National Stories
A Tennessee appeals court last week sent a strong message in a public records lawsuit against the city of Chattanooga, ordering the trial court to award the full $71,343 in attorney fees and expenses incurred by the citizen who brought the case. It was the second time an appeals court overruled the Hamilton County judge in the case. The first time, the Hamilton County judge had found the city had not “acted in bad faith as a result of its slowness in producing the public records requested” and denied the request of Rebecca Little to pay her attorney fees. But the appeals court disagreed, saying the city of Chattanooga “knew it was obligated to produce and willfully did not.” It remanded the case back to the trial court and ordered the judge to determine the amount of attorney’s fees to be awarded. When the judge decided the fee requested was “excessive” and awarded a lower amount of $50,284, Little appealed again. The appeals court on Friday again sided with Little.
Tennessee Coalition for Open Government
Critics of a proposed Federal Communications Commission study that would send researchers into newsrooms across America say the new chairman's vow to tweak the plan doesn't go far enough —with one leading media group calling on the agency to scrap the study entirely. "Where it really needs to go is onto the trash heap," Mike Cavender, director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, said in a statement. The FCC drew the ire of free-press advocates and lawmakers after proposing a "study of critical information needs," which one dissenting commissioner said would let researchers "grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run."
Fox News
Thousands of pages of documents released by the New Jersey borough at the center of the George Washington Bridge scandal give a fuller sense of the frustration and problems created by a traffic jam engineered by Gov. Chris Christie's allies and aides. They also provide a glimpse into the role of the Port Authority Police Department in the closures, including the involvement of Lt. Thomas "Chip" Michaels, a friend to Mr. Christie. The more than 2,200 pages of documents include phone records, police and fire reports and correspondence from Fort Lee, N.J., during the five days in September when access to the bridge was reduced from three lanes to one.
Wall Street Journal
The names of people involved in Alabama executions — and the names of manufacturers of the drugs used in lethal injections — would be a secret under a bill now before the Alabama House of Representatives. "Today there is nothing under Alabama law that makes that information confidential," said Rep. Lynn Greer, R-Rogersville, the bill's sponsor.
Anniston Star
AT&T this week released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the U.S. government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans. AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information — spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants — in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts. There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks.
Wired
|