Transparency News 3/19/14

We chatted with Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, via Twitter about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act.
Times-Dispatch on Storify

The last time the state’s Freedom of Information Act was rewritten, the use of email was still relatively new. This year, state lawmakers thought it was time for another look. The General Assembly passed a resolution this session directing the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council to study exemptions in the open records statute, consider their applicability or appropriateness, and weigh whether they should be scrapped. The council will spend the next two years delving into the statute for the first time since the late 1990s and into 2000. “It’s been 14 years since we’ve taken a holistic look at the law to see some of the exemptions — do they apply anymore?” said Maria J.K. Everett, executive director of the FOIA Council.
Times-Dispatch

Got $50,000? Then you, too, can attend a “private evening reception” with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who wasted little time after Virginia's General Assembly session gaveled to a close to launch a political action committee that offers such meetings with the governor in exchange for high-end donations. Such arrangements are commonplace, and the practice of Virginia governors creating their own fundraising PACs dates back 20 years. But the move was made after a legislative session in which reducing the influence of money in politics was one of the top priorities for a governor who drew up plans to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton administration. “It’s not uncommon to have that kind of arrangement,” said Brad Smith, chairman of the Federal Election Commission during the George W. Bush administration. “Virginia is certainly unusual because there are no campaign finance limits. … A lot of people are going to feel a little uncomfortable with that.”
Washington Times

National Stories

From fundraising efforts to searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, crowdsourcing has quickly become a popular trend over the last few years. But a California legislator may have broken new ground with the concept, using it to potentially alter state law. Assemblyman Mike Gatto, R-Los Angeles, created a Wikispaces account to experiment with letting people draft their own legislation. Working under the Wikipedia format, users can log in, make changes to the bill, offer suggestions and self-police their work. Probate law was chosen as the topic, and the project has helped craft language that may allow a court to assign a guardian to a deceased person’s pet.
Governing

Judicial Watch, a non-profit watchdog that promotes transparency, has sued the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System after the trust refused to release a copy of a federal grand-jury subpoena that is part of a criminal investigation into the pension system. "When government agencies, politicians and bureaucrats don't want to turn over documents like the law requires, it's safe to make the assumption that they have something to hide," said Tom Fitton, president of the Washington, D.C.-based group. The suit, filed late last week in Maricopa County Superior Court, alleges the pension system violated the Arizona Public Records Law by "improperly withholding and failing to provide access to the requested record." The system asserted the subpoena was not a public record, the lawsuit says.
Arizona Republic

The personal data of about 20,000 U.S. Internal Revenue Service employees going back to 2007 or earlier may have been exposed on the Internet, but no general taxpayer information or records were part of the security breach, the agency said on Tuesday. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in a statement that an unencrypted thumb drive containing the information was plugged into an employee's unsecured home network, making the information potentially accessible to third parties online.
Reuters

A high school student with “oppositional defiant disorder” who was banned from the prom, senior trip and commencement for tweeting a vulgar comment about the principal claims disability discrimination as well as a First Amendment violation in a federal suit. The Sterling High School student claims her calling the principal a “pussy ass bitch” was a consequence of her psychological disorder, which causes her to have “dramatic mood swings” and “difficulty with authority,” and that punishing her violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. The student, known as H.W. in court papers, also claims the remark, while offensive, is entitled to First Amendment protection because it was made off campus and outside school hours and did not disrupt school activities.
New Jersey Law Journal
 

Editorials/Columns

Discussions have a funny way of defying linear, chronological progression. They turn on themselves, double back, pick up some ideas, discard others, meld, disassemble. Through the back and forth, you get to a place where people either agree or else don’t disagree (there is a difference between those two). That place is called consensus, and once you have consensus, the next step is ratification (approval of the consensus). So, why the dissection of problem-solving discourse? Because there seems to be a quaint belief among many members of various state and local government boards who feel it’s perfectly fine to talk privately in small groups — two by two, then two by two again (also called daisy chain, serial or Noah’s Ark meetings), until everyone’s weighed in. It’s OK, they say, because these are just discussions. The actual decisions will still be made in front of the public at a public meeting.
Megan Rhyne, Times-Dispatch

March 16-22 is Sunshine Week, an annual occasion for the media focus on how our local public bodies perform in making public information available… to the public. At the Gazette we strive to hold those public bodies accountable in every edition. This time, we'd like to recognize three occasions in which an individual or a public body took steps to make information readily available. During Sunshine Week, it's good to know there are public officials and private citizens taking up the cause of the public's right to know. We just need more of them.
Virginia Gazette

In the battle for the public's right to know, we stand on the front lines. Our primary weapon is the same as yours: the state law which guarantees access to records and meetings. We fight for information duly entitled to the people. Statutes like the Freedom of Information Act are crowbars anyone can employ when needed. They demand your vigorous support and defense, because they help ensure that the officials who work for Virginians are accountable to us all. Sunshine Week (March 16-22) provides a welcome opportunity to highlight issues of openness and transparency. It is easy for us to embrace these concerns, since we use open meetings and records law on a daily basis. But extensive experience informs our belief Virginia's statutes governing access should be broader and stronger.
Daily Press

In Virginia, Sunshine Week comes at an opportune time. It arrives just weeks after the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation authorizing a two-year study and review of the roughly 170 exemptions in the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Exemptions are what the government calls parts of law that officials can—but don’t have to—close to public scrutiny. The most well-known exemptions deal with individual personnel matters, medical and mental health records, and legal advice given to public officials in their government capacity. But the law is inconsistent. For example, correspondence of a member of a city council or board of supervisors dealing with government business is a public record that citizens can obtain. But correspondence of a member of the state House of Delegates and State Senate does not have to be disclosed. All are public officials, but simply serving at different levels. Is it a double standard? Should it be changed?
Dick Hammerstrom, Free Lance-Star

President Obama promised in January 2009 to lead the most transparent administration in history, but in 2014 he still trails in a two-way contest with duct tape. This week is Sunshine Week, an opportunity for press organizations to assess compliance with federal and state public access laws. An Associated Press analysis of record requests to 99 federal agencies over six years shows that the Obama administration set new records in 2013 for the number of denials and documents handed over only after some or all of the information had been marked out. National security was cited as a reason to say No in 8,496 cases, a 57 percent increase over the previous year. But those rejections were not relegated strictly to agencies entrusted to guard the nation's most dangerous secrets. National security was used less intuitively to cloak information held by the Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency, for example. More troubling is the pervasive withholding of information for no other reason than that it would reveal information about internal decision-making. The "deliberative process" exemption from FOIA was used 81,752 times. It's similar to the overly broad "working papers" exemption granted under Virginia's FOIA to the governor, Cabinet secretaries and many other state officials.
Roanoke Times

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the public.
Washington Examiner

When the Valley Journals of Riverton, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, wanted to know the time of the town’s 2012 Easter egg hunt, they couldn’t find out. The city barred the parks official from speaking to reporters without permission, and nothing, not even the Second Coming, would pry that information loose. What Valley Journals Managing Editor Linda Petersen experienced is unfortunately all too common — and becoming more so — in Utah, Washington, D.C., and government shops across the country. Through aggressive and manipulative tactics, government agencies are increasingly controlling what information the public receives, threatening the very foundation of democracy.
Angela Greilling Keane and David Cuillier, Herald Courier