Transparency News 9/8/16

 

    The FOIA Council’s workgroup on personnel records dissolved yesterday without any recommendation. There was no consensus on general clarifying language nor on specific changes that might affect employee grievances, administrative investigations and training certifications.

    The FOIA Council’s subcommittee on records meets this morning at 10:30 in House Room C at the General Assembly Building.


After a brief run-in with Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act earlier this summer, Loudoun supervisors voted Tuesday to not make any changes to its rules of order that would have prevented the board from communicating electronically during meetings.  “I vehemently oppose this,” Supervisor Ron Meyer (R-Broad Run) said before offering a motion to table the proposed rules change indefinitely.  Ahead of the vote, Chairwoman Phyllis Randall (D-At-Large) explained that she believed “transparency and perception” mattered, and although she did not think supervisors did anything wrong, she did not want the General Assembly to look into the matter. 
Loudoun Times-Mirror

The idea was a simple one and long overdue in the eyes of a Norfolk's new mayor: free public Wi-Fi in City Hall. But the network’s name sounds an awful lot like, well, “con (the) public.”
Virginian-Pliot

School Board member Carolyn Weems asked her colleagues Wednesday to consider rule changes that would help current and future members avoid “any possible pitfalls" after The Virginian-Pilot analyzed her company’s business dealings with the city’s schools. 
Virginian-Pilot

Josiah Cooper-Pope, born 15 weeks premature, did fine in the neonatal intensive care unit for the first 10 days of his life. Then, suddenly, his tiny body started to swell. Overnight, he grew so distended that his skin split. His mother, Shala Bowser, said nurses at Chippenham Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, told her that Josiah had an infection and that she should prepare for the worst. On Sept. 2, 2010, she was allowed to hold him for the first and last time as he took his final breath. He was 17 days old. What no one at the hospital told Bowser was that her newborn was the fourth baby in the neonatal unit to catch the same infection, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better-known as MRSA. It would sicken eight more, records show – nearly every baby in the unit – before the outbreak had run its course.  In response to a Reuters public records request on the outbreak, the Health Department sent a copy of its investigation report in which the name and address of the hospital were blacked out. The same was true for 22 more superbug outbreaks in Virginia healthcare facilities since 2007 that involved more than 130 patients, including 15 who died. State law prohibits the agency from identifying the location of outbreaks. At least 27 other states have similar laws or policies in place. Disclosing the names of healthcare providers “would serve as a significant disincentive to the timely reporting of disease outbreaks,” said Brewster, the Virginia Health Department spokesperson.
Reuters

Abingdon officials are proceeding with decisions about the Food City development at Exit 17 although a lawsuit challenging the rezoning that made it possible and a request for an injunction are pending. Mayor Cathy Lowe opened the meeting with a statement that council members have been advised by their attorney not to discuss any part of development on The Meadows property. She added that no one would be allowed to speak on the development during the public comment portion of the meeting and the only mentions would be the two scheduled agenda items. Council members have “heard everything you have to say, but it is now in the hands of the court,” the mayor said, adding that the meeting would be conducted in order and without noise such as clapping.
Herald Courier


National Stories
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The House Oversight Committee released an email exchange Wednesday between Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of State Colin Powell in which he advised her on the use of personal email. The exchange between Clinton and Powell took place two days before the start of her tenure as secretary of state. According to The Wall Street Journal, Powell told Clinton that he used a personal computer to conduct government business and took steps to ensure his digital correspondence wasn’t “going through the State Department servers.”
Fox News

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected an effort by news media to force prosecutors in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal known as "Bridgegate" to disclose the names of unindicted co-conspirators. Reversing a lower court ruling, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia found no right of public access under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment or the common law to a list of people implicated but not criminally charged. The 3-0 decision came one day before jury selection was scheduled to begin in the trial of two former allies of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who are accused of arranging the September 2013 shutdown of bridge access lanes in Fort Lee, New Jersey, causing several days of gridlock.
Reuters



Editorials/Columns

In a widely circulated article for Vox.com entitled “Against Transparency: Government Official’s Email Should be Private, Just Like Their Phone Calls,” Matthew Yglesias writes that because of the frequency of digital communication by government officials, “Treating email as public by default rather than private like phone calls does not serve the public interest.”  He did not mention that the Freedom of Information Act is now based upon  “Presumption of Openness” that requires all executive branch records to be subject to release unless they qualify for one of nine** FOIA exemptions. Yglesias is wrong on many of his arguments beginning with his hazy recap of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He implies that no “complete and accurate record” exists to bolster his claims that transparency harms effective deliberation.  But this is contrary to the rather voluminous existent record of the Convention showing how the framers thought and the justifications which they cited.  Also factually incorrect is his assertion that phone calls are inherently “private.” Dean Acheson documented his conversations; they’re available on the Truman Library’s website. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Christian Herter documented his as well.  The National Security Archive, after a decades-long fight, has won the release of more than 16,700 Kissinger Telcons, transcripts of his telephone calls. His argument that “Email isn’t mail” –along with being incorrect– is also not novel.
Nate Jones, NSA Archive

The University of Chicago has long refused to acquiesce to the demands of a handful of spoiled students. The university made its longstanding commitment to free speech and open, rigorous debate loud and clear in a letter sent to this year’s incoming freshman class. The letter stated in part: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” Such a blunt affirmation of free speech is refreshing.
Daily Progress