Transparency News 11/29/17

Wednesday, November 29, 2017


State and Local Stories

Former U.S. Attorney Tim Heaphy will present his report on the city’s handling of recent white nationalist events in Charlottesville to the City Council at 7 p.m. Monday, to be followed by a public hearing on the report. The council has scheduled its meeting to begin at 4 p.m., three hours earlier than normal, to accommodate the report.  
The Daily Progress

The ACLU of Virginia is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond to uphold a federal court’s ruling that Chairwoman Phyllis Randall (D-At Large) violated Lansdowne resident Brian Davison’s First Amendment right to free speech by blocking him from her Facebook page. “When a government actor bans critics from speaking in a forum, it silences and chills dissent, warps the public conversation, and skews public perception,” the ACLU wrote in its amicus brief filed Monday. “When only critics are blocked from viewing information or petitioning the government for services, the restriction operates as a punishment for holding political viewpoints that the government actor disfavors. This Court should not allow such results.” 
Loudoun Times-Mirror



National Stories
​

Nebraska prison officials are refusing to identify the supplier who recently sold them lethal injection drugs, despite having released such information in the past. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services denied a Nov. 10 public records request by The Associated Press. The Omaha World-Herald reported Tuesday that its request was also denied. The department is arguing for the first time that the records are confidential attorney work product and are protected by attorney-client privilege. The department also contends the supplier is part of its "execution team," whose identities are confidential.
McClatchy

The contents of a highly sensitive hard drive belonging to a division of the National Security Agency have been left online. The virtual disk image contains over 100 gigabytes of data from an Army intelligence project, codenamed "Red Disk." The disk image belongs to the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command, known as INSCOM, a division of both the Army and the NSA. The disk image was left on an unlisted but public Amazon Web Services storage server, without a password, open for anyone to download. Unprotected storage buckets have become a recurring theme in recent data leaks and exposures. In the past year alone, Accenture, Verizon, and Viacom, and several government departments, were all dinged by unsecured data.
ZDNet

Anthony Scaramucci, whose brief tenure last summer as White House communications director ended after a profane phone call to a New Yorker reporter, resigned on Tuesday from an advisory board at Tufts University after several weeks of conflict with students. Mr. Scaramucci said he was stepping down from the advisory board of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to spare Tufts, his alma mater, unnecessary scrutiny. But he stood by his threat to sue The Tufts Daily, a student newspaper, and one of its writers if the writer did not apologize for critical op-eds published this month.
New York Times

The Defense Intelligence Agency is refusing to publicly release a wide array of documents related to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, saying that turning them over could interfere with ongoing congressional and federal investigations.
Fox News

In the last year, two separate judges have ruled against the city of Austin, Texas, for violating the Open Meetings Act. Judge Scott Jenkins ruled Austin City Council’s vote on Nov. 10, 2016 violated the Open Meetings Act by failing to give proper notice of the item they were voting on. In a statement sent to KXAN, the plaintiff’s attorney, Bill Aleshire explained council did not disclose that it was granting environmental waivers to Champion Tract developers. He also wrote that no city commission ever reviewed the waivers.
KXAN