Transparency News 12/18/13

After Hanover County received its first ever public records request for any and all e-mails pertaining to a particular topic, County Attorney Sterling Rives has said the county is making changes in how electronic record-keeping is handled. A recent request for public documents that grew out of a community effort to fight a now withdrawn proposal to build a movie theater on the Mechanicsville Turnpike left resident Deborah Wetlaufer, who lives near the theater site, feeling as though it might be tougher for Hanover County citizens to access public information and government records than it should be.
Mechanicsville Local

A conservative Virginia lawmaker is proposing a solution to a potential bureaucratic nightmare created after lawmakers passed legislation this year to keep private the identities of people seeking concealed weapons permits. Delegate L. Scott Lingamfelter has introduced a bill that would keep information from permits issued before July 1, 2008, open to the public — a response to court clerks who said the law would have resulted in the logistical nightmare of trying to find ways to physically remove information from old indexes and paper record books. In more recent years, the information has been maintained electronically, making it easier to shield in compliance with the law. Mr. Lingamfelter, Prince William Republican, said his bill addresses a “manpower issue” that will have no effect on the state’s gun laws. “If it hurt the Second Amendment, I wouldn’t be carrying it,” he said.
Washington Times

Democrat Mark Herring continued to widen his lead over Republican Mark Obenshain on the second day of the statewide recount in race for attorney general. As ballots were being counted Tuesday, Herring was 866 votes ahead of Obenshain by 7 p.m., Herring’s legal counsel Marc Elias said. Fewer than 120 ballots had been challenged by partisan election officials to be sent to the Richmond Circuit Court, where a three-judge panel will begin reviewing them Thursday.
Roanoke Times

Descendants of a man buried in a cemetery in the path of the Western Bypass of U.S. 29 spent over five hours Tuesday with local, state and federal officials to discuss how the Virginia Department of Transportation might alter plans to reduce the impact on the ancestor’s grave and former house. The only attendees of the meeting were the “consulting parties” involved in the federal review process known as Section 106. They included representatives from VDOT, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the Federal Highway Administration and other groups. The media was asked to leave the meeting, which was held behind closed doors in the Albemarle CountyAlbemarle CountyAlbemarle County Office Building.
Charlottesville Tomorrow

A survey map believed to be created by Thomas Jefferson of land in Albemarle County has sold at auction for $30,000. The map of the land now known as Morven was sold at auction Saturday by Quinn & Farmer Auctions in Charlottesville.
News & Advance

Danville City Council members voted to give themselves a raise Tuesday night, with only councilmen Adam Tomer and John Gilstrap opposing the measure. Councilman Buddy Rawley, who said early in the discussion that he too would oppose the proposal, changed his vote when City Attorney Clarke Whitfield said failing to take action at this meeting would delay any raises for two years. Councilman Lee Vogler said he hoped raising the salaries would convince more people to run for office; he said he has spoken to several people who said they would like to run for city council but cannot afford to take all the time off work that is required to sit on various boards and commissions, as well as community events.
Register & Bee

National Stories

Student data evangelizers argue that used correctly, data, including student attendance, test scores and demographics, can enrich education. Teachers can better personalize instruction for students, principals can view the academic records of students who move across school districts and parents can determine whether a child is on track for college, to name just a few examples. But that promise comes with threats to students’ privacy. Parents have expressed concerns that if teachers have easy access to students’ entire academic histories, they might write off those with poor records, or that student information might fall into the hands of sexual predators. Those concerns have led to heated debates about how much data schools should be collecting, how it should be stored and who should have access to it.
Stateline

Wikimedia’s Sue Gardner received the Knight Foundation’s first innovation award Monday night and she paid it forward with a $25,000 grant to MuckRock, an open government platform that eases requests for public records. Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, was honored for her leadership in digital media and universal access to the Internet. Since she was named as foundation executive director in 2007, Wikipedia has grown to become the world’s fifth largest website, the Knight Foundation said in a press release.
Poynter

The Energy Department blocked about 2,200 attempts this year by users seeking to get data from its websites in ways that endangered equal access to the agency’s widely followed economic reports. The users were blocked because they asked for too much information or submitted too many requests for data, exceeding limits set by the agency.
Wall Street Journal

The state of Colorado has notified nearly 19,000 current and former employees that a device containing their names, Social Security numbers and possibly addresses is missing. And while the state has said "there is no indication that this information has been misused or stolen," the letter sent to employees about the incident created additional concerns. Although it contained the state seal, there was no letterhead and no phone number to call. And when a link to the attorney general's office failed to open, some recipients wondered if it was a scam or a hoax.
The Denver Post

The government has a "legitimate interest" in prohibiting demonstrations on Supreme Court grounds, the Justice Department asserted in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Monday. In the case Hodge v. Talkin, the department is urging the circuit court to restore the law banning assemblages, processions and displays on court property, 40 U.S.C. 6135. Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the law in June, declaring it to be "unreasonable, substantially overbroad, and irreconcilable with the First Amendment."
Blog of LegalTimes

Court documents unsealed this week in the case against three former Penn State administrators shed light on why state prosecutors think they can preserve the hotly disputed testimony of former Penn State counsel Cynthia Baldwin. It's in part because, in more than two hours of closed-door questioning on Oct. 26, 2012, they tried to build a firewall around any work Baldwin did some 21 months earlier in prepping then-PSU Athletic Director Tim Curley and former senior vice president Gary Schultz for their own grand jury appearances.
Patriot-News
 

Editorials/Columns

Daily Press: Roughly 18 months after America and the world learned of the massive and invasive surveillance apparatus constructed by the United States government, a federal judge on concluded that the bulk data collection was almost certainly in violation of the Constitution. That ruling represents a welcome but overdue intervention on the side of individual liberty and personal privacy.Federal District Court Judge Richard J. Leon stayed the injunction so his ruling will not put a halt to Washington's snooping while the government enjoys time to mount an appeal. Yet the decision marks the first time a judge asserted that the government overstepped its boundaries with illegal and overzealous surveillance of citizens.

Virginian-Pilot: In the decades since the Nixon administration, when campaign reform was proven necessary, the Supreme Court and lawmakers have systematically undermined the public's right to know who's trying to control their lawmakers.  After the court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, corporations and unions were freed to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect politicians and push issues. After the ruling, applications doubled for exemptions under section 501(c)4 of the tax code. That section is supposed to cover social welfare agencies, such as civic leagues or volunteer fire departments. But it has been widely abused by nakedly political organizations eager to exploit the fact that 501(c)4s don't have to report donors and that deductions can be considered a business expense. Worse, many of those 501(c)4s are tightly affiliated with 501(c)3s that can take tax-deductible donations but are forbidden from engaging in political activity.

Roanoke Times: Virginians who in 2009 alone donated at least $2 million to the U.S. Navy Veterans Association found later they merely had helped line the pockets of an elusive con man known as Bobby Thompson. They weren’t his only dupes. Nationwide, investigators say, he sucked up more than $100 million from donors between 2002 and 2010, when his “charity” was exposed as a fraud. Monday, a court finally called Cody to account for his crimes, but not a Virginia court. An Ohio judge sentenced him to 28 years in prison and fined him more than $6 million, plus court costs, for racketeering, theft, money laundering and identity theft. Satisfying though that is, Virginians who were fleeced should see him prosecuted in the commonwealth. The public deserves a full airing of how he easily circumvented its elected officials and sleepy consumer watchdogs.