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Wednesday
March 14, 2018
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Join us this morning at 10:00 for our second Sunshine Week YouTube live webinar, this one on the basics of requesting records under FOIA. Click here to join.
Or, watch yesterday's webinar update on access bills at the 2018 General Assembly.
Tomorrow, we'll be taking on the basics of open meetings.
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state & local news stories
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The city of Charlottesville has agreed to release police operational plans from Aug. 12 to two freelance journalists, but Virginia State Police still is fighting to keep its plans under wraps. On Tuesday, attorneys representing state police and the Office of the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit brought by freelance reporters Jackson Landers and Natalie Jacobsen. Both reporters, represented pro bono by attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, are seeking police operational plans for the Aug. 12 Unite the Right rally. In the complaint filed in October, the two said they were told their Freedom of Information Act requests were denied because the records contained tactical plans and could endanger law enforcement personnel if they were made public. At the five-hour long hearing Tuesday, Mike Jagels, a senior assistant attorney general representing the commonwealth, called four witnesses to talk about the sensitive nature of the state police plan. State police 1st Sgt. David Ostwinkle said he denied the FOIA request from Jacobsen because the document contained criminal intelligence and tactical information. Jagels argued that even by releasing seemingly benign details could endanger the public or law enforcement officers. He said “nefarious groups” might use such details to attack police at future events.
The Daily Progress
Navigating the bureaucracy to obtain documents from the government can be daunting — if you even know who to apply to and how. The Daily Press assisted a mother whose son was in jail and reportedly committed suicide when she wanted to obtain documents related to the death. Our assistance to the family was part of a larger effort to get information on this death. Accessing the information relied heavily on Freedom of Information Act requests. As part of Sunshine Week — which began Sunday, March 11, to recognize the importance of access to public information — our reporters will be sharing video explanations of how to obtain public records, the difficulty in obtaining records that you are entitled to get, the steps we had to take to tell this story and more. These videos will be released throughout Sunshine Week on our website.
Daily Press
A man who recorded video of a car plowing into a crowd of protesters during last year's neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is now suing right-wing conspiracy theorists who claimed he was an undercover CIA officer who helped stage the deadly attack. Brennan Gilmore, a Foreign Service officer and bluegrass musician, says he hopes to take Alex Jones, who founded the website Infowars, and six others to trial in Virginia federal court for inspiring death threats and harassment. More broadly, he and his attorneys from the Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic hope to show that the First Amendment does not protect Jones and others whose sensational falsehoods have inspired vicious responses.
The Roanoke Times
On Sunday, the Bristol Herald Courier ran a story about Roger Coleman. Thirty-seven years ago, he raped and murdered his 19-year-old sister-in-law in Grundy, Virginia. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed. Our story included court documents; a video of one of the prosecutors; a podcast with a survivor of Coleman and a former Herald Courier reporter who witnessed the execution; a letter Coleman penned from jail; data on executions in Virginia; and more. One thing it didn’t include was the criminal investigation of Coleman that followed the murder. Local officers were assisted by Virginia State Police in their investigation. The murder took place almost four decades ago. Coleman has been dead for more than 25 years. Yet the Virginia State Police would not release the investigative file to the Herald Courier. Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, criminal investigations are released at the discretion of law enforcement, regardless of whether a case is open or closed. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act Council calls this “one of the broadest exemptions from releasing information in all of the states.” Megan Rhyne of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government has echoed that sentiment, describing the exemption as huge and all-encompassing.
Bristol Herald Courier
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national stories of interest
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Luxury Uber rides. Home plate seats to a Minnesota Twins game. Membership in a swank private club. A South Carolina prosecutor’s office racked up thousands of dollars in charges on these items and other perks — all on the taxpayers' dime, newly released records show. The office of 5th Circuit Solicitor Dan Johnson, which prosecutes cases in Richland and Kershaw counties, spent big bucks outside the courtroom while some 9,000 active cases remain pending on its docket. Charges include a $6,000 Christmas party with beef tenderloin and a $2,000 Super Bowl bash complete with face-painting services, according to a Post and Courier analysis of records obtained by PAPR, a new South Carolina watchdog group. Within hours of the newspaper's report publishing online Thursday, S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson asked the State Law Enforcement Division to review the matter and determine if a larger investigation is warranted.
The Post and Courier
The New York Times brought a federal lawsuit to force production of Justice Department records on Ukrainian and pro-Russian lobbying firms. Several of the records described in the March 8 line up with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Represented by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic out of Yale Law School, the Times and investigative reporter Kenneth Vogel note that they first requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2017. The 7-page complaint says the Justice Department acknowledged receipt of the first three of Vogel’s four FOIA requests on Aug. 19, but the department has yet to produce any responsive records.
