Transparency News 12/28/16
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
No, you didn't miss the Dec. 27 issue of Transparency News. My last gift on Christmas was a massive cold that kept me in bed Monday and Tuesday. My apologies!
State and Local Stories
No, you didn't miss the Dec. 27 issue of Transparency News. My last gift on Christmas was a massive cold that kept me in bed Monday and Tuesday. My apologies!
State and Local Stories
Local politics is so heated in Bath County these days that the board of supervisors moved its Dec. 13 meeting to the county’s circuit courtroom to accommodate an overflow crowd, which watched the proceedings in quiet disapproval. Three of the supervisors — Chairwoman Claire Collins, Richard Byrd and Stuart Hall — could soon find themselves back in the same courtroom. Angered by the board’s surprise vote in September to eliminate the county’s director of tourism position, a group of citizens has launched a legal effort to have the three supervisors removed from office. The petitions allege the board violated the Virginia Freedom of Information Act when it held a closed session to discuss eliminating the director of tourism position — a change in governmental structure that should have been addressed during the public part of its meeting.
The Roanoke Times
Three months after Alphabet, Google’s parent company, delivered hundreds of Chipotle burritos with drones in Blacksburg, the company says the experiment was a “complete success.” But that’s about the extent of what the tight-lipped tech giant is willing to discuss. The experiment shined a national spotlight on Blacksburg, as national media organizations including Bloomberg, TIME and TechCrunch covered the flights. Project Wing said the service was closed to the public and that no professional photography was allowed on the test grounds, but The Roanoke Times was allowed to order a burrito and take cellphone photos.
The Roanoke Times
The sponsor of a proposed piece of legislation says it will ensure freedom of speech on Virginia’s college and university campuses. Del. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, has prefiled House Bill 1401 for the 2017 General Assembly session, which begins Jan. 11. If approved, the bill would provide students, faculty members, lecturers or invited guests additional support for voicing their opinions on school grounds.
Daily News Record
On different floors of Norfolk City Hall, the treasurer and the finance director insert two specialized thumb drives into their computers. Only once those digital “keys” are in place and both officials issue electronic signatures can Norfolk’s government print checks or deposit payroll for its 5,000 employees. The two-key system, as any Tom Clancy reader knows, is not unlike the U.S. military practice that ensures no single officer can launch a nuclear missile. It’s not new. But now that Norfolk residents have to pay their taxes to a man who’s been ruled corrupt and a liar, city officials have been reviewing such safeguards and tightening them where possible.
Virginian-Pilot
An assembly planned earlier this month by Cox High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance appeared to confuse the Virginia Beach school division even though several notices were sent to parents and community members about the program, documents obtained by The Virginian-Pilot show. In fact, the division itself sent a notice to local media promoting the event just days before controversy arose, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The assembly, which was to include a keynote speech by Hampton Roads Pride President Michael Berlucchi and a question-and-answer panel with students, was delayed on Dec. 4 – one day before it was scheduled to happen. The emails show confusion among division leaders about what the program entailed and who was presenting it.
Virginian-Pilot
The police use of automatic license plate readers, photographing hundreds of license plates per minute and capturing the exact time and place of the photo, has become routine in law enforcement and is credited with helping to solve all manner of crimes, find missing persons and locate stolen autos. But the vast data those readers generate continues to alarm civil liberties advocates, troubled by the possibility of police tracking people’s movements, and now a legal challenge is headed to Virginia’s Supreme Court to determine whether the police can keep the information indefinitely — or not at all. Different states, and individual police departments, have varying policies on how long the police can keep the data from their license plate readers. In Colorado, the data can be kept for three years. In New Hampshire, state law says the readers can’t be used at all. In Virginia, where there is no restriction, the American Civil Liberties Union entered the swirling controversy over data retention by suing the Fairfax County Police Department, seeking an injunction to prevent them from keeping the license data they currently maintain for a year.
