Transparency News 6/15/15
Monday, June 15, 2015
State and Local Stories
It’s the kind of issue that can get accounting experts and finance profs up in arms (and you know what excitable folks they are) with dire warnings of hits to state budgets and credit ratings, so Shad Plank took a minute to ask the Virginia Retirement System and the officials who oversee Newport News’ old pension plan to ask what, exactly, GASB 68 is all about. Cut to the chase: Nobody’s worried that the new Government Accounting Standards Board’s Rule 68, which takes effect at the end of this month, is going to change anything about how state or local governments actually pay for pension plans. What it is going to do is to say state and local governments’ balance sheets now must disclose unfunded pension liabilities – that is, the difference between the assets used to fund pensions and projections of how much they’ll have to pay in the decades to come. At the moment, you can find VRS’s 65.9 percent funded ratio, a gap of nearly $30 billion, on page 126 of the state’s 330-page Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. “It basically just moves the number forward” in a financial report, says VRS acting director Trish Bishop.
Daily Press
Digital sabotage may not have resulted in quick cash for hackers, but it certainly led to extra work for two local repositories of old Lynchburg photographs. Prior to last Thanksgiving, the Lynchburg Museum had more than half of its 11,000 photographic images posted on its website. Today, there are only 1,100 images online. At the same time, another online source for old photographs, lynchburghistory.com, was experiencing similar difficulties. In December, the owner of the lynchburghistory.com, Nancy Marion, placed a note on the site explaining that hackers had demanded money from Ktools, who refused to pay. In retaliation, the hackers attacked multiple Ktools’ servers. “It was a malicious hack,” Marion said. “They weren’t just trying to get old photos of Lynchburg.”
News & Advance
National Stories
The White House revealed that hackers had breached a second computer system at the Office of Personnel Management, and said that President Obama was considering financial sanctions against the attackers who gained access to the files of millions of federal workers. Investigators had already said that Chinese hackers appeared to have obtained personal data from more than four million current and former federal employees in one of the boldest invasions into a government network.
New York Times
Amazon for the first time has released a report on the number of government data requests it receives, offering the public more information on how often it hands over its customers’ data to judges and law enforcement agencies. The e-commerce company, which runs the largest public cloud-infrastructure business in the world, hadn’t previously released a biannual transparency report, despite repeated criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and the digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
CNET News
The Federal Bureau of Prisons's categorical justification of redactions in a freedom of information suit filed by Prison Legal News was not appropriate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled last week. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an amicus brief in the case. In FOIA cases, the government has the burden of showing that an exemption is warranted. The prison bureau initially produced no records and denied PLN’s request for a fee waiver after PLN filed a FOIA request in 2003 seeking all documents related to the money the bureau paid in connection with lawsuits and claims brought against the bureau from January 1, 1996, to July 31, 2003.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Federal prosecutors on Friday petitioned a judge to keep secret their evidence in the case against former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges of trying to hide cash transactions and lying to the FBI about it. In a motion filed before Judge Thomas Durkin, who is hearing the Hastert case, prosecutors said sensitive information in the case should not be disseminated because it would "adversely affect ... the privacy interests of third parties" and also said that Hastert's defense attorneys do not oppose the motion.
Reuters
Two government watchdog agencies are investigating whether the Pentagon inspector general destroyed evidence improperly during the high-profile leak investigation of former NSA senior official Thomas Drake. The Justice Department acknowledged the probes in a letter last week to a federal magistrate judge who recently received the allegations from Drake’s lawyers. The judge is determining whether she should take further action in a case that ended in 2011 when Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge. The Justice Department told the judge the inquiries are being conducted by a committee that looks into allegations of misconduct by inspectors general’s offices and the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that investigates whistleblower complaints.
McClatchy
Editorials/Columns
These day if police aren’t recording their interactions with the public, chances are someone else is. The Texas [pool party] incident is just the latest example of why police body cameras are so important for so many reasons—the main one being accountability. Fredericksburg police officers have been using them for more than a year. The sheriff’s offices in both Spotsylvania and King George counties are seeking federal matching grants to help purchase the cameras and limit the burden on local taxpayers. The Stafford County Sheriff’s Office is considering body cameras, but isn’t seeking grants. Stafford and other law enforcement agencies in the region would be well-advised to get up to speed. It may just be a matter of time before they wish they had made the investment.
Free Lance-Star
