Transparency News 6/3/15

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

State and Local Stories


Lawyers for the state are taking their fight to keep information about executions secret to the Virginia Supreme Court. The Virginia Department of Corrections argues that documents it maintains are exempt under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act for security reasons — even documents from which the sensitive material has been redacted. Fairfax County Circuit Judge Jane Roush last year ordered the release of information, including execution manuals and a schematic of the state’s death house — the so-called L-Unit at the Greensville Correctional Center — sought under the act by state Del. Scott A. Surovell, D-Fairfax. The state high court is set to hear arguments in the case today. The attorney general’s office asked the justices to reverse Roush’s decision ordering the release of the information. “Moreover, the trial court erred as a matter of law by ordering the department to produce redacted versions of the execution manuals — which the court acknowledged fell within the scope of the security exemption,” argues the state’s appeal. But a friend of the court brief filed by the Virginia Coalition for Open Government disagrees that there is an “all-or-nothing” rule under which a state agency could insert a piece of information that is properly exempt from the act into a document, thereby exempting the entire document from disclosure.
Times-Dispatch

The state has digitized more than 16 million birth, death, marriage and divorce records, putting them online through a partnership with Ancestry.com, a popular genealogy research website. Ancestry paid for people to site in a darkened room at the state's main vital records building, scanning one document after another. The company also provided the equipment, so there was no direct cost to the state, Virginia Department of Health Commissioner Marissa Levine said. Getting certified copies of birth certificates and other key documents will still require a trip to vital records offices, or to a Department of Motor Vehicles location, which started offering documents last year. Records will still cost $12 to $14. But much of the information contained in those records will be available online for free, through state's vital records and Library of Virginia websites, officials said. Names, birth dates, death dates, marriage dates and locations – all of this will be online, according to Debbie Condrey, Chief Information Officer for the Virginia Department of Health.
Daily Press

Suffolk city employees and residents may soon be able report incidences of fraud, waste or abuse of city resources anonymously - at least if Finance Director Lenora Reid has anything to say about it. "I'm really excited about it," Reid said of her department's goal to implement the hot line by the end of the year. Reid said it's all about accountability, showing residents the city is doing all it can to safeguard their resources. "You can't fix problems if you don't know where they are," she said. Neighboring cities have similar hot lines, most coordinated through their auditor offices. Suffolk does not have a city auditor.
Virginian-Pilot

The FBI is conducting surveillance with low-flying aircraft over the U.S. and has at least one plane registered in Bristow for that purpose, according to an investigative report published by the Associated Press. The AP reported Tuesday that the FBI is operating “a small air force” capable of video and cellphone surveillance technology, and hides the aircraft “behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government.” One of those planes is a Cessna 182T Skylane registered to NG Research at P.O. Box 655 in Bristow. That address is one of at least 13 front companies registered to post offices in Bristow that the AP “identified being actively used by the FBI.” That same Cessna has been spotted and photographed over McLean, Manassas and last month’s riots in Baltimore, according to posts on Reddit and Twitter.
Inside NOVA


National Stories
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Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel is creating an Office of Open Government to help the public obtain government records more quickly and consistently. The Republican attorney general said he wants to ensure that his office is being timely in releasing records such as Department of Justice investigations into shootings by police officers and that the agency is applying state law in a similar manner across the board whenever a member of the public requests government records. Also, Schimel said he wants to provide consistent and prompt advice to other state and local officials as well as citizens when they have questions about the state's long-standing law requiring that most records about the affairs of government be released to the public upon request. The same goes for open meetings for official bodies and other state laws related to transparent government, the state's top lawyer said, noting the presumption of openness in Wisconsin law.
Governing

Over a five-year span, senior officials at the National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) voiced growing alarm about Hillary Clinton’s record-keeping practices as secretary of state, according to internal documents shared with Fox News. During Clinton’s final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA – essentially the agency’s chief records custodian – privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes. Referring to a colleague whose full name is unknown, Wester wrote on December 11, 2012: “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her records from State to Little Rock." That was a reference to the possibility that Clinton might seek to house her records at the Clinton Presidential Center, which was largely funded by the Clinton Foundation. "[W]e need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about…the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State," Wester added. He did not specify why the situation required “delicate” handling, but added that colleagues had “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hilary [sic] Clinton.”
Fox News

What makes open data a powerful tool for governing better is the ability of people inside and outside of institutions to use the same data to create effective policies and useful tools, visualizations, maps and apps. Open data also can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations about what's broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions. But to realize its potential, the data needs to be truly open: not only universally and readily accessible but also structured for usability and computability. One area where open data has the potential to make a real difference -- and where some of its current limitations are all too apparent -- is in state-level regulation of nonprofits. 
Governing

U.S. intelligence spending remains at the frontier of national security classification and declassification policy, as some new scraps of intelligence budget information are divulged, most other information is withheld, and a simmering demand for greater disclosure persists in Congress and elsewhere. Last month the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) released heavily redacted versions of its annual budget justification books for Fiscal Year 2012 and Fiscal Year 2013. The declassified portions of the NGA budget documents reflect an emphasis on improved sharing of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) products and an ongoing reliance on commercial satellite imagery.
Secrecy News

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks offered a $100,000 bounty for copies of a Pacific trade pactthat is a central plank of President Barack Obama's diplomatic pivot to Asia on Tuesday. WikiLeaks, which has published leaked chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiating text before, started a drive to crowdsource money for the reward, just as U.S. unions launched a new push to make the text public. "The transparency clock has run out on the TPP. No more secrecy. No more excuses. Let's open the TPP once and for all," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement. The U.S. Trade Representative has increased availability of the text to lawmakers, but critics complain there is still not enough oversight.
Reuters

A government watchdog says the Internal Revenue Service ignored many of its recommendations to improve computer security. But IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a Senate panel Tuesday that a data breach reported last month involving the accounts of 104,000 taxpayers is an example of "a perfectly good security mechanism ... being overtaken by events." At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, panel Chairman Orrin Hatch told Koskinen that his agency "has failed" the taxpayers whose returns were stolen in the breach reported last month.
NPR

A federal judge is investigating allegations that the government may have improperly destroyed documents during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake. U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie Gallagher’s inquiry was launched after Drake's lawyers in April accused the Pentagon inspector general’s office of destroying possible evidence during Drake’s criminal prosecution, which ended almost four years ago, McClatchy has learned.
McClatchy


Editorials/Columns

When the General Assembly decided last year to conduct a review of Virginia's Freedom of Information Act, we were among those hopeful it would produce real reform for what should be the commonwealth's most valuable open government law. The statute was last examined about 14 years ago, and is now riddled by more than 170 exemptions that unfairly keep documents from public scrutiny and unnecessarily allow government to meet behind closed doors. This review intended to address that. Unfortunately, we harbor doubt that this process will produce the type of changes Virginia needs. The Freedom of Information Advisory Council, the body conducting the review, has thus far been too timid in its consideration of new proposals for the law and too accepting of existing exemptions. Not only has it been tentative in its scrutiny of the FOIA exemptions, last week it rejected a proposal by Del. Rick Morris, R-Carrollton, to make the deliberate refusal to release public information a class 1 misdemeanor. Even though Del. Morris' measure won nearly unanimous approval from the House, the Senate sent it to the council — which rejected it outright rather than sending it to a subcommittee for serious consideration.
Daily Press