Courthouse News Service
When the Department of Justice launched its new portal for filing Freedom of Information Act requests, it didn’t just release the site -- it also released the code. Can state and local governments use that open source code to build their own portals? The simple answer is yes. “It is open and available for reuse,” Department of Justice CTO Ron Bewtra said. Practically speaking, however, how useful it is depends on what these smaller governments are looking for, according to open government experts. Michael Morisy, the co-founder of MuckRock, which houses its own repository of government documents, said local governments are often looking for software that can manage the entire process for requesting public records -- including applications that take and route requests, inform requesters of the status of their queries, track the status of requests, search for and identify requested documents and possibly even suggest redactions. “In talking with local government, what they really want is workflow software that they can use to manage the entire process," he said. " FOIA.gov doesn’t … try to do that.”
GCN
Hundreds of times a year across North Carolina, officials who control everything from the taxes you pay the city to the tuition required to attend public universities meet behind closed doors to conduct sensitive business on behalf of the public they serve. Whether they're elected or appointed, members of these local and state boards can meet out of view of the public for almost a dozen legitimate reasons, like personnel decisions or discussions of legal strategy. When they do, they're supposed to keep an account of what happens — and barring specific exceptions, be able to provide that account to the public. That's often not the case. A collaborative investigation by 10 newsrooms across the state found that governing boards that meet in closed session are often slow to hand over legally required records that detail what they discuss in secret, if they provide them at all. When they are produced, they're often heavily redacted, raising questions about how closely those boards are following the law.
The Herald Sun
Nearly a dozen new exemptions to public records are poised to become law in Florida after this year’s legislative session, as lawmakers chipped away at what information is available to the public under the state’s Sunshine Law. At least two of those exemptions — crafted as part of the state’s response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting last month — have already been approved by Gov. Rick Scott after he signed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Safety Act into law Friday. One of the two exemptions, SB 7024, shields the home addresses of victims of mass violence. The other, SB 1940, withholds the identities of armed school staff who are trained as part of the state’s new “guardian” program. Florida is widely considered to have among the strongest public records laws in the nation. But Florida First Amendment Foundation's Barbara Petersen said with more than 1,000 exemptions passed by the Legislature over the years, that openness is continually eroded.
Miami Herald
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 March 16, 2018
Virginia Credit Union House
Details
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editorials & columns
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 "A potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws."
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Culpeper County saw courage and wisdom in five of its elected officials Monday night. Amid intense support for the Culpeper County School Board to open its meetings with a public prayer, five of the seven members had the bravery to vote no. It was the board’s five women who possibly saved the school district tens of thousands of dollars in future legal fees. And in the end, education prevailed over litigation.
Culpeper Star-Exponent
For democracy to work, citizens need to know what their government is doing. Then they can hold government officials and institutions accountable. Over the last 50 years, freedom of information – or FOI – laws have been one of the most useful methods for citizens to learn what government is doing. These state and federal laws give people the power to request, and get, government documents. From everyday citizens to journalists, FOI laws have proven a powerful way to uncover the often-secret workings of government. But a potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws. We are scholars of government administration, ethics and transparency. And our research leads us to believe that while FOI laws have always faced many challenges, including resistance, evasion, and poor implementation and enforcement, the last decade has brought a different kind of challenge in the form of a new approach to transparency.
Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Alex Ingrams and Daniel Berliner, The Conversation
After more than four decades without any major changes to the public records statute, the Massachusetts Legislature in 2016 reformed the law. The changes are both good (an attorney fee provision) and bad (longer response times). The most egregious part of the new law, however, is what didn’t change. Massachusetts continues to be the only state in the country where the Legislature, judiciary and governor’s office all claim to be exempt from the public records law. In other words, it took the state Legislature 43 years to pass meaningful public records reform and despite these changes most records are still kept secret. This secrecy is a dangerous proposition. In 2014, for example, reporters in Virginia used the state’s public records law to uncover more than $177,000 in gifts and loans given to their then-governor in exchange for promoting a dietary supplement company. The League of Women Voters in 2015 used Florida’s public records law to obtain emails of state legislators showing that these representatives unconstitutionally remapped voting districts to benefit their own political party. If either of these scenarios were to play out in Massachusetts, our public records law would be of no help. Major legislative reforms take many years to occur and there seems to be little political appetite for another one anytime soon. So what can be done?
Justin Silverman, Worcester Telegram
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