Transparency News 11/21/13

Despite a warm welcome on Twitter, @MayorJonesRVA is apparently a phony. After media inquiries, Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones’ administration on Wednesday evening announced that the new Twitter account, which has picked up nearly 300 followers, including residents, reporters and politicians, was a fraud. The city is taking action to have the fake account removed, a release from Jones’ press secretary, Tammy Hawley, said. The fake account first tweeted at 1:42 a.m. Monday: “Hello #rva feels good to be connected!” with a picture of Jones and a background of the city’s night skyline.
Times-Dispatch

The campaign mailers that stuff local mailboxes every year during election season may soon have to clear a new set of hurdles if political parties want to continue to receive special low postage rates. That’s because an arrangement that General Assembly members and candidates in the region describe as standard seems to violate U.S. Postal Service requirements, said Katina Fields, a spokeswoman in the postal service’s Washington headquarters. At issue is how closely state Democratic and Republican parties coordinate their activities with the individual campaigns of their candidates. For years in Virginia, both parties have produced a blizzard of mailers for candidates. The candidates send campaign money to the parties, and the parties put together mailers and send them at rates that can be about half what the candidates themselves would pay. The catch is that to qualify for the low rates, the parties are supposed to limit coordination with the campaigns. Money that candidates send to the state parties is not supposed to be tied specifically to the mailers — a stipulation that candidates and officials said is routinely ignored in practice. The requirement comes from a wrinkle in the nonprofit mailing status. Political parties can use the rate to advocate for issues or to independently campaign for specific candidates, but the parties are not supposed to plan candidate-specific mailers or coordinate them with the candidates’ actual campaigns.
Roanoke Times

Chesterfield County’s refusal to clean up its voter rolls before the Nov. 5 Virginia electionthreatens to turn the populous Richmond suburb into a legal battleground in the still-undecided attorney general’s race.
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau

National Stories

Weeks after Maryland State Police and federal agents seized reporting files from a former Washington Times journalist’s home, a Homeland Security agent checked the materials out of the police evidence room for an hour, according to logs that shine new light on a case that has raised First Amendment concerns. The custody logs don’t state why the reporting materials were removed from evidence Sept. 3, about a month after they were seized from reporter Audrey Hudson’s home during a search in an unrelated investigation of her husband.
Washington Times

The Pennsylvania Superior Court has ruled that online commenters have no constitutional right to falsely attribute nonsatirical postings to someone with a direct connection to the subject matter. The court found that two John Doe defendants may not appeal a trial court's interlocutory order requiring an Internet service provider to reveal their identities because they failed to establish that they had a First Amendment right to pose online as a high-level AmerisourceBergen Corp. executive and post commercial information about the company in a website's comments section.
Legal Intelligencer

Top White House and health officials feared that HealthCare.gov would not work correctly and would set off a wave of bad publicity, according to emails sent shortly before the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare enrollment website. The emails, released Wednesday evening by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, included a picture of an error message that has become emblematic of the launch debacle. They were dated Sept. 25 — less than a week before the enrollment portal opened — and immediately created a crisis for the White House.
Politico

Could online privacy one day be a thing of the past as we share more and more details about ourselves through social networks? Vint Cerf certainly believes that privacy will become much harder to ensure. The father of the Internet spoke Tuesday about online privacy at a US Federal Trade Commission workshop called the "Internet of Things." A series of tweets posted by Adweek reporter Katy Bachman captured some of Cerf's key comments. Cerf said that "privacy may be an anomaly," warning that "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve" it. But at least some of the fault lies with us.
CNET News