Transparency News 12/2/15
State and Local Stories
Financial consultants for the city of Richmond who took issue with an auditor’s bleak assessment of its fiscal health in September still were not content with a revised analysis the office issued Tuesday. They made their case before city finance officials and Richmond’s chief administrative officer Tuesday and issued a written response to the report from City Auditor Umesh Dalal. “My job is to report to the citizens of this city the risks that we have and suggest solutions to minimize those risks,” Dalal said. “They work to make sure the bond rating agencies view the city favorably.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Election officials in Prince William County this week asked the Commonwealth’s attorney to investigate one of their own. They say Guy Anthony Guiffré, a member of the county electoral board, might have broken state and federal laws in his quest to determine whether someone improperly used technology to impersonate voters in last month’s election. At issue is a state rule that says a voter can apply for an absentee ballot online using an electronic signature instead of the old-fashioned way — with paper and pen. Guiffré, a Republican, says the system opens the door to fraud. To prove it, he recruited four friends — while the county’s registrar was away — to inspect 151 absentee ballot documents and registration records laden with Social Security numbers and other personal information. In doing so, Democrats say, he compromised the meticulous process used to handle ballots, usurped his authority and violated voter privacy. “It’s my obligation as an individual electoral board member to make sure if I see something that looks extremely suspicious to do something about it,” he said.
Washington Post
National Stories
Some Capitol Hill residents want to know whether a "revolving door" of justice is playing a part in their neighborhood's crime problem -- but actually getting the answer will come with a daunting price tag. So they've come up with an unusual way to get that information: a bake sale. For months, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Denise Krepp, who serves the Hill East area, has been trying to find out how many of the thousands of arrests made by police have actually resulted in prosecution. The Department of Justice responded to Krepp’s FOIA request by saying say that providing the information would be costly: $40 an hour, for what could be hundreds of hours of research. "You know what happened when I told my residents that I was going to pay $1,000 [of my own money]?" Krepp asked. "They said, 'No, you're not. We're going to help you.' So we started thinking of ways to raise the money. We're going to do bake sales."
NBC Washington
The D.C. Council ended months of arguments Tuesday and approved a plan that would allow most footage captured by police wearing body cameras to be accessible to the public. The decision, which paves the way for some 2,400 cameras to hit the streets by next summer, received the council’s unanimous support, despite members’ concerns about privacy. The bill rolls back parts of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s original proposal, which would have allowed police to block public access to most footage in the interest of protecting personal privacy, but it maintains exemptions for footage shot inside homes.
Washington Post
After a decade of court battles, the Internet entrepreneur who filed the first legal challenge to a type of secret administrative order known as a national security letter revealed the breadth of an FBI demand in 2004 for information about a customer. National security letters, which empower federal investigators to seek certain customer records without court approval or oversight, were significantly expanded as part of the USA Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
New York Times
The more than 27-year-old case file on the disappearance of Randy Leach, a Linwood high school honor student, must be thousands of pages. But it's impossible to know because the Leavenworth County Sheriff's Office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who investigated the long-ago mystery, refuse to release the records even to Leach's parents, Harold and Alberta Leach. Law enforcement agencies are permitted to do that under the Kansas Open Records Act. The state's police records disclosure law is unusual, and Kansas is one of the few states in the country that allows police to choose to keep all investigative records secret in perpetuity, even if there was a trial, or someone pleaded guilty, or the case is more than a generation old and there are no longer active leads. A group of public records advocates are pushing for Kansas legislators to bring the Kansas Open Records Act regarding disclosure of police records more in line with open records laws of other states. They want to return the law to the way it worked in Kansas until the late 1970s when legislators, angry about a crime story, passed a law that closed police investigations and police reports, including probable cause affidavits.
Lawrence Journal-World
The top U.S. Air Force general on Tuesday confirmed that the service had raised concerns about the release of sensitive data about a next-generation bomber that was included in a report published by Forbes magazine last month. "We did have a concern about data that should not have been released," Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh told industry executives and foreign military officials at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank. "I think it's our duty to identify the fact that that should not have been made available and try to keep the process as pure as we can. That’s why the Air Force highlighted that as an issue," Welsh said. Reuters reported last week that the Air Force was looking into how classified data about the bomber competition had found its way into the Forbes report.
Reuters
The House Judiciary Committee began considering a bill Tuesday to update a nearly 30-year-old law that allows government agents to read Americans' emails without a search warrant if the messages are at least six months old. Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal, state and local police or regulatory agencies can order Internet service providers to turn over customers' emails that are 180 days old or older. The law was written before email use was common and before the creation of cloud technology to store electronic communication. The bipartisan Email Privacy Act by Reps. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., and Jared Polis, D-Colo., would require government agencies to get a search warrant to gain access to emails regardless of when the messages were written or whether or not they were opened. The bill has more than 300 co-sponsors. Similar legislation has been introduced by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also with bipartisan support, and privacy rights groups and the U.S. tech industry are pushing for the bills to get a vote soon.
USATODAY
