Attorney General Jay Jones has launched an investigation into Placer.ai — a U.S.- and Israel-based location analytics company that has sold cellphone location data to City Hall. Placer.ai purchases geolocation data on roughly 30 million cellphones across the U.S., bundles that data and then sells it to corporate and government clients alike. In July, the Times-Dispatch reported that city officials had partnered with Placer.ai to determine how many people have visited Richmond parks, and to build profiles for those visitors. … Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the Times-Dispatch had requested any and all records related to active investigations into Placer.ai. In response, a deputy general counsel with the attorney general’s office, Jake Lambert, said that roughly a dozen relevant records were being “entirely withheld” under state law that shields “evidence testimony, documents or other results” of an investigation by the attorney general. Lambert added that the documents constituted both working papers and work product of the attorney general, both of which are also exempt from disclosure under FOIA.

Scott Wagoner, co-owner of The Quick Check convenience store in Independence, has spent months trying to get answers about a project known only as “Project Lightning” after it appeared on a meeting agenda and then disappeared from public view. “There was nothing about Project Lightning. I asked some members of our own board of supervisors, and they had no clue what Project Lightning was. Nobody did,” Wagoner said. … Wagoner filed a public records request seeking information on the project. He received a bill for nearly $2,600. “I did not understand why a Freedom of Information Act would cost so much for things that we should already be able to get,” Wagoner said. Wagoner said the resistance only strengthened his resolve. “With each correspondence, I felt like they did not want me to have any of this information — and that made me want the information that much more,” Wagoner said. Wagoner turned to the public to help cover the cost, and community members contributed small donations to support his effort.

The Alexandria Police Department will release a map of automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera locations across the city by Oct. 1, the same day that it begins a third-party audit of its surveillance programs. That’s according to a long list of answers that APD posted on the city’s website in response to questions posed at the Sept. 8 City Council meeting. At that meeting, Mayor Alyia Gaskins said that she does not think there is a role for Flock cameras in the city, and was backed up by two other Council members.

As James Madison University prepares to hear in-person proposals from five firms to lead work on its campus master plan, new public documents shed more light on the direction the massive project could take in the near and long term. Among the documents available on an online vendor portal operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia is a 50-page detailed phase version of the Request for Proposal (RFP) submitted by JMU, which seeks a public-private partnership to develop and fund a near-complete redevelopment of the mid-campus precinct, among other campus enhancements. The biggest change within the new documents is a call for new campus housing to provide 3,000 additional beds by the fall of 2029. The original RFP submitted in the summer asked developers to plan for 1,000 new beds as soon as fall 2028.