Washington Post
The lawyer representing dozens of residents of a troubled Manassas mobile home park is now readying subpoenas for city staffers and elected officials, planning to put them under oath to prove that the park’s owner has neglected its failing sewer system for years. Jonathan Francis, the pro bono attorney assisting 49 families living in the East End Mobile Home Park, gathered dozens of his clients for a meeting Dec. 16 to discuss his legal strategy in the “tenant’s assertion” cases they filed against the property’s owner. Since November, the residents have been paying their rent into an escrow account managed by the Prince William County District Court, rather than to owner Helen Loretta Clarke’s trust, alleging Clarke’s representatives failed to act on notices from the city that the park sewer system was regularly leaking raw sewage. Accordingly, Francis asked some of his clients to testify to the park’s substandard conditions in a hearing set for Jan. 27. But he noted that their accounts will only be one part of the case he needs to make. To round out his arguments, Francis said he’ll need to call city water and sewer officials, and even city council members, since they voted in April to agree to a deal to eventually buy the park for $1.86 million. “We need people to verify that the owner received these notices about the park’s condition, but did nothing,” Francis said in an interview. “But because the council also discussed a lot of this in closed session before they decided to buy the park, we need them to testify about what happened there.”
Inside NOVA
National Stories
We’re excited to announce that over the coming days, we’ll be able to start reactivating some state scrapers to collect up-to-date legislative data. We plan to turn on nearly a dozen states in our first round: California, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington DC. These are some of the earliest states to begin their 2017 legislative sessions, and together include over 40% of the US population. We expect to be serving current data for them no later than January 3. After these, we’ll move our focus to a second round: Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, and Wisconsin; we’ll have an eye towards serving current data for them by mid-January. And we expect all remaining states to be completed and running by mid-February at the latest.
Open States
In a new legal development on the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails, an appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling and said two U.S. government agencies should have done more to recover the emails. The ruling from Judge Stephen Williams, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, revives one of a number of legal challenges involving Clinton's handling of government emails when she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
Virginia's Freedom of Information Act is 57 pages of single-spaced type, which is needed to outline all the excuses for ignoring its stated goal — that "The affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be the beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government." Since newspapers have long been in the business of "writing tight," we thought we'd offer an alternative.Here goes:
Daily Press
If you are walking down a public street, should you expect people not to see you? Of course not. But suppose someone decides to follow you — and to make records noting the time and place of your movements. Is that the same thing as simply noticing you happen to be out and about? No. Most people would agree the second case differs from the first. Yet a Fairfax judge unfortunately failed to pick up on that distinction recently when he ruled in favor of the county’s use of license plate readers. Fairfax’s police department uses automated license plate readers that can scan 3,600 plates per minute. The county compares the plates to a hot list of stolen cars and other vehicles that might have been involved in a crime.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In 2012, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 660 that required the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) to contract with a private company to create an online index of vital records. The bill also reduced the period for marriage, divorce, annulment, and death vital records to become public from 50 to 25 years after the event. The period for birth vital records to become public was not changed. In June 2015, after more than two years of scanning and indexing, VDH and its contractor, Ancestry.com, published the online vital records index that includes information for nearly every Virginian. The index contains information from both public and nonpublic vital records. With few exceptions, if you were born, married or divorced in Virginia, your full name as well as the date and place of the vital record event are now public information published on the internet. Does it benefit the citizens of Virginia when data from nonpublic vital records is being transformed into public information by simply including it in the index? To make matters worse, because the vital records index has been designated as public information, it is possible to obtain an electronic copy of the index through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Charles Hague, Richmond Times-Dispatch
When Donald Trump takes the presidential oath next month, he will be, for the first time in his life, an elected official. As a businessman and private citizen, he has been able to conduct his affairs more or less on his own terms. Once he is in the White House, he is accountable as a public servant. The Freedom of Information Act guarantees public access to certain government data, and journalists have used it with regularity to get information they need to report on officials and agencies. Given the president-elect’s frequent attacks on the media and journalists, the expectations of the open government community are not high. If Trump has no use for FOIA and its ray of sunshine in government, he certainly wouldn’t be the first president to hold those views.
