Transparency News 3/23/16

State and Local Stories

Upcoming FOIA Council Subcommittee meetings

March 24 at 10 a.m. — The Proprietary Records Work Group (this group is studying the various FOIA exemptions related to proprietary records and trade secrets)

April 11 at 10 a.m. — The Meetings Subcommittee (this group is studying the procedural portions of FOIA’s meeting provisions

April 11 at 1:30 p.m. — The Records Subcommittee (this group continues to study the records exemptions and will probably be covering those found in 2.2-3705.4 and 2.2-3705.5

All meetings are held at the General Assembly Building in Richmond in the 6th Floor Speaker's Conference Room.

The public is encouraged to attend! 

The Norfolk School Board soon will vote on a new policy that could limit what it hears from the public at meetings. The board's public comment time regularly draws a half dozen or more speakers, often including staff. Among those speakers, teachers have complained about principals and student discipline. Parents have criticized the staff's handling of issues such as suspensions. Sometimes speakers offer praise for school officials. Under the draft policy, the board no longer will listen to comments about specific staff, individual personnel actions, student discipline matters nor pending legal matters. Speakers can address the board regarding items only on the meeting agenda and other matters of concern, according to the draft.  Speakers who do otherwise could be ruled “out of order” by the chair and will have to stop talking and sit down, the policy states. People instead can email to the board such comments. Anyone the chair deems disruptive or disrespectful could be removed from the building.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
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The best that officials in Plainfield, N.J., can tell, the hackers got in when someone was on the Internet researching grants, and soon employees in the mayor’s office were locked out of their own files. City officials scrambled to pull servers offline, but three had been compromised, leaving memos, city newsletters and other documents inaccessible. The culprits said they would release the files, but only if the city coughed up about 650 euros, paid in bitcoin, Mayor Adrian Mapp said. When the city instead turned to law enforcement, he said, the hackers vanished. The computers in Plainfield had been infected with “ransomware” — a type of malware that cybersecurity experts and law enforcement officials say is proliferating across the United States and around the world. The malware gets into people’s computers, often because they click on a link or open an attachment in an email, then encrypts files or otherwise locks users out until they pay for the key. Officials say that more people are paying — and, consequently, more criminal enterprises are launching ransomware attacks. In a nine-month period in 2014, the FBI received 1,838 complaints about ransomware, and it estimates that victims lost more than $23.7 million. The next year, the bureau received 2,453 complaints, and victims lost $24.1 million. Researchers discovered this month that even Apple products, typically less penetrable to hackers, are not immune.
Washington Post

Rejecting a practice commonly used by some government boards, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday that private meetings can be illegal even when a majority of members aren't physically present. For years, many members of county boards, city councils and school boards have met privately with staff to deliberate on controversial matters outside of public view. As long as a quorum isn't present, they contend that the requirements to notify the public in advance and have an open meeting don't apply. Often, the closed-door decisions are formally adopted later during brief public meetings with little discussion or input. In a first-of-its-kind ruling in Iowa, the court decided 4-3 that those private meetings are illegal if the board or council members use staff as conduits to share their views and negotiate policies. Any meeting called to discuss public policy in which a majority of a body's members are present "by virtue of an agent or proxy" — such as a staff member representing their views — is subject to the law's requirement of an open meeting, the court ruled.
Des Moines Register

Washington, D.C., officials acknowledge “technical issues” have been causing problems with the city’s release of public records. The problems, which have affected Freedom of Information Act requests in recent months, have prevented the release of city emails and memos requested by the News4 I-Team on several occasions in 2015 and 2016. The I-Team discovered problems with D.C. government responses to Freedom of Information Act requests during a review of city records in advance of Sunshine Week, a national week of awareness highlighting the importance of transparent government. The problems acknowledged by the city prevented the release of emails and records from the mayor’s office, the Department of Public Works and the DC Public Schools system. In each case, approximately 100 pages of records were withheld from public records requests, including requests into how the city handled snow response and school athletics finances.
NBC Washington