Transparency News 10/5/17
Thursday, October 5, 2017
State and Local Stories
Petersburg taxpayers spent about $1 million during the past year on firms hired to pull the city from the brink of insolvency and scrutinize the cash-strapped government’s books. Of that, about $830,000 has gone to turnaround consultants with the Washington, D.C.-based Robert Bobb Group. Nearly $195,000 was spent on a long-awaited forensic audit by the firm PBMares, according to city spokeswoman Folakemi Osoba. The cost of the Bobb Group’s services was chief among criticisms lobbed by detractors of the proposal to hire the firm last fall during a turbulent transition period that saw the City Council back away from the contract after voting to negotiate with the firm. But the city ultimately signed on. One year later, the deal’s chief architect says city taxpayers have gotten their money’s worth.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate committee investigating Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, said he plans to introduce legislation that would make political advertising on social media more transparent. The proposal, which he is writing with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), comes in response to recent revelations that Russian-tied entities bought divisive political ads on social-media platforms during the campaign season. Mr. Warner said the ads were intended to “sow chaos and drive division.”
Wall Street Journal
National Stories
The U.S. Department of Justice identified 400 pages of documents related to its Community Oriented Policing Services office’s actions in the wake of the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, but a vast majority were either totally or partially redacted before being released under the Freedom of Information Act. Responding to an almost three-year-old FOIA request from the Post-Dispatch, DOJ FOIA Officer Chaun Eason determined that only 55 pages - mostly mundane COPS office communications about travel to St. Louis, talking-points memos, press releases, and other non-revelatory material – were totally releasable to the newspaper. Almost two-thirds of the documents were totally redacted without any other reference to the person or persons who created them, the person or persons to whom they were intended, or the topic of the material withheld.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The University of Michigan and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy have settled a lawsuit seeking emails sent by university President Mark Schlissel referencing President Donald Trump. The settlement required that UM release seven additional emails that Mackinac Center reporter Derek Draplin requested through a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails have been published online. The university previously released four emails in response to the request, but withheld seven, calling them confidential. UM agreed in the settlement to revise its FOIA practices, hire more staff to fulfill transparency requests, produce an annual compliance report and strive to complete 75 percent of FOIA requests without charging a fee. UM also reimbursed the Mackinac Center for $7,914 in legal fees.
MLive
A North Carolina Congressman announced Tuesday that he was filing a lawsuit for all records related to a 2000 Osprey crash that killed 19 Marines. U.S. House of Representative Walter B. Jones, NC-3, held a 22-minute press conference from Washington D.C. announcing the filing of a rare Freedom of Information Act request lawsuit seeking all records pertaining to the V-22 Osprey crash in Marana, Arizona. The families of the Osprey’s two pilots — Maj. Brooks Gruber and Lt. Col. John Brow — flanked the congressman in an outdoor press conference on Capitol Hill. After spending 14 years to clear the names of Gruber and Brow, Jones is demanding the release of documents that may explain why they were unfairly and incorrectly blamed for that tragic crash.
Jacksonville Daily News
News bulletin in 1957: Sputnik stuns the world. CIA in 2017: Not really. The CIA released newly declassified documents on Wednesday revealing that while the American public was surprised when the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite 60 years ago, intelligence agencies weren't caught off-guard.
McClatchy
One of the frustrations with the FOIA process that we hear about most frequently is the delay in an agency’s response to a request. Frequently, requesters contact us to ask why an agency has not responded within the 20 working days response time that is prescribed in the law. We understand that delays are extremely frustrating; unfortunately they are all too common at agencies that receive a large volume of requests and at agencies that are struggling to respond to a backlog of old requests. To help requesters understand why an agency’s response may be delayed, we thought it might be useful to give you all a quick guide to where you can find statistics about an agency’s FOIA performance, and give you a few helpful hints on how to use these resources.
The National Archives
There are no visitor logs or other system of tracking those who visited President Donald Trump at his winter retreat known as Mar-a-Lago, a Secret Service official confirmed Wednesday. Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Special Agent Kim Campbell said that her agency had a smattering of records regarding some foreign dignitaries and law enforcement officers who met Trump earlier this year during his stays at the Palm Beach resort he owns. However, Campbell acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive or even a routine process for tracking such visitors, such as the one used for the White House.
Politico
As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all. A heavily redacted cache of emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by students at Vanderbilt University Law School and published exclusively by The Intercept, reveals how in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, ICE agents in Austin scrambled — and largely failed — to engineer a narrative that would substantiate the administration’s claims that the raids were motivated by public safety concerns.
The Intercept
Editorials/Columns
It was ironic that a university with a new emphasis on “big data,” including data analysis of social trends and patterns, should have been so blindsided in its failure to understand the social media clues leading up to the white supremacist march at the University of Virginia on Aug. 11. But immediately after the events of Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, a number of UVa experts quickly realized that big data could and should be better used to anticipate such incidents. Admittedly, this type of snooping makes us nervous. “Big data” can begin to sound too much like “Big Brother.” But the bad guys are already ahead of us in manipulating or obscuring data, and they’re using those skills to harm us economically, politically, physically, culturally and emotionally.
Daily Progress
