A judge on Thursday upheld a series of six Freedom of Information Act violations on the part of the office of Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth, resulting in upwards of $25,000 in penalties – a slight increase from the previously-announced sum. The plaintiff, Fairfax County resident Valeria Juarez, filed a lawsuit in 2023 claiming the commonwealth’s attorney’s office failed to produce 172 emails in a timely manner before subsequently over-redacting them upon handing them over. Chief Judge Angela L. Horan on Thursday once again ultimately ruled in favor of the petitioners – Juarez and her attorney, Jonathan P. Sheldon, who also currently represents Lydon – stating they had “substantially prevailed” in the matter, per a 2022 Virginia Court of Appeals case, Town of South Hill v. Hawkins, which established a precedent for what may be protected as a personnel exemption under FOIA. Among the commonwealth’s chief arguments was the notion Juarez had received all requested documents prior to the opening of litigation. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Brandon Parker also invoked a legal philosophy known as “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword,” which states that what cannot be settled by experiment or concrete evidence is not worth debating. Horan was quick to dismiss the argument. In an emailed statement to InsideNoVa, Ashworth said while her office respects Horan’s ruling, she is considering an appeal.

The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it? So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country and asked 15 law enforcement agencies, using Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide me with the Flock LPR footage of my vehicle. My journey took me over 300 miles through slices of the communities those agencies serve, including the nearly 50 cameras they employ. And this journey may take me to one more place: an April Fool’s Day hearing in a courtroom in Roanoke. There, a judge will be asked to rule on a motion to declare the footage of the public to be beyond the reach of the public.

This week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the U.S. government and an internet watchdog organization. NewsGuard was founded by Gordon Crovitz, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill, an attorney who started Court TV; they serve as co-CEOs. The company employs journalists to assess and rate the reliability of news outlets on a scale of 0–100. The ratings—what it calls “nutrition reports”—are offered to advertisers and news aggregators but can also be displayed in search results for users who download NewsGuard’s software. Consortium News is an online news outlet founded in 1995 to counteract what its founder deemed the mainstream media’s “pattern of groupthink on issue after issue” and “the silliness and propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism.” In 2022, NewsGuard assessed Consortium News’ reliability and found it lacking: It rated the outlet 47.5/100 and said it “covers international politics from a left-wing, anti-U.S. perspective [and] has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war and other international conflicts.” No matter how “objective” NewsGuard claims to be, it’s ultimately giving its opinion of a site’s reliability based upon its output—a clear act of First Amendment–protected speech.