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After 25 years being hosted at the University of Syracuse, the national FOI-L listserv has relocated to the University of Florida and the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC). The owner/manager of the FOI-L listserv, Barbara Fought is stepping down. Ms. Fought began it as a service to NFOIC to provide a discussion forum for persons working on open government and transparency issues in states. It then morphed into discussion not only about state issues but federal records and access issues, as well. FOI-L currently includes around 680 subscribers, ranging from journalists to attorneys to access professionals.
NFOIC
They’re cops who can’t be trusted, prosecutors say. In a startling accounting, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office has publicly released a list of 54 NYPD officers with credibility issues — including seven cops who prosecutors will never use as the only witness in a criminal case. The release, following a Freedom of Information Law request from Gothamist and WNYC, comes on the heels of a similar list from the Bronx District Attorney last month.
New York Daily News
In the past 18 months or so, cyberattacks on government have accelerated. Experts say this is an evolution wherein bad actors have moved from targeting individuals at random, to going after governments, school districts, companies, and other institutions, which often have more to lose and are thereby more lucrative. Another factor in the recent acceleration is that many of these entities have been traditionally underfunded in the realm of cybersecurity. As such, public-sector IT leaders have begun to view a successful cyberattack as a matter of when, not if. Essentially, regardless of how well-prepared government is, a breach is still coming, and so a larger onus is now being placed on response, specifically on best practices for the aftermath of a cyberattack. Within this conversation, however, a major point of tension has arisen — transparency. A question local government leaders must grapple with is this: How transparent should government be after a cyberattack? Should they tell citizens everything, or should they downplay incidents altogether, obscuring details under the assumption that any information on their vulnerabilities can and will be used against them?
Governing
Internal emails at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released Thursday showed how the agency scrambled to respond to President Donald Trump’s inaccurate claims about Hurricane Dorian and Alabama. The emails, dozens of which were obtained by NBC News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, also detailed the blowback the NOAA received from both inside and outside the agency over a statement it put out bolstering Trump’s claims over prior information from its own forecasters.
NBC News
Nearly 1 million U.S. immigration court records allegedly went missing in September, and the data crunchers at Syracuse University want to know why. The New York university’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, has federal administrations for three decades, making constant FOIA requests to maintain one of the nation’s most comprehensive troves of immigration data. Journalists, attorneys and immigrant advocates often rely on TRAC’s numbers, which haul of numbers that can otherwise be hard to find. TRAC publicly alleged on Nov. 3 that the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which runs the country’s immigration courts, “deleted” records on nearly 1 million applications for immigration relief in its September figures. Hundreds of records of charges filed by the Department of Homeland Security and scheduled court hearing records were also missing, TRAC said.
El Paso Times
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 “Should they tell citizens everything, or should they downplay incidents altogether, obscuring details under the assumption that any information on their vulnerabilities can and will be used against them?”
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“If it’s public, it should be released to anyone interested. If it’s not, it should be released to no one.”