Transparency News 12/12/17

Tuesday, December 12, 2017


State and Local Stories

When iPads that the city’s Economic Development Department bought years earlier started to go on the fritz, the agency decided it was time for new ones. But the devices were never distributed. Instead, they sat in a closet gathering dust for six months. Why? The answer, it turned out, was a little murky and a little weird. But somebody clearly had some explaining to do. The mystery of the abandoned Apple tablets began nearly a year ago. The Virginian-Pilot filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how the iPads were acquired. On Sept. 15, Harris wrote a memo explaining the situation to the city manager’s office. He said his department did not follow the law on procurement that lays out how a city must go about buying items.
Virginian-Pilot



National Stories
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The Justice Department is refusing to reveal details of the process that led up to former FBI Director Robert Mueller being granted an ethics waiver to serve as special counsel investigating the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. In response to a POLITICO Freedom of Information Act request, the agency released a one-sentence memo Friday confirming that Mueller was granted a conflict-of-interest waiver in order to assume the politically-sensitive post.
Politico

Soldiers and Marines fighting in populated urban environments have to assume that their actions are being closely monitored by the public, according to new military doctrine published last week. They need to have "an expectation of observation." Increased transparency surrounding military operations in populated areas must be anticipated and factored into operational plans, the new doctrine instructs. "Soldiers/Marines are likely to have their activities recorded in real time and shared instantly both locally and globally. In sum, friendly forces must have an expectation of observation for many of their activities and must employ information operations to deal with this reality effectively."
Secrecy News


Editorials/Columns


In an age of entrenched political antagonism, here’s a proposition everyone can support: A democratic government should be as open and transparent as possible. No one — not citizens or businesses, not advocacy groups or the media — should be denied information because there are too many hoops to jump through or it costs too much to get it. So why has it been so hard for New York to pass a law that would make it a bit more likely for people to get that information? Welcome to Albany, the land of outsized egos and petty turf wars, where good ideas go to die every day. Now Gov. Andrew Cuomo has an opportunity to rise above this childishness and look like a champion for government transparency. A bill awaiting the governor’s signature would remove one of the biggest obstacles facing those who are wrongly denied documents they have requested under New York’s open-records law — the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight that denial in court. The tab can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars, which may be affordable to deeper-pocketed corporations and organizations but is prohibitive for ordinary citizens.
The New York Times

In 2017, elements of Virginia’s antidemocratic legacies still pervade Jefferson’s University. For instance, the members of the Board of Visitors are appointed with little public input, and has no mechanism for public comment at its meetings. In turn, the Board, not the student body, appoints the student representative. The nonvoting faculty member on the board is also not elected. I speculate that Jefferson would question the aristocratic form of the UVa’c civic culture that is more “Virginian” (in Tartar’s sense of the word) than it is Jeffersonian in its democratic ethos.
Walter Heinecke, The Daily Progress