Transparency News 7/1/13

 

Monday, July 1, 2013  
State and Local Stories  

After a protracted public records dispute, the Virginia Port Authority released the value of the severance package given to former executive director Jerry A. Bridges, who left his post in October 2012. He received $350,000 in severance, the equivalent of a year's pay under his latest contact, according to a pay stub sent to newspaper outlets Friday afternoon.
Daily Press

Tens of thousands of concealed handgun permits in Hampton Roads — and hundreds of thousands of such records across Virginia — will be private under a new law that goes into effect on Monday. Those permits, as well as the applications and other records pertaining to them, were once clearly public records. The Virginia State Police maintained a list of all active permit holders, and the records were also accessible in courts around the state. But in a two-step process over six years, those weapons permits were completely cut off from public access.
Daily Press

Jobs in higher education and higher finance yielded the largest paychecks for state employees last year, with officials from the University of Virginia and the Virginia Retirement System dominating the list of top-paid public positions. Paul Hewitt, men’s basketball coach at George Mason University, had the highest base salary at $659,750 and with bonuses earned $744,750. Ronald D. Schmitz, VRS chief investment officer, was second in earnings, with a base salary of $375,000 and $295,313 in bonuses for total compensation of $670,313. Those earnings are based on records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from state agencies. The Richmond Times-Dispatch sought salary data for the state’s fiscal year that lasted from July 1, 2012, through today.
Times-Dispatch

Officials from the U.S. Justice Department will come to Augusta County on Monday to tour voting precincts in response to a complaint from a Churchville resident. Augusta County Attorney Pat Morgan said an attorney and an architect from the department's civil rights division will arrive at the county government center for an 11 a.m. Monday meeting with the county's electoral board. A complaint was earlier sent to Justice from Churchville resident Steve Morris about the location of a precinct at the Churchville Fire Station for North River District voters.
News Virginian

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and one of his senior assistants are fighting an attempt to issue them subpoenas to testify in the embezzlement case of former Executive Mansion chef Todd Schneider.
Times-Dispatch

Seeking to give the public the inside look at police work that is gained by riding along with officers for a shift, Albemarle County police spokeswoman Carter Johnson came up with a modern alternative: a “tweet-along.” Earlier this year, she live-tweeted action ranging from officers aiding someone in cardiac arrest to patrolling traffic to speaking at a school. Albemarle Fire Corps Director Kathryne Presson was inspired to do a tweet-along of her own.
Daily Progress

Consider yourself warned: The next time you enter Culpeper County Courthouse, you need to leave your cell phone -- and any other electronic recording device, for that matter  -- behind. Effective today, all cell phones and digital recording equipment without written permission from each individual court and/or clerk are prohibited from inside Culpeper County Courthouse, according to a notice recently posted on the facility’s front glass door.
Star-Exponent

Catering costs and a wedding dress aren't the only expenses Gov. Bob McDonnell's family apparently avoided in connection with the June 2011 nuptials of his daughter Cailin: They also received some free limousine service. A political donor from Virginia Beach invited to the ceremony provided the use of his 19-passenger Hummer stretch limo, which was used to take members of the wedding party from the church to the reception site at Virginia's executive mansion on the state capitol grounds. That freebie is the latest in a string of questioned gifts - from an expensive watch to vacation accommodations - that have come to light as part of an unfolding federal investigation surrounding McDonnell.
Virginian-Pilot

Tom Whipple remembers 1996 as “the year everybody went online.” It was also the year that his Arlington County neighbor William Dolan III ran for Virginia attorney general. “We had a subscription to the RTD [Richmond Times-Dispatch], which came in the mail about three days late,” said the affable Whipple. But the Internet was revving up, so he started poking around and found that nearly all of the state’s 33 dailies were online.
There was, he discovered, more coverage of the race than either he or Dolan knew. Whipple, who rises early, about 4:30 a.m. or so, began copying and pasting stories about Virginia politics from the newspaper sites into Microsoft Word that fall. He printed out all that he could find, then walked down the street to Dolan’s house. Whipple stuck the printout into the plastic bag holding Dolan’s copy of The Washington Post. Dolan told others about Whipple’s printouts, and they told others. Whipple would send it to anyone who asked, as long as they had an e-mail account so he didn’t have to hand-deliver the report. Over the next 15 years, about 2,100 people — legislators, reporters, lobbyists, state employees and Virginia political junkies — signed up for what became the daily e-mail known as the Whipple report, the Whipple wire or the Whipple clips.
Washington Post

