Transparency News 11/19/15

State and Local Stories

The Virginian-Pilot has won a lawsuit to get basic information about law enforcement officers across the state. Norfolk Circuit Judge Joseph Migliozzi ruled Wednesday that records of 125,000 current and former police officers, sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement personnel from some 500 agencies are subject to the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Migliozzi ordered officials with the Department of Criminal Justice Services to give The Pilot the following information: officers’ names, agencies they work for, and when they started and stopped working for those agencies. Lawyers with the Attorney General’s Office argued that the Department of Criminal Justice Services wasn’t the primary keeper of the records – that the records’ owners were the individual law enforcement agencies, which simply shared them with the department. Migliozzi ruled otherwise, although he said it was tough weighing public access against the safety of law enforcement officers.
Virginian-Pilot

Virginia teachers will seek new assurances in the coming legislative session that the class-by-class student test scores used in teacher evaluations aren't released to the public. The Virginia Education Association also will push for a change in state law to ensure teachers are given notice when anyone requests information from their personnel files, the group's attorney told the state's Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council Wednesday. School systems don't have to release this data under Virginia law, but teachers want a chance to weigh in before that decision's made, VEA attorney Dena Rosenkrantz said.
Daily Press

Virginia’s public-records panel will explore changes to state law to address the ramifications from a recent state Supreme Court ruling that advocates have warned could have sweeping effects on government transparency. At a meeting Wednesday, the co-chairman of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act Advisory Council said the body will look into concerns raised by Sen.-elect Scott A. Surovell, D-Fairfax, who took the Department of Corrections to court last year after being denied information about the state’s procedures for carrying out the death penalty. Speaking to the FOIA council Wednesday, Surovell said the ruling essentially says “you’ve got to trust a fox that’s guarding a henhouse” and the fox “gets to pick which chicken to show you.” “Basically, they’re saying just trust the government,” Surovell said. “It’s a real problem.” The council seemed to concur, but the body did not take action Wednesday in order to give itself time to craft a proposed remedy.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

The Department of Motor Vehicles has debuted an interactive online map giving residents the ability to see what roads in the commonwealth have the highest concentration of vehicular accidents. “Knowing exactly where problem areas are on our roadways is very important information for safety advocates and the general public,” DMV Commissioner Richard Holcomb said in announcing the new effort. Information can be found at http://dmvnow.com/safety. The feature allows individuals to select a year and road type to find clusters of accidents, then to access each cluster to obtain specific information on crashes that occurred there.
Inside NOVA


National Stories
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The F.B.I. director and the Manhattan district attorney on Wednesday sought to reopen the argument that law enforcement and intelligence officials need to have access to encrypted information on smartphones with court approval. The question seemed settled last month after President Obama decided not to push legislation requiring American technology companies — notably Apple, Google and Facebook— to roll back smartphone encryption schemes that make it almost impossible to read a target’s communications, even if investigators have a court order. But the terrorist attacks in Paris may have changed the politics on both encryption and a range of surveillance issues, with critics renewing their charge that the Obama administration is not using all tools available to stop terrorism.
New York Times

The D.C. Council’s Judiciary Committee is expected to approve a plan Thursday that would allow the public to view much of the video shot by D.C. police officers’ body-worn cameras. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) said the revised plan, developed in what several said were tense negotiations with the mayor’s office, will give D.C. residents more access than in other major U.S. cities that have adopted the technology.  Certain footage, including that showing domestic or sexual assaults, would not be made public. The bill also would bar the release of footage taken inside a home.
Washington Post

As a nonprofit focused on educating and empowering consumers to protect themselves from false and deceptive advertising, truthinadvertising.org (TINA.org) routinely files requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with state and federal officials for consumer complaints lodged against companies it is investigating. These complaints provide valuable information about experiences consumers have had with a business. While consumer complaints filed with key federal consumer protection agencies are available to the public, states differ drastically as to whether and how they disclose these same types of complaints. In order to gauge the level of access consumers have in different states to these important records, TINA.org launched a Freedom of Information (FOIA) project, sending pubic records requests to all 50 states and analyzing the pertinent public records laws.
Truth in Advertising