloaded 30,000 government emails created during her tenure in the position from her private server onto three commercial thumb drives, which her lawyer, David Kendall, transported to Washington, D.C. In transferring her emails to private thumb drives, Clinton violated a slew of federal regulations, including those of her own State Department. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs manual prohibits the storage of classified material on any external drive, stating, “the flash drive may only be used for the transfer of unclassified files.” Flash and thumb drives are treated inter-changeably by the rules. Further, unclassified material must be on a “department owned” drive, not a personal or private sector drive.
Daily Caller

Editorials/Columns

Libraries are supposed to be bastions of free speech. They’re also supposed to be centers of intelligence. The two did not mix well when the Jefferson-Madison Central Library decided last spring to allow an explicit abortion and sex-education display in the front lobby of the downtown Charlottesville branch. Civil-libertarian John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute suggested that the problem might lie in the library board’s policy of allowing individual library managers to determine what is age-appropriate — thus introducing the element of arbitrariness. Josh Wheeler of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression suggested that the library could stop making space available to community groups of all types — thus solving the element of arbitrariness.
Daily Progress

To learn more about the duties of a court clerk in Virginia, a citizen might visit the Virginia Court Clerks' Association Web page, which provides a handy repository of information about these important constitutional offices. Among the duties emphasized by the association's online presence is the fact that clerks serve as custodian of Court Cases. "Under Virginia law, the clerk is responsible for providing public access to most court files," the Web page reads. We wonder, then, how clerks across Virginia, who as public employees are elected by voters and accept taxpayer-funded salaries, reconcile this statement with their determined and coordinated effort to put their collective thumb squarely in the eye of citizens when it comes to accessing records. We can only imagine what the full database will tell Virginians about how our courts work, and how we could make them work better. But the position of the OES and many elected clerks of court is that the public should not have access to data in a manner that makes such statistical analysis possible. We expected better from these clerks of court. We hoped they would support making our justice system more transparent and accountable. We are deeply disappointed to have learned otherwise. And it makes us wonder what these court officials are trying to hide.
Daily Press