National Stories

Federal authorities’ use of wiretaps to intercept wire, oral and electronic communications in criminal investigations jumped substantially in 2012, versus the prior year, according to figures obtained by the Washington Post. Federal courts reportedly authorized a total of 1,354 wiretaps in 2012, up from 792 in 2011, a 71 percent increase in the use of the controversial surveillance method. In total, 3,743 arrests were made due to incriminating evidence obtained by the wiretaps, 455 of which have so far resulted in convictions.
Fox News

Sometimes, what’s civil is in the eye of the beholder — especially on Facebook. That much became clear Thursday, as Indiana Gov. Mike Pence navigated the blowback from his staff’s deletion of hundreds of comments on his official Facebook page. They were responding to the posting Wednesday of a statement expressing his renewed support for putting a constitutional gay marriage ban before Indiana voters. The episode underlines the difficulty faced by government officials when they set up an outpost on Facebook. Wittingly or not, they take responsibility for a forum in which supporters and detractors alike can sound off — sometimes including insults, name-calling or profanity.
Indianpolis Star

Twenty-two of President Barack Obama's top advisers make the top White House salary of $172,200 per year - but there is one official who earns 30 percent more. It's not Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. Not Obama's senior adviser and close friend Valerie Jarrett. Not Cecilia Munoz, who is overseeing White House efforts on immigration reform, nor Lisa Monaco, who advises Obama on homeland security and counterterrorism. The best-paid person of the 460 people who work at the White House is Seth Wheeler, a senior adviser at the National Economic Council, who is crafting Obama's strategy on housing finance.
Reuters

Slides published by The Washington Post appear to confirm that the NSA and FBI have the ability to perform real-time surveillance of e-mail and stored content.
CNET News

Ever lose sleep over e-mails you've sent? Messages of an embarrassing nature that make you wish you hadn't clicked on "send"? AT&T is thinking of you. It applied for a patent for self-deleting e-mail. Once sent, these missives won't hang around in some inbox waiting for someone to do what he pleases with them. They'll disintegrate, so to speak. "Method, System, and Apparatus for Providing Self-Destructing Electronic Mail Messages" is U.S. patent application number 20130159436 and was recently made public.
CNET News

Since the birth of the Supreme Court, Americans have heard from their justices almost exclusively through the opinions they wrote. Now, they’re popping up on “The Daily Show” and “Fox News Sunday,” on book tours and on the lecture circuit. Fresh off a term that brought landmark rulings on gay marriage, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, the justices are ready to engage with the public. Chief Justice John Roberts on Saturday will make a regular appearance at a judicial conference for a televised, on-stage interview. Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan are headed to Aspen Ideas Week — Kagan will appear Saturday and Breyer Tuesday.
Politico

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Sunday that Edward Snowden made sure that the information he took about U.S. surveillance programs will continue to be published regardless of what happens to the former U.S. spy agency contractor.
Reuters

Chief Justice John Roberts says he and his colleagues have become too aggressive in questioning lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court. Roberts says the justices "overdo it a bit" in posing questions to lawyers who are arguing their cases without giving the attorneys the chance to respond.The chief justice says one reason is that the justices have not discussed the case among themselves before the argument. Roberts says they use the typically hour-long session to debate each other through the lawyers. Justice Clarence Thomas, who hasn't asked a question in seven years, has made the same criticism.
Politico

For police, the license plate readers carry the potential to help solve crimes from nabbing a murderer to tracking a stolen car. “It’s a huge, valuable tool,”  Deputy Police Chief Rich Benoit said. For others, the increasingly common license plate readers have raised enough privacy concerns that some communities nationally have banned them. In Vermont, a new law takes effect Monday that limits the amount of time that data gathered by the readers may be kept. The law also directs the state Department of Public Safety to compile a report about who’s accessing the information and how often.
Burlington Free Press

Editorials/Columns

George DeSerres, Star-Exponent: The public’s right to know. Freedom of the press. Transparency. These are all important aspects of an open, democratic government. But somehow, during the War on Terror, being so open that your enemy learns how to kill you better because freedom of the press and transparency give them that information, is just dumb. During WW-II, the U.S. went to great lengths to keep the location and date of the attack on Normandy secret. What if Private Smith or an AP reporter substituted his judgment for Eisenhower’s and leaked the invasion of Normandy to the world. What if we had transparency and told Osama Bin Laden we knew where he was hiding and we were going to raid and kill him? Think that would have worked?