Transparency News 11/22/17

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Transparency News will return Monday, Nov. 27. A happy and safe Thanksgiving to all!


State and Local Stories

Check out a few of the photos from VCOG's annual conference, courtesy of VCOG board of directors member Lou Emerson, posted to our Facebook page.

A Prince William County judge has blocked school board Chairman Ryan Sawyers’ attempt to get access to his predecessor’s email correspondence, tossing Sawyers’ legal action against Superintendent Steve Walts out of court. Circuit Court Judge Steven Smith granted Walts’ motion to dismiss the chairman’s case in a hearing Tuesday, ruling that Sawyers doesn’t have the right to access archived emails from former Chairman Milton Johns and other board members without the full board’s permission. “In my mind, the law is clear that an individual board member can’t go off rogue, and go out on their own to ask for this,” Smith said.
Inside NoVa

The University of Virginia Police Department and other officials heard about the Aug. 11 Tiki torch march that sparked violence at the Rotunda as early as Aug. 8, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Monday. The Chronicle received more than 3,000 pages of documents through a public records request, some of which show communication among UVa officials and others before, during and after hundreds of white nationalists marched through Grounds from Nameless Field to the Rotunda. The documents were also provided to The Daily Progress on Tuesday.
Daily Progress



National Stories
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An appeals court gave a skeptical reception Tuesday to a lawsuit claiming that President Donald Trump's voter fraud commission violated federal law by failing to study the privacy impact of a demand for voter rolls and other personal data on millions of Americans. During oral arguments, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals didn't say much about the possibility that the President's Advisory Committee on Election Integrity violated a requirement Congress created in 2002 that federal agencies conduct a "privacy impact assessment" before embarking on collection of data on individuals.
Politico

Lawyers for the city of Aurora, Illinois, opened their latest argument in a privacy rights lawsuit with a quote from a 2017 John Grisham novel. The city cited something a character said on page 69 of "Camino Island." "Elaine was right — nothing is really private these days with the internet and social media and hackers everywhere and all the talk about transparency," begins the city's latest filing asking a judge to dismiss a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven current and former police officers who say the city shouldn't have released their personal information to a gang associate their work helped put in prison. The city is arguing the constitution grants no right to privacy for the types of information released.
Chicago Tribune

Records and photographs from the papers of former U.S. Rep. Nick Joe Rahall II have been opened for research at West Virginia University Libraries' West Virginia & Regional History Center. Rahall won the 1976 contest for West Virginia's Fourth Congressional District seat and was re-elected 18 times. He is the state's longest-serving congressman. The university said in a news release the materials in Rahall's collection document his contributions to national policy and state projects.
McClatchy

"After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, the Obama administration turned out to be one of the most secretive," wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan last year. Speaking at Harvard's Shorenstein Center last month, former ACLU litigator Jameel Jaffer didn't go quite that far. He acknowledged that Obama had taken some small steps towards greater transparency, such as making White House visitor logs available and declassifying the Office of Legal Counsel memos on intelligence interrogation (the "torture memos"). But overall, Obama was a disappointment, said Jaffer, a respected figure who now directs the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "Few people today--and certainly very few transparency advocates--believe that President Obama kept his promise," he said.
Secrecy News