Transparency News 3/24/14

Monday, March 24, 2014

State and Local Stories

The easiest and most common form of government communication is often the most expensive and difficult for the public to access. Email has transformed government operations in ways that the state’s Freedom of Information Act never anticipated when it was last revised in 1999, said Maria J.K. Everett, executive director of the state’s FOIA Council. While the vast majority of simple requests for information such as accident or spending reports are routinely made public for free to anyone who asks, public bodies in the Richmond area sometimes quote prices of hundreds or thousands of dollars to produce sets of emails. And those prices are legal the way the law exists today, Everett said, which is one of the reasons she sees reforming the way the state treats emails as the FOIA council’s top priority as it begins a two-year review of the public records law.
Times-Dispatch

Next year, the University of Virginia will begin classes in its first degree in data science, a graduate program that could help train people to analyze data for corporations, scientific researchers and the federal government. It’s a growing field, especially in health care, where collection of patient data can help researchers study entire populations for risks and trends. But many data scientists could wind up combing through consumer data to help, say, social media websites such as Facebook do targeted advertising. That could send those graduates into a field lacking professional codes of ethics specific to the work they do.
Daily Progress

A conservative advocacy group is trying to find out whether health officials met what it says is a legal obligation to inform police about abortions on two 14-year-old girls. Family Foundation of Virginia officials say their concern was triggered by the state Health Department's December 2012 inspection of the Roanoke Medical Center for Women. The inspector noted that the clinic failed to supply notarized parental consent forms for the two girls. The Family Foundation says state law requires the clinic and the state health commissioner to report the pregnancies to law enforcement because "carnal knowledge" of a 13- or 14-year-old is illegal. The organization filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documentation that the cases were reported. The Health Department said it had no relevant records.
Daily Progress

The group of Sterling residents seeking to recall and remove Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) from office has moved for dismissal of the Arlington County commonwealth's attorney from the ongoing case. Leesburg attorney John Flannery, on behalf of the Citizens of Sterling petitioners, filed the motion in Loudoun County Circuit Court Friday, four days before Delgaudio is scheduled to return to court for a hearing on the recall petition. In the motion, Flannery states that Arlington Commonwealth's Attorney Theo Stamos (D) “is unlikely to change her pre-determined opinion on this third review of Mr. Delgaudio. And this time we have another aggravating factor -- Ms. Stamos plainly disputes the rationale for the statutory remedy that the Sterling citizens invoked to make this petition.”
Loudoun Times-Mirror

A committee in Spotsylvania County will examine the use of county-issued credit cards in response to concerns about business meals and other charges. The Board of Supervisors this week approved the three-member committee made up of Supervisors Ann Heidig and Greg Cebula and Deputy County Administrator Mark Cole. Among the group’s tasks is to review county-issued credit card expenditures over the last five years, compare the charges with those of similarly sized localities and recommend any corrective actions. The county has 69 SunTrust credit cards for department heads, constitutional officers, supervisors, Sheriff’s Office employees and others.
Free Lance-Star

National Stories

Back when he was still Sheriff of Wall Street, Eliot Spitzer said his pursuit of American International Group was a matter of enforcing “simple rules of transparency.” Transparency, he liked to say, was a basic ingredient for markets to function properly. But if transparency is important for companies operating in a market, surely it’s even more vital for public officials in a democracy. Which is why we find it so interesting that the former state attorney general and governor filed an 84-page motion last week asking state Supreme Court Justice Christopher Cahill to quash a Freedom of Information Law suit seeking Spitzer’s private e-mails from his time as attorney ­general.
New York Post

Michigan State Rep. Mike Shirkey says somebody needs to step up and look out for citizens' right to public information that they own. That's why the Republican from Clarklake introduced a bill to amend Michigan's Freedom of Information Act of 1976, a law he contends needs more protections for those seeking public records. One of the big complaints? That municipalities are charging egregious fees for copying documents to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests. House Bill 4001 sets a statewide standard per-page fee for copying documents, which could be reduced if not provided within the set deadline. It also increases punitive damages against public bodies that a court determines arbitrarily and capriciously violated the act and makes several other changes. The measure passed 102-8 on Thursday, with the nays split between Democrats and Republicans.
MLive.com

