Transparency News 12/29/15
State and Local Stories
Mayor Will Sessoms pleaded no contest Monday to a single misdemeanor charge of violating the state’s Conflict of Interest Act. The remaining four charges against him were dropped as part of a plea agreement with a special prosecutor. The deal included prosecutor Mike Doucette’s recommendation that the mayor not be removed from office and that Sessoms make a donation of $1,000 to the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. A $500 fine – the maximum penalty for the Class 3 misdemeanor – was suspended.
Virginian-Pilot
Comments from special prosecutor Mike Doucette
(NOTE: VCOG was not part of any plea deal discussions. We received Mayor Sessoms' donation last week but were not informed that it was related to a plea deal. We learned about the connection at the same time everyone else did: at Sessoms' hearing Monday morning.)
Each month in this column, I [Kelly Hinchcliffe] try to feature journalists who are telling important stories using public records. For my final column of 2015, I wanted to do something big and decided to find public records stories from all 50 states (plus, a bonus: Washington, D.C.). This is not meant to be a “best of” list. It’s simply a collection of public records stories from the past year that intrigued me. I found many of the stories by searching the National Freedom of Information Coalition’s website, as well as Investigative Reporters & Editors. I also got some ideas from fellow journalists who wrote to me on Twitter @RecordsGeek. If you have a story you want to share, I’d love to hear about it and may feature it in an upcoming column. In the meantime, check out my list of public records stories from around the country and see what records journalists are requesting.
Poynter
(Virginia’s entry is about the governor’s refusal to release the Martese Johnson/ABC report)
National Stories
Nominations are invited for inductees to the 2016 class of the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame, which honors those who have made significant contributions to developing, protecting and expanding access to government information. Nominations will be accepted through Jan. 23, 2016, and should be made by e-mail. Nominations should include a statement of qualifications and links to supporting information, data or reports; and must include the name, e-mail and telephone contact information the nomination. Please send nominations to Gene Policinski, Chief Operating Officer, Newseum Institute, at gpolicinski@newseum.org. (202-292-6290 for inquiries) The nominations will be reviewed by a selection committee drawn the FOI community and from members of the Hall.
NFOIC
If you have voted in a US election recently, there's a good chance your personal information is included in a trove of voter data found on a publicly available Web server. A misconfigured database has exposed the personal information on more than 191 million US voter records, according to Chris Vickery, a security researcher who made the discovery and shared his findings with Databreaches.net for a story published Monday. The database contains information required for voter registration -- including names, home addresses, date of birth and home phone numbers -- as well as voting history since 2000.
CNET News
Editorials/Columns
The judge’s finding of guilt on the misdemeanor, a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, is the equivalent of a conviction for having an open container of alcohol. Sessoms, who had not even a traffic violation on his record before Monday, now has a criminal conviction, albeit a minor one. But Doucette, who initiated the plea negotiations, said implications of corruption were simply “hyperbole.” Sessoms said he was unaware of the connection but should have investigated the case thoroughly and then disclosed the relationship. In a brief hearing Monday, he agreed to donate $1,000 to the Virginia Coalition for Open Government; the judge suspended a $500 fine.
Virginian-Pilot
Historians and archivists call our times the “digital dark ages.” The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1,000 years. But don’t blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen big 8-inch floppies replaced by 5.25-inch medium replaced by little 3.5-inch floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud — and let’s not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc. We’ll ignore the data lost in computer crashes. Each transition has seen the loss of countless zillions of documents and images. The irony is that, even as we’re generating more records than any civilization ever, we’re destroying so much important stuff that future generations will hardly know we ever lived.
Ted Rall, News & Advance
