Transparency News 2/12/18

Pittsylvania County has filed an open records request with the Danville Area Humane Society to determine the number of county animals still coming to the city shelter. Honoring the information request is estimated to come with a price tag to the county of $6,000. On Monday, Pittsylvania County Administrator David Smitherman filed request for copies of all records of animals that were brought in by county residents over the last two years. State law requires these records be made open to public inspection, even if the animal shelter is a private business.
Register & Bee

The University of Virginia Police Department is using the social media monitoring program Social Sentinel in an effort to more effectively respond to threats made online. The program will cost UVa $18,500 a year, according to documents provided by the university. Legal experts say they’re concerned about privacy and creating a surveillance state, but police say the program is just one more tool in the race to stay on top of online threats and messages.
The Daily Progress

For years, student journalists in Virginia have been able to request students’ addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses from their colleges and universities directories. House Bill 1 could change that. HB1 passed the Virginia House of Delegates on Feb. 7 with wide bipartisan support. The bill will now move to the Virginia Senate. While HB1 is a win for privacy advocates, its a potential loss for student journalists and others seeking addresses, phone numbers, and emails from student directories.  The bill would make it so college and university students have to “opt-in” for their contact information to be listed in directories. Right now students are automatically included in the directory unless they “opt-out.” 
Student Press Law Center

In the hours after last summer’s white power rally in Charlottesville, Va., erupted into violence, the planners of the protest mounted a defense: While much of the country may have found their racist chants and Nazi iconography deplorable, they claimed that they had a First Amendment right to self-expression, and that none of the bloodshed was actually their fault. Six months later, that narrative of blamelessness, which started on the airwaves and the internet, is now being tested in the courthouse. In a direct assault on the so-called alt-right movement, a sprawling lawsuit contends that the leaders of the Charlottesville gathering engaged in a conspiracy to foster racial hatred, and are legally responsible for the 30 injuries and the death of a woman, Heather Heyer, that occurred.As the case moves forward, it is likely to explore the limits of the First Amendment’s broad free-speech provisions and the principle that incitements to violence are not protected. Discovery in the case may also expose the links between the far-right groups and their often opaque sources of financing.
New York Times

A growing chorus of Kansas Statehouse leaders is calling for revisions in a sweeping confidentiality agreement that legislative interns must sign. A Star investigation last month found that interns are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that employment law attorneys warned could have a chilling effect on interns’ willingness to report harassment or illegal activity. Anything that takes place or is said in a lawmaker’s office must stay there, the document says, under threat of immediate termination.
Kansas City Star
 

Colleges will say it’s a much-needed privacy measure for students, as if administrators give a fig about student privacy. The real reason they’ll cheer this Virginia House-approved bill if it clears the Senate? It gives them an easy excuse for denying public records requests. The bill has understandable intentions behind it, prompted by a progressive advocacy group that obtained student contact information in bulk and gave it to political campaigns for voter-registration purposes.  But the desired change would create two classes of adults under state law: college students and everyone else, whose information would continue to be subject to FOIA requests. Greg Piper, The The College Fix

It’s now been a year since the #USDAblackout—the sudden deletion of thousands of animal welfare-related records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) website with no warning and virtually no explanation. Despite swift and massive outcry from all corners—including Congress, the media, the public, animal protection organizations, and even industry—we’re still in the dark about how the USDA is enforcing our nation’s most important animal protection law—or if it even is enforcing that law.  This must change.
The Hill