In 2001, the Pentagon produced a strange training video, for internal use and at a cost of more than $70,000, designed to teach civilian and military employees how the Freedom of Information Act works. It was comically dumb, featuring a noir private detective in a hack Humphrey Bogart accent navigating a World War II-era spy scenario, occasionally looking to the camera and delivering FOIA-based tips. When researchers tried to obtain a copy under the FOIA itself, the Pentagon took 18 months to release it, and redacted portions. Here it is. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been posted on the internet until now. But "The People's Right to Know" was so bizarre that it merited an Associated Press story in 2004, when it was first released. Aside from the silly, and ultimately trivializing, "spy" narrative, the AP took issue with the fact that the Pentagon redacted a video it uses to train people how to process FOIA requests when someone sought access to it via a FOIA request. The Pentagon protested that it had to black out certain copyrighted portions—snippets of film derived from other sources—despite the fact that the FOIA doesn't expressly permit the government to withhold copyrighted material.
Gawker

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the state's eavesdropping law as unconstitutional. Annabel Melongo spent 20 months in jail, according to the Chicago Tribune, for recording three telephone conversations with a supervisor in the Cook County Court Reporter's Office. The Illinois eavesdropping statute makes it a crime to record any conversation, even in public, without the person's consent.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

The head of the CIA on Friday promised a quick review of whether a Senate report on the agency's use of "enhanced interrogation" methods on foreign terrorism suspects can be released on an unclassified basis, apparently moving to reduce tensions with the CIA's congressional overseers. CIA Director John Brennan's statement, contained in a message distributed to CIA employees, comes amid a fierce dispute over whether members of the spy agency secretly monitored a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the detention and interrogation policies used under former Republican President George W. Bush.
Reuters

A San Francisco Bay Area federal judge shielded potential evidence in civil suits challenging the National Security Agency as the Justice Department came under fire for its representations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In a four-page order issued on Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California ordered the government to protect all documents and data that are relevant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's challenge to the NSA's harvesting of telephone metadata. The EFF scrambled to protect the records after the government indicated earlier this month that it would begin purging records that are more than five years old, per the mandate of the FISC, a secretive court that oversees operations carried out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But in another order issued Friday, FISC Presiding Judge Reggie Walton scolded government lawyers for not notifying the court of a preservation order in the Northern District litigation.
The Recorder
 

Editorials/Columns

Any day now, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a free-speech case that could cement a dangerous precedent — one establishing a de facto double standard in government’s favor. The case stems from the election season of 2004, when a group of 200 or so protesters showed up near a Jacksonville, Ore., restaurant where George W. Bush was eating. They started chanting about Bush’s polices on war and the environment. After 15 minutes or so, the Secret Service decided that was enough anti-Bush speech for the day. Agents instructed local law enforcement to move the demonstrators — which was done, with riot police firing plastic bullets. A pro-Bush demonstration nearby was allowed to continue unimpeded. Michael “Mookie” Moss and his anti-Bush compadres have a strong claim that the disparate treatment violated their First Amendment rights. But they are spitting into the wind of a two-year-old precedent. In 2012, the Supreme Court said Secret Service agents enjoyed qualified immunity in arresting Steven Howard, who accosted Vice President Dick Cheney and told him his “policies in Iraq are disgusting.”
Barton Hinkle, Times-Dispatch

The Washingtonization of Virginia continues apace with Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s access-selling scheme. Last week, he announced the formation of a new political action committee, Common Good Virginia PAC. With it comes a plan to sell access for donations ranging from $10,000 to $100,000. Mr. McAuliffe is capitalizing on a national practice: If you pony up enough cash, you get face-time with political luminaries. And now, you can pay to join an even more elite group, gaining access to “policy experts” as well. What sets Mr. McAuliffe’s plan apart is not just its price tag — although that’s enough to raise eyebrows. What crosses the line into new territory is the promise that, in addition to meeting candidates, high-price donors also will gain access to special experts.
Daily Progress

Many public officials have decided just saying no to requests for government documents is not the best way to keep them secret. Indirect assaults on the public's right to know are better, they believe. That way they cannot be accused of disobeying freedom of information laws.
Wheeling News-Register