Paul Fletcher, Forbes
(Fletcher serves on the VCOG Board of Directors)
The Illinois Freedom of Information Act says citizens "are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts and policies of those who represent them as public officials and public employees." It does not say, "unless those affairs are conducted on a personal email account." So what to make of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision to release 2,700 pages of emails from his personal accounts to settle a lawsuit filed by the Better Government Association? The BGA had sued to obtain official emails sent or received by Emanuel on nongovernment accounts. We're happy Emanuel has finally coughed up these records after stonewalling for more than a year. There is no question they should be open to public inspection. Are they complete? It's impossible to say. Emanuel's personal attorney — not a judge — determined which of the emails to release; the city's lawyers redacted them. That's a one-sided arrangement, with the public on the wrong side.
Chicago Tribune
The Roanoke Times
Three months after Alphabet, Google’s parent company, delivered hundreds of Chipotle burritos with drones in Blacksburg, the company says the experiment was a “complete success.” But that’s about the extent of what the tight-lipped tech giant is willing to discuss. The experiment shined a national spotlight on Blacksburg, as national media organizations including Bloomberg, TIME and TechCrunch covered the flights. Project Wing said the service was closed to the public and that no professional photography was allowed on the test grounds, but The Roanoke Times was allowed to order a burrito and take cellphone photos.
The Roanoke Times
The sponsor of a proposed piece of legislation says it will ensure freedom of speech on Virginia’s college and university campuses. Del. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, has prefiled House Bill 1401 for the 2017 General Assembly session, which begins Jan. 11. If approved, the bill would provide students, faculty members, lecturers or invited guests additional support for voicing their opinions on school grounds.
Daily News Record
On different floors of Norfolk City Hall, the treasurer and the finance director insert two specialized thumb drives into their computers. Only once those digital “keys” are in place and both officials issue electronic signatures can Norfolk’s government print checks or deposit payroll for its 5,000 employees. The two-key system, as any Tom Clancy reader knows, is not unlike the U.S. military practice that ensures no single officer can launch a nuclear missile. It’s not new. But now that Norfolk residents have to pay their taxes to a man who’s been ruled corrupt and a liar, city officials have been reviewing such safeguards and tightening them where possible.
Virginian-Pilot
An assembly planned earlier this month by Cox High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance appeared to confuse the Virginia Beach school division even though several notices were sent to parents and community members about the program, documents obtained by The Virginian-Pilot show. In fact, the division itself sent a notice to local media promoting the event just days before controversy arose, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The assembly, which was to include a keynote speech by Hampton Roads Pride President Michael Berlucchi and a question-and-answer panel with students, was delayed on Dec. 4 – one day before it was scheduled to happen. The emails show confusion among division leaders about what the program entailed and who was presenting it.
Virginian-Pilot
The police use of automatic license plate readers, photographing hundreds of license plates per minute and capturing the exact time and place of the photo, has become routine in law enforcement and is credited with helping to solve all manner of crimes, find missing persons and locate stolen autos. But the vast data those readers generate continues to alarm civil liberties advocates, troubled by the possibility of police tracking people’s movements, and now a legal challenge is headed to Virginia’s Supreme Court to determine whether the police can keep the information indefinitely — or not at all. Different states, and individual police departments, have varying policies on how long the police can keep the data from their license plate readers. In Colorado, the data can be kept for three years. In New Hampshire, state law says the readers can’t be used at all. In Virginia, where there is no restriction, the American Civil Liberties Union entered the swirling controversy over data retention by suing the Fairfax County Police Department, seeking an injunction to prevent them from keeping the license data they currently maintain for a year.
Washington Post
The lawyer representing dozens of residents of a troubled Manassas mobile home park is now readying subpoenas for city staffers and elected officials, planning to put them under oath to prove that the park’s owner has neglected its failing sewer system for years. Jonathan Francis, the pro bono attorney assisting 49 families living in the East End Mobile Home Park, gathered dozens of his clients for a meeting Dec. 16 to discuss his legal strategy in the “tenant’s assertion” cases they filed against the property’s owner. Since November, the residents have been paying their rent into an escrow account managed by the Prince William County District Court, rather than to owner Helen Loretta Clarke’s trust, alleging Clarke’s representatives failed to act on notices from the city that the park sewer system was regularly leaking raw sewage. Accordingly, Francis asked some of his clients to testify to the park’s substandard conditions in a hearing set for Jan. 27. But he noted that their accounts will only be one part of the case he needs to make. To round out his arguments, Francis said he’ll need to call city water and sewer officials, and even city council members, since they voted in April to agree to a deal to eventually buy the park for $1.86 million. “We need people to verify that the owner received these notices about the park’s condition, but did nothing,” Francis said in an interview. “But because the council also discussed a lot of this in closed session before they decided to buy the park, we need them to testify about what happened there.”
