|
Hackers have infected computers at a Georgia courts agency, demanding a ransom payment and causing officials to shut down court websites. The Administrative Office of the Courts was offline Monday as the state government tried to contain the hack. The agency maintains court documents, provides computer applications to some local courts and publishes guidance on court operations. All georgiacourts.gov websites were inaccessible. It’s unclear how many computers and court services were affected. Personal information wasn’t compromised because the agency doesn’t keep that information, said Michelle Barclay, a division director for the Administrative Office of the Courts. “Everything is shut down until they tell us to turn it on,” Barclay said. “We’re definitely inconveniencing folks who rely on our applications.”
Governing
The Central Intelligence Agency can selectively disclose classified information to reporters while withholding that very same information from a requester under the Freedom of Information Act, a federal court ruled last month. The ruling came in a FOIA lawsuit brought by reporter Adam Johnson who sought a copy of emails sent to reporters Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, and Scott Shane of the New York Times that the CIA said were classified and exempt from disclosure.
Federation of American Scientists
A New York federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered the unsealing of up to 2,000 pages of judicial documents that are expected to show evidence relating to whether New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, were recruiting underage girls and young women as part of an international sex trafficking operation. The decision comes two days after the Miami Herald urged the court to issue a ruling in the civil case in the wake of last week’s Justice Department announcement in the federal criminal case that it would not void Epstein’s controversial 2008 non-prosecution agreement. Using others as recruiters, Epstein lured underage girls to his waterfront estate in Palm Beach from 1997 to 2006 under the guise that he was hiring them to give him massages. He sexually abused them, the girls told authorities, then paid them to recruit other girls, mostly 13 to 16 years old. Epstein, now 66, was never federally prosecuted, having received immunity in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges in state court in 2008.
McClatchy
A government transparency group cannot have access to Trump transition team emails under access to public records laws, even though they are being held by the federal General Services Administration, federal Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Tuesday. Even with the emails in its possession, the GSA argued in court that the records weren’t the agency’s to make available. Presidential transition teams’ records are not covered under the Freedom of Information Act. “The GSA did not create the records. Nor did it review, search or consult them. It did not use them in any way,” Mehta wrote in his opinion. “In short, there is nothing about the documents’ contents that would shed any light about GSA’s operations or decision-making. Therefore, the transition team’s emails are not ‘agency records’ subject to disclosure under FOIA.”
NBC2
|
 “The GSA did not create the records. Nor did it review, search or consult them. It did not use them in any way.”
|
“The center’s role in First Amendment education was crucial. Who will pick up this function with the center’s closing?”