Inside NOVA
National Stories
We’re excited to announce that over the coming days, we’ll be able to start reactivating some state scrapers to collect up-to-date legislative data. We plan to turn on nearly a dozen states in our first round: California, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington DC. These are some of the earliest states to begin their 2017 legislative sessions, and together include over 40% of the US population. We expect to be serving current data for them no later than January 3. After these, we’ll move our focus to a second round: Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, and Wisconsin; we’ll have an eye towards serving current data for them by mid-January. And we expect all remaining states to be completed and running by mid-February at the latest.
Open States
In a new legal development on the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails, an appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling and said two U.S. government agencies should have done more to recover the emails. The ruling from Judge Stephen Williams, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, revives one of a number of legal challenges involving Clinton's handling of government emails when she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
Virginia's Freedom of Information Act is 57 pages of single-spaced type, which is needed to outline all the excuses for ignoring its stated goal — that "The affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be the beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government." Since newspapers have long been in the business of "writing tight," we thought we'd offer an alternative.Here goes:
Daily Press
If you are walking down a public street, should you expect people not to see you? Of course not. But suppose someone decides to follow you — and to make records noting the time and place of your movements. Is that the same thing as simply noticing you happen to be out and about? No. Most people would agree the second case differs from the first. Yet a Fairfax judge unfortunately failed to pick up on that distinction recently when he ruled in favor of the county’s use of license plate readers. Fairfax’s police department uses automated license plate readers that can scan 3,600 plates per minute. The county compares the plates to a hot list of stolen cars and other vehicles that might have been involved in a crime.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In 2012, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 660 that required the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) to contract with a private company to create an online index of vital records. The bill also reduced the period for marriage, divorce, annulment, and death vital records to become public from 50 to 25 years after the event. The period for birth vital records to become public was not changed. In June 2015, after more than two years of scanning and indexing, VDH and its contractor, Ancestry.com, published the online vital records index that includes information for nearly every Virginian. The index contains information from both public and nonpublic vital records. With few exceptions, if you were born, married or divorced in Virginia, your full name as well as the date and place of the vital record event are now public information published on the internet. Does it benefit the citizens of Virginia when data from nonpublic vital records is being transformed into public information by simply including it in the index? To make matters worse, because the vital records index has been designated as public information, it is possible to obtain an electronic copy of the index through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Charles Hague, Richmond Times-Dispatch
When Donald Trump takes the presidential oath next month, he will be, for the first time in his life, an elected official. As a businessman and private citizen, he has been able to conduct his affairs more or less on his own terms. Once he is in the White House, he is accountable as a public servant. The Freedom of Information Act guarantees public access to certain government data, and journalists have used it with regularity to get information they need to report on officials and agencies. Given the president-elect’s frequent attacks on the media and journalists, the expectations of the open government community are not high. If Trump has no use for FOIA and its ray of sunshine in government, he certainly wouldn’t be the first president to hold those views.
Paul Fletcher, Forbes
(Fletcher serves on the VCOG Board of Directors)
The Illinois Freedom of Information Act says citizens "are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts and policies of those who represent them as public officials and public employees." It does not say, "unless those affairs are conducted on a personal email account." So what to make of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision to release 2,700 pages of emails from his personal accounts to settle a lawsuit filed by the Better Government Association? The BGA had sued to obtain official emails sent or received by Emanuel on nongovernment accounts. We're happy Emanuel has finally coughed up these records after stonewalling for more than a year. There is no question they should be open to public inspection. Are they complete? It's impossible to say. Emanuel's personal attorney — not a judge — determined which of the emails to release; the city's lawyers redacted them. That's a one-sided arrangement, with the public on the wrong side.
Chicago Tribune
Categories:
